Author: A.T.

ILLIONS AND ILLIONS

Several of you pointed out my Irene typo. In one place, I said she cost $160 million; later, $160 billion. Which is it, you wanted to know. Just goes to show how numbed we’ve become to big numbers. The answer: $160 million. For $160 billion, you could buy every plane American, Delta and United own. You could build a chunnel between England and France. You could pay off the 1997 federal deficit. I knew that, but one of my index fingers (I type with both, so it’s hard to fix blame) did not.

THE NEXT 150 YEARS

“Can you imagine what the next 150 [years] will be like?” I asked rhetorically at the end of that same flawed comment. To which Mark Gorman replied: “Actually, no. If I could, I would have a much better idea of where to invest. But the cynic in me foresees a world where power (lawmaking, regulatory, financial, and the media) increasingly rests with people who have NEVER had direct contact with the industries and activities they are controlling. The people in positions of power will not only never have worked on an oil rig, they will never have had a friend whose father worked on an oil rig. They will expect to buy meat inexpensively at the supermarket and benefit from medical research, while voting for increasingly restrictive animal rights laws. In other words, they will be increasingly cut off from the ‘real’ world. I am enough of a cynic to realize that this sort of thing has been going on since the dawn of civilization. Furthermore, specialization is necessary in a complex society. It just seems to be getting worse, and I fear the consequences. More people should have experiences such as yours on Irene.”

Being more of an optimist than a cynic myself, I’m not particularly fearful. But I’d recommend climbing around Irene to anyone. There’s nothing like actually getting out and seeing things. I’ll never forget our class tour of the Wonder Bread factory when I was in the third grade. Or last week’s in-depth tour of Asia.

Tomorrow: Asia — The Saga Begins

IT PAYS TO DIS . . . TROY

“This note is in response to your junk mail column and specifically the practice of companies that send unsolicited blank checks, as you described. This resulted in a most unpleasant experience for my daughter a few years ago. She had been sent a packet of those checks, but before she got them a thief removed them from her mailbox (typical not-too-secure apartment complex), filled out the checks for hundreds of dollars, forged the signature and managed to cash them! My daughter didn’t even know it had happened until the bank informed her of the rapidly increasing number of checks that were being returned. About the same time multiple vendors were also leaving not-too-pleasant messages about bounced checks.

“It turned out that the thief was apprehended in his car with opened mail addressed to a slew of other people including my daughter. I understand that he got off with a warning. My daughter spent months cleaning up the personal financial mess that was created by the incident. Lesson: I would modify slightly your admonition. ‘DISCARD’ should be spelled ‘DESTROY.'” — Lee Haas

Wayne Arczynski takes this a step further. “You miss the point,” he writes. “Junk mail should not be thrown out, it should be recycled. I have a friend (‘oh sure’) who tears up his junk mail and uses the handy return envelopes to recycle the information back to the source.”

“Though I find your Henry Ford history interesting, do you have any thoughts on the market crash?” — David L.

Did it crash? I thought it was just down 7%. Maybe today it will crash. Hope not. Having so long dreamed the market would someday reach 5,000 (perhaps by the end of the century — up from 777 a mere 15 years ago), I guess I don’t see 6,500 as a crash. But of course I “hear” you. If I ever know in advance which way the market is headed, I will definitely post it here.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming: Stubble Trouble.

I know you’re probably sick of hearing about my visit to that offshore oil rig, Platform Irene. But better sick than dead. When I was telling you about the helicopter and the hydrogen sulfide hazard last week, I forgot to give you a proper safety briefing.

Did you know, for example, that when approaching or leaving a helicopter you should “Stay low, head up and eyes looking around?” And that you should “Keep your arms down at your sides?” Without a briefing and instructions like that, you might have gotten off the chopper, spotted a loved one, and jumped up and down waving your arms — chop, chop — to say hello. Of course, in our case, we were not allowed anywhere near the outside of the chopper when its engine was on or its rotor was turning. But these were valuable tips all the same.

Less obvious, and thus all the more important because you might not have thought of it on your own: “Hard hats and baseball caps will not be worn at any time while the helicopter is operating.” This is a federal regulation, so a lot of thought and study doubtless went into it, though no explanation is given (repeated thwops on the hard hat could dull the rotor blade?). There is no mention of big hair — Marge Simpson, where are you? — but we may have been handed the abbreviated version of the regs. (I am quoting here not from the verbal briefing we got but from the fine-print safety form we were handed to read and sign.)

As for the hydrogen sulfide, which could quickly kill you if you didn’t slap on a respirator as soon as you heard the sirens go off and saw the panic in the roustabouts’ eyes, we were reminded about 29 CFR 1910.134(e)(5)(1) Part which states that “Respirators shall not be worn when conditions prevent a good face seal. Such conditions may be a growth of beard, sideburns, a skull cap that projects under the face piece, or temple pieces on glasses.”

Which sounds very much like ANSI Z88.2-1980 (7.3), also part of our briefing sheet, which states, “A person who has hair (stubble, mustache, sideburns, beard, low hairline, bangs) which passes between the face and the sealing surface of the respirator shall not be permitted to wear the respirator.”

Leading, no doubt, to the following dialog for the Platform Irene TV Movie I envision, amid wailing sirens and roustabouts running every which way:

“Quick! Pass me one of those air packs!”

“No. Not until you go downstairs and shave off that stubble.”

“But [muffled, as when shouting and holding one’s breath at the same time] I’ll die in ten seconds if you don’t give me that thing!”

“Sorry, bud. Safety regulations.”

I suppose in theory the point is that no one with these hairy hazards should be allowed on Irene in the first place. But that’s not how it works. You can get onto the rig; you’re just not supposed to sue if there’s a gas leak and you have a mustache.

My impression was that our hosts were far safer and more sensible than the printed forms they were required to hand us. Had there been a gas emission, I think they would have found a way to save even George, our bearded cameraman. Hope so. Liked George.

Forbes had a good rundown on bank debit cards recently. They’re Visa and MasterCards that immediately hit your checking account when you “charge” something. They’re like paperless checks — so convenient you don’t even have to key in a PIN when you buy something.

Forbes panned these cards for three reasons. First, of course, you lose the “float.” (You also lose the frequent flier miles some credit cards offer.) That is, the money leaves your checking account instantly. With a credit card, the average interest-free float is around 40 days if you pay your bill within the allotted grace period. (The grace period may be 25 days, but the average charge was made in the middle of the month, so it’s 15 days before it even hits your bill.) Second, “you lose the option of withholding payments — important leverage in case of disputed charges.” And third, “it could give a thief carte blanche to your checking account.”

I don’t know whether Carte Blanche is still a credit card — it used to compete with Diners and American Express — but credit-card puns aside, the point here is important. With a credit card, your liability is usually limited to $50, and while there may be some hassle in straightening things out, a lost card is mainly the card-issuer’s problem. You get a bill in the mail for $18,320 in charges, none of them yours, and you don’t pay it. With a debit card, you would get your checking account statement and notice that $18,320 in bogus debits had been sucked out of your account, pushing you to the limits of your “overdraft-checking” privileges, for which you’re charged 18% annual interest, and causing checks you wrote to bounce. In short, you’re busted.

Yes, you’d eventually get that $18,320 added back into your account and straighten everything out, most likely. You might even get the overdraft checking interest and the bounced check charges reversed. But it would surely be more trouble than just declining to pay an $18,320 Visa bill.

(Forbes warns that some thieves take a more subtle approach to exploiting your stolen debit card. Say a thief gets the account number off a discarded receipt, then has a phony card made up with your number. Now, rather than charge $18,320 all in one spree, he occasionally uses it for small purchases you might not notice. Until you do notice and cancel your card, you’re buying him gasoline, sweat socks, the occasional dinner, books and CDs at Barnes & Noble — whatever. And when you finally do notice, you may only be reimbursed for fraudulent charges incurred within the last 60 days.)

Avoid bank debit cards. Carry only a few credit cards at most, instead, and be sure to pay them in full each month to avoid incurring interest. Check your credit card statements carefully and reconcile your checking account statement promptly when it arrives each month. (Computer programs like Quicken and Managing Your Money make this easy once you get set up.)

When your bank sends you a new ATM card to replace your old one, with the great news that “now you can use it for purchases, too — as easy as a credit card, but with no interest to pay!”. . . see whether they’ll let you cut it up and provide you with a plain old ATM card instead.

You know the old slogan? “Ah wants a car that Ah can afford. And when Ah says afford, Ah means a Ford.” The first car I could afford was a 1967 Acapulco blue Ford Mustang — $2,411, brand new, including tax. Loved that car.

Anyway, in a comment last month about Schindler’s List, sponsored by Ford — and the fact that the original Henry Ford was, ironically, a raging anti-Semite — I mentioned that Hitler actually had a picture of Ford hanging on his wall.

Writes my trusty unpaid researcher, the estimable Dave Davis of Dallas and the Adolphus: “It turns out that that picture of Ford on Hitler’s wall wasn’t exactly an 8 X 10 glossy.” According to Henry Ford And The Jews by Albert Lee:

<blockquote>Next to Adolph Hitler’s desk at Nazi Party Headquarters in Munich hung a life-sized likeness of Henry Ford. On the table in the antechamber, visitors were often shocked to find anti-Semitic booklets and books with Henry Ford’s name and portrait on the covers . . .

Hitler often spoke of Ford to his followers, frequently bragging about financial support he had received from the American industrialist. With the press, Hitler was more guarded, yet at times he did express his adulation. When Ford was said to be running for president of the United States, for example, Hitler told Chicago Tribune reporter Raymond Fendrick that Ford had 100 percent of his support. “I wish,” Hitler said, “that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections.” . . . In 1931 Hitler summarized his feelings when a Detroit News reporter asked what the portrait of Ford on Hitler’s wall meant to him. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler said.</blockquote>

Gee. Without Henry Ford, we might not have had the Mustang — or World War II.

Speaking of which, my friend Jim Halperin, whose amazing success as a first and second novelist I’ve chronicled here is now writing his third novel, which imagines that Hitler was assassinated in 1934 — and what the world would have been like today had that happened. It’s too early to show you any of that, but you can still visit his Truth Machine page (and yes, the movie rights have now been sold).

But back to Henry Ford:

On the occasion of Ford’s seventy-fifth birthday, Hitler sent personal congratulations, along with the highest honor which could be awarded by the Nazi government: the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Ford shared this honor with only four other men, one of them Mussolini.

For those who’d like to outperform Wall Street, low-expense index funds usually do the trick. They simply mirror the stock averages, minus a tiny expense charge — and are thus like betting on an average horse ridden by a 20-pound jockey. Your friends are betting on actively managed funds that hope to beat the market by knowing which stocks will do best, yet are ridden by 150-pound jockeys (i.e., higher expenses), making it hard for all but the most spirited to outperform your average nag.

But now comes for your consideration a “stock,” for all practical purposes, traded on the American Stock Exchange (symbol: SPY) that does much the same thing. Ridden by a 19-pound jockey, each share represents one-tenth of a unit of the Standard & Poor’s 500 average. Called Standard & Poor’s Depository Receipts — SPDRs, or spiders for short — they represent tiny shares in all 500 stocks in the average, weighted proportionately. So if the S&P is 750, each SPY share will be selling for almost exactly $75.

The disadvantage of trading SPY is that although the annual expense ratio is very low — just nineteen hundredths of one percent — there is a brokerage commission to pay when you buy or sell, as with any stock — which there is not with, say, the Vanguard Index Trust. (So if you trade SPY, it makes sense to do so with a deep discount broker, where the commission is trivial.)

The advantage over an index fund is that you can buy or sell with a quick phone call, as you would any stock; and if you think the market is headed down, you can short SPY — you can’t short most mutual funds — and do so without worrying about “the uptick rule” that normally governs short sales. (Normally, you can’t short an exchange-listed stock on the way down — “no fair piling on, guys” is the rough reasoning behind the rule — you have to wait for an “uptick;” that is, until the stock price has bounced up a notch. But the uptick rule is waived with SPY because it’s not a real stock.)

Also, Vanguard restricts the number of times you can move money in and out of its fund each year. You can buy and sell SPY all day long.

And with index funds, your order is executed at that day’s closing price. With SPY, you can set limit orders and know exactly the price you will pay. Or, if you sense the market is going to tank, you can get that morning’s price rather than the price at the end of the day.

So if you were thinking about shifting some money into “passive management” but prefer electronic trading, say, to filling out mutual fund forms, here’s a way to do it.

Please note, I am not saying the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is a bargain here. I don’t pretend to know which way it’s headed (but it’s no bargain). I’m just saying this is a handy and efficient way to “buy the market” when you do think it’s headed up, or to short it — if you’re very brave, very rich, and very careful — if you think it’s headed down. (One problem with shorting: the market’s long-term upward trend — if only for inflation — is against you. Another: you can hold a short for a year or ten, and it’s still taxed as a short-term capital gain if you make money.)

• If your tastes run to smaller stocks, check out the American Stock Exchange’s “MidCap 400 SPDRs” — the same deal, only based on one-fifth the current price of the Standard & Poor’s MidCap 400 Index. MidCap stands for “companies with medium-sized capitalizations” and “capitalization” means the overall value of the company — the total number of shares the pie is divided into, times the price of each slice. A company with 500 million shares outstanding at $70 each is capitalized at $35 billion. Big. But a company with 40 million shares at $20 each — $800 million — might find itself in the MidCap Index. The symbol for this one: MDY.

• If it’s non-U.S. exposure you seek, then the acronym is not SPDRs, it’s WEBS — World Equity Benchmark Shares. Ask your broker.

I had always thought that an offshore rig sorted of floated around and could be moved when a well dried up. Not Irene. As described yesterday, she sits 4.5 miles off the California Coast, somewhere between Lompoc Penitentiary and Santa Barbara.

I had also thought a rig had some sort of anchoring columns at the corners, and then a pipe more or less in the middle going down through the ocean floor deep into the oil formation, from whence flowed the oil. And maybe that’s vaguely how Irene started out. But in the 11 or so years since, she’s grown to include 28 wells. They all go straight down to the ocean floor just a few yards from each other, but then, under the sea floor, they angle down and out in different directions. This is very weird, if you ask me — how do they get a mile-long drill bit to go around corners? But even though we saw not a drop of oil, smelled not a whiff of gas, in the hour we were Irene’s visitors, about 3,000 barrels of “natural resources” had flowed from beneath the ocean floor, through these various pipes up to the rig, and then through a pipeline to the mainland for processing (through more pipes) and then through more pipes to trucks to tanks to hoses to nozzles to YOUR GAS TANK.

About 80,000 barrels a day through Irene alone, consisting of oil, gas, water and assorted other junk, netting about 12,000 barrels of oil (half a million gallons). At $20 a barrel (to take a round number), that would be close to a quarter million dollars a day, close to $100 million a year. No wonder someone had invested $160 million in Irene.

Of course, the costs of operating Irene, and retrieving the occasional hard hat blown overboard, are not insignificant. But standing there above the Pacific, contemplating it all, looking at the barnacles and rust (painting goes on constantly), it was fascinating to try to connect the real (an unseen steady stream of dirty gasses and oil and water, including the occasional release of deadly hydrogen sulfide) with the financial (footnotes and discounted cash flows and oil futures). The steady flow that leads from under the ocean to your gas tank (and then into the atmosphere) . . . and to the $15.60 dividend check perhaps you get every quarter.

OK, OK, I’m getting carried away. But I was like a third-grader out on a field trip to the Wonder Bread bakery. A lot of us never see much of the real world. (I was sixteen before I saw my first real cow.)

When the wells flowing into Irene are depleted, new ones will be drilled. So far, none reaches more than a mile or so toward shore, so as not to trespass within 3 miles of the coastline and, thus, into California State waters. But if a deal can be struck with the state, drill bits will one day pass that imaginary line beneath the ocean floor, and new reservoirs will feed Irene.

“What about an earthquake? What about a big wave?” I asked, worrying that the folks who built Irene might not have thought of these risks before putting $160 million into the enterprise. I should probably be more worried if I caught a whiff of rotten eggs, our safety officer, Jeff, cheerfully advised — that would be a hydrogen sulfide release. A tiny concentration would quickly kill us, which is why the sensors all over Irene would wail hysterically at the first sign of keeling canaries (as I understood the technology) to warn the crew. Within moments (holding our breath), we were to locate one of the five-minute air packs placed all over Irene, don it, move “upwind” (the wind itself would quickly disperse any hydrogen sulfide emissions), and then into one of the 52-person orange safety bubbles suspended like Christmas tree ornaments from Irene’s main deck. Fortunately, there were no such emissions while we were visiting. They are quite rare.

We finished our filming, boarded our helicopter, and flew back to Santa Barbara (Goodnight, Irene!), consuming another 70 gallons or so of jet fuel in the process — about 12 seconds’ work for Irene, if I calculate it correctly.

Will any of this make me a better investor? Savvier about picking oil stocks? I think not. But it did remind me that someplace beyond all the Value Line rankings and p/e ratios, there is actual steel and mud and guys getting lowered in twin-engine motorboats in rough seas to retrieve a hard hat that’s blown overboard.

And all of this — not to mention the computer consoles in the control room that monitor it, or the 10 phone lines the crew have available to call their sweethearts from the rig just as easily as you or I would call home — has been invented in the last 150 years.

Can you imagine what the next 150 will be like?

The reason to chopper out to Platform Irene, four and a half miles off the Santa Barbara coast, in 37-mile-per-hour winds, was to film more of our interview with Peter Bernstein, as described yesterday.

The theme of this particular segment was “risk” — investing entails risk — and so we wanted a metaphor. Drilling for oil is risky. Choppers are risky. Thirty-seven-mile-an-hour winds, I kept pointing out to no avail, are risky.

The helicopter was a $7 million job owned by a subcontractor to the oil company. If you ask me, it looked pretty humble for $7 million. We were advised to be careful of the sliding-door railings — “don’t screw up the door, please” was more or less the instruction — because the door cost $130,000.

Two pilots, two engines, room for 12 passengers (we were 11, but with a fair amount of camera gear as well). First we were told to provide our weight — “This is not the time to lie!” I kept advising everyone, nervously. Then each of us was issued a Mae West, I think they were called, in the unlikely event of a mayday, like the ones they show you every time you take off on a regular jet, only this time I paid close attention. We also got headphones to drown out the noise.

Off we went from the Santa Barbara airport, a few miles out to sea and 35 miles up the California coast to Irene, cruising at just under 140 knots, which is to say about 175 miles an hour. Whoa, is that coastline beautiful! And what perspective it gives to see all this from the air. The first balloonists must have experienced an incredible thrill, centuries ago, seeing everything from above for the first time. And unlike them, we could steer.

Irene is the northernmost of a chain of offshore rigs that sit about 4.5 miles out to sea. It was built around 1986 on a square-mile federal lease that cost $40 million. (Don’t hold me to every detail of this, but I think I got it straight.) It cost maybe $120 million to build, although it is a fairly small rig. It sits in 285 feet of water and can sleep more than 50 people. Most of them share common quarters, but the foreman and the one female on board have private rooms. (“Is she the accountant or a roustabout?” I asked. “A roustabout,” I was told, “and you don’t want to mess with her — she can heft three guys over the side of this thing.”) They work two shifts, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, seven days straight, then seven days off. When no drilling is going on, the maintenance crew is about 20. From sea level to the top of the drilling derrick: 310 feet, like a 31-story building.

We touched down on the bull’s-eye of the helipad.

“Please be real careful about loose papers or anything else,” we were told before we were allowed to deplane (dechop?). “It’s really windy out there, and if anything blows over, we have to go get it.”

There is a full-time environmental and safety compliance officer on the rig, and he seems to take all this rather seriously. In all the years Irene has been out there, only a few people have fallen overboard, and no one has been lost. There were two roustabout corpses on the metal floor on one of the levels, but I was relieved to see they had been constructed as a joke from a variety of rig-based parts — fire extinguisher arms, steel pipe legs, safety goggles, boots, and so on. Very lifelike, but no actual ex-human components.

We were all issued hard hats and safety goggles, and when our sound man’s hard hat blew over the side, three guys in orange heavy-weather gear had to climb into a twin-engine motor boat, lowered a couple of hundred feet down to the swells and white caps below. They retrieved the hat (“waste not, want not,” I was thinking, but actually this was part of the environmental discipline: zero tolerance for debris) and a few minutes later, we watched as they were winched back up, dripping boat and all, by a single strand of cable, drenched from the sea, but triumphant.

After a safety briefing, we were given full run of the place. It’s a lot of see-through iron stairs, descending down to the lowest level platform, which on a really rough day the seas wash over. Sea lions were cavorting amongst the forest of vertical pipes rising from the ocean floor.

It was really neat. And to think: all that money flowing silently through those pipes. Irene’s a wealthy woman.

Tomorrow: Goodnight, Irene

Choppered out to an oil rig in the Santa Barbara Channel yesterday — Platform Irene. As I don’t do all that much choppering, and had previously seen oil rigs only in annual reports (usually next to an inset map of Bahrain or Indonesia), it was a day that kept me wide awake.

The day began at the home of Peter Bernstein, author of the recent Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk, which I enthusiastically recommend (as do some much weightier names than mine . . . “I speak carefully: no one should miss it” — John Kenneth Galbraith).

Peter is 78 and looks very much like my late Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie — Charles Previn — conducted the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall for decades, before I was born, and can be easily found in the credits of 30-odd old movies as music director (where would we be without Cinemania and its filmographies?). In addition to being my uncle (my mother’s mother’s brother), Charlie was the uncle of an even better known musical Previn — the jazz pianist and conductor Andre Previn. (According to my birth certificate and passport, I am Andrew Previn Tobias. But occasional fawning letters to the maestro over the years, accompanied by signed books and good wishes, have never produced a response — I’ve never met my second cousin.) Uncle Charlie was crazy about me, when I was a teenager, and I was pretty crazy about him. So I had a feeling I was going to like Peter Bernstein.

He and his wife Barbara winter in Santa Barbara. Taking over his house that morning were a film crew, directors, producers and gaffers (complete with eight rolls of various tape, hence, it suddenly dawned on me: “gaffers tape”) — we were interviewing him for a PBS series scheduled to air this fall. My part may be uninspired at best (“so Peter — is it possible to beat the market?”), but the lighting will be incredible. They typically spend two hours readying the set before we even sit down to talk. Our director, who calls “action” (but sometimes lets me do it when I see the red lights on both cameras and both cameramen have said “speed”), is a charming white-haired Brit, Michael Gill, who has something like 200 PBS and BBC documentaries under his belt, including Alistair Cooke’s Civilization. Michael has met Eisenhower, DeGaulle, and Chou En Lai, among others, and though he describes himself as being “deaf as a post” (“what was it like meeting Chou En Lai,” I asked him at one point over dinner; “mmm, yes,” he replied, “and the potatoes are quite nice, also”), he is in fact sharp as a tack on that post. Still, he is more the director emeritus, leaving a great deal of the work to the dynamo behind this whole project, Eugene Shirley, who was now introducing me to Peter Bernstein, who looked like my Uncle Charlie, and whom I was quite sure I would like.

But that wasn’t the half of it. It turned out that Peter and I had actually gone to the same New York high school, Horace Mann, a few decades apart and that we had even had some of the same teachers. Mr. Metcalf, an old guy who could sling chalk with deadly aim when he taught me Latin, had been Peter’s young Latin teacher. Al Baruth, who had terrified me as he neared retirement, had dazzled Peter in his prime. And then, it seems, we had both gone on to the same college. But here’s what really dropped my jaw (other than the fact that Peter could remember it): Peter had evidently met my dad.

“Was your father’s name Seth, by any chance?” he asked. Why, yes indeed it was. “I thought that might be your father. I didn’t really know him, but in 1949, when I had come out of the Army, I was working for the Modern Industrial Bank — it’s not around anymore — and it had never advertised but was considering taking some radio ads, and I remember this nice young guy, Seth Tobias, coming in from an ad agency — I can’t remember the name — ”

“Emil Mogul Company?”

“Yes! That’s it! And he sang this jingle he had written for the bank.”

“My father sang you a jingle?”

I, of course, remembered none of this, as I would have been two at the time. Only later did I begin singing my dad’s jingles (Ronzoni sono buoni, means Ronzoni is so good, it’s clearly understood, Ronzoni is so good. Macaroni or spaghetti, better buy Ronzoni. Ronzoni sono buoni means . . . Ronzoni is so good!) and, in particular, his bank jingles (Reuben, Reuben I been thinkin’, how the dollar bill’s been shrinkin’, something-something-rhymes-with-plank, in the Lincoln Savings Bank).

Anyway, I much enjoyed meeting Peter Bernstein. Two hours under the hot lights would follow, during which I learned, among other things, how his father had sold his successful car-sponge-and-shammy business in 1929 and — in order to diversify — invested the proceeds in a variety of stocks. Oops.

But enough family history (though I have a hunch that sooner or later I will discover we are somehow related on my Previn side). Thank you for indulging me. If I’ve waxed a little windy, it may be because it was windy out there at sea.

It was Peter’s wife, Barbara, who suggested choppering out to the rig.

Tomorrow: Landing on Irene

Junk mailers do us a service by indicating right on the outside of the envelope that what they are sending is junk and can be thrown directly into the trash. They do it by stamping their envelopes with legends like this one I just got from the Discover card: Important: Please open at once. DO NOT DISCARD.

What this tells you, of course, is that the contents are not at all important, that you would be a fool to waste your time opening it, and that by rearranging the words slightly, as if they were magnetic refrigerator-door words (have you seen those?), they would say: Important: Please DO NOT open. DISCARD at once.

If you had any doubt about Discover’s true meaning here, it evaporates with a glance to the upper right corner of the envelope, wherein rests the phrase bulk rate. Bulk . . . bunk . . . junk . . . these are all words from the same linguistic family, derived from some of the earliest cave language. Thunk — the sound of a rock hitting the cave’s dirt floor — is their precursor.

I’m pretty sure the United States Postal Service forbids bulk mailings that are in any meaningful way personalized — as, for example, a mailing of renewal credit cards. Those have to go out first class. Bills go out first class. Refund checks go out first class. Junk goes out bulk rate, and hits your door every morning with a loud thunk.

So naturally, for the purposes of this comment, I had to break all the laws of my nature and open this particular mailing piece to prove my point. And inside, to my astonishment, was a genuine, negotiable check for $4,380.22.

No, of course not. Inside were four Discover Card Checks “just for [me].” I was encouraged to “use them to make purchases, pay bills or get cash advances — up to [my] available credit line.”

And cash advances, I was prominently reminded, “are interest-free,” although there’s “a small transaction fee.*” The footnote disclosed that this fee was 2.5%, which works out to a rate of just 30% a year (ignoring the effects of compounding), assuming I pay it back within a month. If I don’t pay it back within the grace period, then the normal 19.8% kicks in.

Why pay cash when you can use these checks for just an immediate 2.5% surcharge, plus ongoing interest if I carried a balance at 19.8% a year?

The phrase interest-free is italicized and used a second time in this very brief letter, which ends: “So remember, with your Discover Card and Discover Card Checks, you’re always in the money.”

This is America, land of P.T. Barnum, where there’s a sucker born every day. So I guess the fact that they’re lying to us — clearly, this is NOT an “important” missive that need be opened at once — and the fact that they’re trying to fool stupid people into thinking that a 2.5% transaction fee (disclosed only in the footnote) is a good deal because it’s not called interest (though it works out to a 30% annual rate) — should not in any way lessen our esteem for Sears.

The fact is, “everybody does it.”

But that’s why smart people save a lot of time and money glancing at the top right-hand corner. If there’s cave language, out it goes. Thwap, is the sound a properly flicked bulk-rate envelope makes against the side of the trash.