Mormons and Energy Partnerships March 10, 2015 π Hey! What are you doing this coming Saturday, March 14 at 9:26am? Wait 54 seconds to experience a once-a-century moment. It’s pi! Namely, 3/14/15 at 9:26:54 . . . 3.141592654. Bake something! YESTERDAY’S PUZZLE I would say “spoiler alert,” but if your spatial intelligence is as bad as mine, you won’t understand the explanations, either. Mark: “Yesterday’s puzzle was easy to decipher. Between 1:02 and 1:03 if you listen closely you hear hm drop a tile on the table from his hand.” ☞ Perhaps — but not according to George: George Vivino-Hinze: “You can see that he’s cooking the books, skimming off 1.7% for himself each time he moves the skewed blocks. After the camera break, he lets you see his second set of books – I mean blocks – and the middle blocks no longer are perfect squares, having been replaced with inflated blocks from ‘under the table.’ If you had a straight-on view, you would see the middle blocks getting shorter, but like a professional con, he doesn’t let you see that. And after he’s pocketed his 5%, another camera break, and he shows you the first set of – uh – blocks and confidently counts the deflated squares neatly fitting back into their folder, keeping the stockholders from having any suspicion.” ☞ Perhaps — but not according to Bruce: Bruce: “Here’s a video that shows how it’s done.” ☞ I didn’t get that one either. But I can tell you how they saw people in half. EVEN MORMONS SOMETIMES LIE My two Mormon friends of longest standing are spectacularly decent guys. A little nuts in some of their views, if you ask me, and needlessly shy of caffeine; but first-class folks. Which is why this account of Church duplicity — found guilty on 13 counts of election fraud (written by the only openly gay candidate for President that I can recall, a Republican, no less) — struck me. ENERGY PARTNERSHIPS Doug Gary: “I’m writing to see if you are still holding this energy partnerships you mentioned sometime back. I have them in my IRA and they haven’t done great — but time will always be the ultimate, judge, right? I hold CMLP, MWE, OKS, PAA, RGP and TOO. Thoughts?” ☞ They’ve gotten hammered, but I hope that makes them an even better buy. In the meantime, I suffer along with you, even as we’re collecting very nice distruibutions. (Since you have them in your IRA, your custodian may be siphoning off some of the distributions to the IRS, as explained here. It’s an IRS interpretaion that’s never made the slightest sense to me; but the law’s the law.)