Tag: poetry

THE OSCARS

Geoffrey Rush was robbed. I’m so angry, I’m stammering.

(I do on some level reluctantly recognize that these are actors, not the actual characters they pretend to be; and that it is the best acting that’s meant to be voted for, not the character you most like or admire. But still.)

Otherwise, wonderful as always.

DNC MEETING

Paul deLespinasse: ‘I was just scanning around on the TV for a minute Saturday morning and ran into the Democratic National Committee meeting under way. There you were. Nice story about your mother. I do wish you guys (and the New York Times) would lay off Citizens United. One small thought: Do you suppose you might want to update your photo on this blog?’

☞ You are so right about the photo. It must now be 40 years old. I kept trying to change it but Charles nixed every choice, promising to take a better one himself but never quite getting around to it. Now I guess I’m free to do it, finally.

If you get a chance to watch the meeting, you’ll see Chief of Staff Bill Daley, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and Governor Kaine. I especially loved the Governor’s puzzlement over the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare. ‘I’m glad Obama cares,’ he said. ‘If it’s not Democrats, who is gonna care?’ Not the Republicans. They want to cut taxes for the rich and the social safety net for everyone else. Democrats think that when billionaires are in lower tax brackets than their secretaries and poverty is rising, the pendulum has swung too far.

CONDOLENCES

Just when I thought your collective generosity of spirit had reached its outer limit, one of you, John Leeds (with the support of his wife Michele), proffered a sonnet. (A sonnet!) . . .

For Andy and Charles

Sometimes the most important words are said
In passing; trust these words will stay with thee
Though I have left to live among the dead
I still love you; I know you yet love me
We had our time on earth. The best of days
Will linger like a morning mist ere sun
Has risen. Green, the field will glow with praise
Of countless drops, our love in ev’ry one.
Unknown, though day must come and mist to air
Must go, the dew remains in secret form
Within the field; so trust the dew is there.
Let day come fresh and light, and clear, and warm.
Within this life, within this mystery,
Our love, my Love, will live eternally.

Another of you, Michael Gardner, wrote a haiku. (A haiku!) . . .

Last night’s winter winds
Blew a hole in my roof
Leaving no space between me
And everything

And yet another, John Bell Young, offered his transcription and performance of Mahler’s Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony ‘in the hope it would be comforting.’

Good Lord. I am blown away. Unless you can produce an opera or a sculpture garden, the condolence window is now closed. But with my great thanks.

Tomorrow: Widgets. Watch As China’s Energy Consumption Surpasses Our Own

I’m sorry about yesterday – I wanted to nail the thing about Charles’s relationship to money but then I got sleepy, and when I get sleepy my mind reverts to ‘roses are red’ and I’m useless.

Which is too bad, because now there is now SO much important stuff backed up, starting with this assessment from Time:

The Stimulus Turns Two: How Obama Quietly Changed Washington
By Michael Grunwald

President Obama is often mocked for failing to change Washington, and clearly, his lofty campaign vision of post-partisan cooperation hasn’t come true. But behind the scenes of the Beltway perpetual-conflict machine, Obama has made quiet progress towards reforming Washington – not politically, but bureaucratically. The most important reform, launched two years ago today, was tucked inside his unpopular stimulus package, and inside his new budget, he’s trying to expand it.

The reform is a simple concept that certainly ought to be post-partisan: Harnessing the power of competition in the spending of taxpayer dollars. Most federal programs spread cash around the country like peanut butter through rote, check-the-boxes, everybody-wins formulas. Obama has tried to divert funds into competition-based, peer-reviewed, results-oriented grant programs that reward only the worthiest applications. The best-known is the Race to the Top education program, but the stimulus hatched similar competitions in energy, transportation, housing, health care and broadband. And Obama’s 2012 budget proposes new races to the top in everything from juvenile justice to workforce development to agricultural research. (Read TIME’s report card on Obama’s first year in office.)

At a Cabinet meeting today to commemorate the second anniversary of the stimulus, Vice President Joe Biden will release a lessons-learned report that includes a section titled “Competition Brings Results.” (His aides gave me an exclusive copy of the report, titled “A New Way of Doing Business: How the Recovery Act Is Leading the Way to 21st Century Government,” because I was already writing about the topic. And perhaps because I’m the only journalist in America who keeps writing nice things about the stimulus.) At the meeting, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will all talk about the power of competition to promote good government, encourage innovation and get better returns on taxpayer investments. Biden is sure to gush about stimulus successes, and the various ways the budget aims to build on them.

But their self-congratulation probably won’t get much attention, because bureaucratic progress is a lot less dramatic than political warfare. And it’s quite possible that the progress will end with the stimulus; in not-yet-post-partisan Washington, the only thing House Republicans consider deader on arrival than an Obama budget initiative is an Obama budget initiative inspired by the stimulus.

Still, the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program does have some bipartisan support – Jeb Bush, George Will and Arnold Schwarzenegger love it – and it does show how competition can create laboratories for change. By setting clear goals and guidelines – the cash was reserved for states that carefully measured student and teacher performance, promoted charter schools, and adopted other accountability-oriented reforms – the program encouraged 41 states to change laws or policies before the feds even spent a nickel. The application process also put a premium on cooperation among school leaders, teacher’s unions, parent groups and elected officials. So the impact of a program that amounts to less than 1% of the education budget will extend well beyond the twelve states that won grants. The stimulus also financed a separate $650 million competition to identify innovative evidence-based school programs; it received over 1000 applications for 49 grants, a vivid illustration of pent-up demand for something different. (See pictures of homeschooling in America.)

Now Obama wants to pour another $1.4 billion into new education competitions, including an Early Learning Challenge Fund to encourage reforms in early childhood education, a “First in the World” program to improve outcomes in higher education, and an additional Race to the Top targeting school districts instead of states. “By introducing competition, you get a much better bang for your buck,” says Jared Bernstein, Biden’s top economic advisor. “You can’t do it with every federal program, but it’s one way to reinvent government for the 21st century.”

There were grant competitions scattered all over the stimulus, and almost all of them were dramatically oversubscribed. A $2 billion program seeking innovative approaches to stabilizing foreclosure-ravaged neighborhoods received $15 billion worth of applications. Obama’s $8 billion high-speed rail initiative received $55 billion worth of applications. The Department of Energy received an astonishing 3700 responses to its solicitation for radical blue-sky ideas that would transform the clean-energy landscape if they happened to work; only 37 received first-round funding. But the department’s seal of approval apparently meant something to private funders; a half dozen of those projects have already attracted additional venture capital.

Meanwhile, with $35 billion in stimulus cash to distribute through a slew of competitive programs – for everything from energy efficiency programs to battery factories to advanced biorefineries – the energy department itself became the world’s largest venture fund. To help evaluate the applications, Chu recruited over 3,000 independent experts, who devoted about 50 person-years to the task. That kind of scrutiny isn’t required for formula programs that distribute cash to all qualified applicants, much less earmarks that simply dump the money into congressional pet projects. (Watch a Q&A with Chu.)

Obama’s budget includes $100 million for a “Race to Green” competition for innovative state and local building codes, and $200 million for a similar race for communities that invest in electric vehicles and charging stations. There’s $380 million for a Workforce Innovation Fund to reward successful approaches to job training, and $120 million for “a new performance-based Race to the Top-style Juvenile Justice System Incentive Grant Program.” And there’s $32 billion for competitive transportation grants designed to promote safety, livability and innovative approaches to reducing congestion, along with a $30 billion national infrastructure bank that would also provide merit-based loans and grants.

It’s hard to overstate how radical this approach is, especially in the world of transportation. Aside from earmarks, almost all transportation funding is formula-based, where every state is entitled to a slice, and any project is acceptable as long as it fits into a neat silo (highway, airport, etc.) and provides all the necessary paperwork (traffic studies, minority hiring plans, etc.) It’s nobody’s job to ask whether the project actually makes any sense or serves any national purpose. But the stimulus included $1.5 billion in competitive grants for major projects that wouldn’t necessarily fit into a neat stovepipe but would provide significant economic and environmental benefits, from public-private partnerships to expand freight-rail capacity in seven states to new streetcars in Tucson, Dallas and New Orleans to a green-themed revitalization of a tough Kansas City neighborhood.

The Department of Transportation was inundated with nearly 1400 applications for its first 51 grants. And DOT officials say the program galvanized their bureaucracy; it turns out that civil servants work a lot harder when they’re assigned to help evaluate whether projects would be good for America, rather than whether projects have submitted all their paperwork. “Republicans ought to love this stuff,” said one senior administration official who requested anonymity. “It’s evidence-based, it’s merit-based, it’s results-based. It’s not government telling you what to do; it’s setting the goals and letting the applicants figure out how to get there.”

There could be legitimate nonpartisan concerns about the Race-to-the-top-ification of federal spending. Rigid formulas provide certainty and a measure of equality; competition introduces subjectivity, and opportunities for political shenanigans. Rigid formulas are determined by Congress; competition introduces flexibility, and additional power for the executive branch. And some programs don’t lend themselves to competition; formulas work just fine for Social Security benefits and food stamps. (Comment on this story.)

But legitimate nonpartisan concerns won’t drive the debate over Obama’s budget, especially where stimulus-related initiatives are concerned. At his Cabinet meeting today, Biden will present the good news of the Recovery Act, which helped avoid a depression, reduced the unemployment rate by 2%, cut taxes for 95% of Americans, bailed out every state to prevent mass layoffs, funded over 75,000 projects to upgrade roads, parks, sewers and just about everything else, and made unprecedented investments renewable energy, health information technology, broadband, the smart grid and much, much more – with no earmarks and virtually no fraud. But to Washington Republicans it’s the “failed stimulus.” That was their story in 2009, when they opposed it en masse, and after their sweeping victories in November, it’s hard to see why they would want to change it. Anyway, most Americans believe it.

Obama wasn’t the first presidential candidate to promise a new era of bipartisanship; his polarizing predecessor, after all, was supposed to be a uniter, not a divider. But it’s a silly promise to make, because your opponents can break it for you by refusing to cooperate. Washington is remarkably resistant to that kind of cultural change. On the other hand, bureaucratic change ought to be genuinely achievable, if only because the 24-hour cable yappers don’t really care about bureaucracy, and the sillier aspects of government are obvious across party lines. Obama’s stimulus did begin to usher in a new era of rationality through competition, where you had to do more than just check the right boxes and extend your hand to qualify for a federal check.

But the most important competition took place in November, and Obama’s team lost. It’s possible to change Washington, but Washington can change back, too.

DEFUND THE WILD WEST

Jim Leff: ‘Re ‘Defund Kentucky‘ Wednesday, you and Begala overlooked a far larger and longer-standing version of the same hypocrisy. How about the entire American west? It’s been a powerhouse of American libertarianism for decades, yet its economy depends on deep federal subsidy. Big ranchers grew rich from a federal dole and used their wealth to push for denial of basic needs for everyone else – strictly on ‘philosophical’ grounds. I don’t blame the right for this hypocrisy. I blame the left for being too wormy to point it out.’

BIG PHARMA PROFITS

Joel Wesson: ‘If the US moves toward a more rational health care system – and the government is allowed to negotiate what Medicare pays for drugs – the speculative drug stocks you and Guru suggest would be less likely to be so profitable. We might also have a healthier population at lower total cost.’

☞ And that’s not the only big picture trend that could someday pinch these stocks. This Newsweek story features a highly regarded genius who says that much of the expensive medicine we rely on is worthless. Ouch.

DYAX

First suggested at $3.17 and briefly topping $5, it closed at $1.98 yesterday. Back in November, we suggested selling it for a tax loss. But I held some . . . and so yesterday checked back with Guru for an update:

The DYAX competitor I told you about came out with its data and it was positive. I expect a launch of the competitor in 2011 and it should have the upper hand. It will likely have no meaningful sales. Still, the company is in lots of partnerships for other drugs. You never know, out of the blue something could be announced and make the stock pop. If you are comfortable treating this as an option without an expiry date where ‘you never know’ – one of 14 partnerships could suddenly say something positive (though these partnerships pay DYAX at best single-digit royalties) – then you can hold. If you prefer the theory that ‘I want to know why I should be making money,’ then you want to sell this and go into something like CBRX, or pretty much any of the other recommendations.

CVV

Aristides’ Chris Brown: ‘We have built a significant position (3% of the fund) in a very speculative company named CVD Equipment (ticker CVV) which makes products that enable R&D, prototyping, and manufacture in a variety of extremely high-technology industries (e.g. nanomaterials, solar, LED). Prior to the global economy falling apart, the company had a record revenue year in 2008 ($18 million, up from just under $14 million in 2007). Recently, the company has received orders at an unprecedented pace: over $7 mil in 3Q10, $8 mln in 4Q10, and $9.3 mln in January 2011 alone. The stock has flown higher on these recent press releases, in spite of the fact that the company filed a $20 mln shelf registration [for sale of $20 million worth of stock] at the same time it revealed its January orders. It is a NY-based company with a seemingly very well qualified management team. . . . If one annualizes orders for the last 7 months, that yields a very rough forward annual revenue run rate estimate of $41 million/year. Given the high-tech nature of the company’s business, in this market environment I believe enterprise value-to-revenue is an appropriate way to value the company, and believe it is very reasonable to assign a value of at 2.5x EV/forward revenue based on public peers in other high technology applications. The company has no net debt, so its EV is its market cap. The company has about 5 million shares outstanding, and I believe they are likely to issue another 1 million shares in a secondary offering, as they will need more working capital given the recent order flow. The stock last traded at $11.21. Assuming they do issue shares, and they use the proceeds to buy inventory (so that it’s no longer cash), that gives an enterprise value of $67.26 million, versus a target of $102.5 million. In other words, based on what is known about the company right now, I think the shares should be trading about 50% higher ($17.08). If future orders resemble anything like January’s, then the price could go much, much higher than that. If you blog it, please remind your readers to use limit orders if they are buying something small and illiquid like this.’

☞ By the time I read Chris’s email, the stock was $11.68 bid. It touched $12.60 in the middle of the day. When it calmed down a bit, I bought some for $11.90. I sure would have preferred to buy it at $8 a few days ago but (and here is the main thing) I paid $11.90 only with money I can truly afford to lose.

Have a great long Presidents Day weekend.*

*There once was a man from Manhattan
Whose writing was like purple satin.
He said with a grin
To make right Thursday’s sin:
‘Posting Monday — but maybe in Latin.’

Roses are red
Violets are bluish;
I can’t tell a lie
And say I am fluish.

Orchids are white
And last quite a while;
Today’s post in time
I just cannot file.

I feel like a dope
And a bit of a jerk
But the idiot dog
Ate all my work.

Missing a day
Fills me with sorrow;
Nevertheless,
Please come back tomorrow.

SHUCKS

Bumped again. But again something more important has come up. And no, I don’t mean Jon Stewart’s October 30 Rally To Restore Sanity or Stephen Colbert’s fiendish and simultaneous March to Keep Fear Alive – though we have in fact booked our $117 four-star Priceline hotel room for both. Rather, Shucking Like a Guy has been bumped for . . .

WARREN BUFFETT’S PARTNER CHARLIE

Stephen Willey: “Here is a two-hour interview with Charlie Munger. I didn’t regret a minute spent watching. By his own admission, Charlie is a Republican, but his solutions to the current crisis could have been mistaken for your own.”

☞ Thank you for this. Fantastic. And he’s 86? Amazing.

Charlie and Warren have been business partners since they were mere multi-millionaires. They are generally regarded as two of the most – if not in fact the two most – astute, level-headed capitalists in the world.

Skip the introductions. The actual interview starts 8 minutes in.

I like the part (about 27 minutes in) where he praises the selection of Elizabeth Warren and suggests that she may not be tough enough on the financial industry. And the part a few minutes later where he comes out against tax cuts but advocates “the biggest infrastructure program you ever saw” – with special emphasis on becoming energy independent via the sun.

He is one Republican who favors keeping Social Security just as it is.

But don’t think he’s a squishy liberal – he thinks Costco does more good for the world than the Rockefeller Foundation. He thinks ill of my hero Al Gore.

He thinks we’re hugely fortunate both parties worked together to bail out the banking system – that things would have been unimaginably bad if they hadn’t.

He thinks you should avoid gold (“even if it works, you’re a jerk”). I’ve long knocked gold, too (how is society enriched by digging for more of something whose principal value lies in its scarcity?), but Charlie ups the ante – and makes me feel a bit guilty about my own fairly recent and reluctant holding in GLD, up 36% since first suggested. May need to rethink.

He’s a multibillionaire contrarian who thinks Singapore may have been the best political system, at least for its situation, of any in the world (as he explains in answer to the last student’s question) . . .

. . . and he lives by Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem, “If.”

I assume you know it, but just in case:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

☞ If you think Charlie Munger may be possessed of more wisdom than Sarah Palin or Mitch McConnell . . . yes, or even Joe Scarborough . . . if you are willing to listen to a Republican capitalist who thinks the current Republican leadership has its economics all wrong . . . who has thought hard about how terrible economic times made Hitler’s rise possible . . . who remembers the Depression . . . then settle back and listen to him for a couple of hours.

If only everybody would.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,
So “BOO-frickin-HOO.”

Most personal income tax bills are lower – and tax refunds higher – than last year, thanks to Obama’s first budget (that got not a single Republican vote). And the tax rate we pay here is lower than in most other First World nations. (Is there any other with lower taxes than ours?)

It’s true, those of us fortunate enough to have high-paying jobs and/or significant investment income will doubtless see our tax rates rise in the not distant future. (So this is a good year to look hard at converting some or all your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.)

But I’d guess most Americans will see their low tax rates unchanged, or raised only very modestly; and that for high-income taxpayers, it will be not so different from what it was in the – very prosperous – Clinton/Gore era.

Man up, for God’s sake. And consider the possibility that paying taxes – or in this case, cashing your larger than usual refund check – is even more patriotic than complaining that you shouldn’t have to. You voted for Bush, you even reelected him, and thus you voted for the war in Iraq and the giant tax cuts for the rich and the massive debt and deficits they left us with. So now that it’s fiscal clean up time, grab a mop – not a gun – and help out like everybody else.

(Warm smile. I’m not really this tough – I would make a very bad drill sergeant – and I’m not crazy about paying taxes either. But I mean . . . really . . . did “the Greatest Generation” complain this much about taxes?)

TARAWA

Until this week I had not ever even heard of Tarawa. (Well, had you?) And now in response to Tuesday’s post comes an email from Roz Savage, who rowed there from San Francisco.

I don’t know which I find more astounding: that I am communicating, instantly, with a woman in a rowboat by an atoll in the middle of the Pacific . . . or that she rowed there.

Roz writes:

Planning to leave for Australia on Monday Tarawa time, which is Sunday in the US. So still a few more chances to get some zzzz before spending 100+ days alone in a tippy little rowboat!

Thanks for the publicity!!

Anyone is most welcome to use me as a spokesperson for the environment. Hell, even the Republicans. Well, okay, maybe not. But seriously, the environment should be at the top of EVERY political agenda. If/when we completely screw up the world, the consequences will not discriminate along party or country lines. Hopefully I speak as a passionately concerned human, rather than as a Brit or a liberal or anything else. We’re all on this planet together, and we have to look after it if we want it to look after us.

If you have 3 minutes, here‘s my latest little video. It’s a bit home-made (did it myself a couple of weeks ago, and I’m no pro!) but hopefully it gets the message out there. My TED talk should be going on YouTube soon as well, again with the message that every action counts.

Okay, time to get back to boat stuff!

All best

Roz

Roz Savage

2006 Solo Atlantic from Canaries to Antigua
2008 Solo Pacific I from California to Hawaii
2009 Solo Pacific II from Hawaii to Kiribati
2010 Solo Pacific III from Kiribati to Australia

Twitter: rozsavage
Rowing the Atlantic (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Roses are red,
Violence, appalling.
With a rhyme such as this one,
I’m obviously stalling.

Peppers are green,
Great Mozart, enthralling.
Does poetry pay well?
Have I missed my calling?

Oceans are blue,
Investors are bawling.
Four oh one K’s
Just keep falling and falling.

This, too, shall pass,
The storm and the squalling.
But don’t hold your breath;
Prepare for more mauling.
No column today. Sorry.

DELIGHT

Amazon is my hero. From the get-go – and I must have been one of its first 5,000 customers – this company’s goal seems to have been to win by delighting its customers. Presumably most of you feel the same way (and I will hear from those who hold a different view), but I am moved to tell you this because of my latest folly – and its resolution.

My car doesn’t start. I always assumed it was because I almost never use it, and the battery just dies of loneliness in the meantime. I get a jump, take it in for a new battery, pay $1,523 for a framis rebalancing I had not realized I needed, and then park it for the next two months, at which time, when I need to go someplace, the cycle begins anew.

(It’s a longer saga than this, and I think may involve alternators and trickle charges – it certainly involves my calling a lot of cabs – but I’m trying to tell you about Amazon, and all you want to do is look under my hood: stay focused, won’t you?)

The point is (and really, in a world of endlessly intriguing hyperlinks, doesn’t focus become ever more a challenge?), I went onto Amazon, rooted around a little, and found a powerpack reduced from $179 to $60 that promised not just to jump-start my car, but to power a fan and a light and maybe a TV – surely my laptop – for a few hours while I wait for the power to be restored. I bought four (don’t ask) and when I opened the first one it became clear that this deluxe item was shipped without a cord to connect it to the wall, and without the ‘inverter’ (or ‘framis’) required to plug in the fan, TV and laptop.

I never return stuff, I just give it away or throw it out, because everyone knows what a pain it is to return stuff. You have to call and wait on hold to get an ‘RMA’ number, call and wait on hold to schedule the UPS pickup, then write out the return label, etc. – hey! I’m a busy guy! I have to think of things that rhyme with ‘redolent’ and ‘pluperfect!’ But my friend and mentor in all things modern told me I was being ridiculous. Just go to Amazon, he said, click on MY ACCOUNT, and . . . well, I’ll be darned. I clicked on my order for the powerpacks. I clicked on Return This Item. I clicked on why and added an optional sentence of explanation. And that’s all there was to it.

Done.

Just leave the boxes for UPS, who would be coming to pick them up.

I would not even be charged for shipping (these things are heavy!) because, a message on the screen advised, I had felt the product was not as advertised.

Amazon is not the only company that delights me – Google is another, FreshDirect (for groceries in New York) is a third. But isn’t this amazing?

DE PLANE

Joe Cherner: ‘Are you SURE the plane moved?’

☞ Ah. Borealis. Well, yes, I’m sure the plane moved – it would be pretty hard, I think, to fool Boeing and Air Canada’s chief pilot about that. But when and whether anything else will move I cannot say. My sense is that patience is a virtue in a situation like this, and that we hold a smart lottery ticket. Unlike a real lottery ticket, it’s unlikely to be worthless in a few weeks . . . and the odds of an outsized gain (albeit not of the size that would draw helicopter news crews to your lawn) are modest but real. So, since you all promised me you would only buy shares with money you could truly afford to lose – hang on.

HAIKU

Rod Ruggiero: Ok, it’s irresistible.

Cheery blossoms pink
Nitromed is in the red
Summer color green

☞ A perfect 5 x 7 x 5 syllable, season-referencing financial haiku. ‘Cheery,’ says Rod, is no typo.

THE FIRST 2500

Carl: ‘The best, I think, was September 11, 2001.’

Richard Theriault: ‘Happy 2500! As a registered Republican for 60 years, I am so FUCKING angry about what the current crop of idiots have done to the party and the country that I have given to the DNC while still trying to fix the GOP from within. It may be futile.’

☞ Let’s hope not. Though they seem to be playing their hand – both domestically and abroad – almost the way I used to play Hearts. Where you know that if you try to ‘shoot the moon’ and fail you suffer a terrific penalty . . . and it’s become clear you miscalculated and you will fail . . . and yet, rather than change course, you just step on the gas and hope for a miracle.

Yesterday’s was the 2500^th column in this space, and as those of you know who’ve been with me from the beginning, several of them have been quite good. I just got forgot to note which ones. (There was one about clickles early on I rather liked.)

The genesis of all these was recounted in #751, the day my pay for writing them went from big bucks to bupkes; and the interesting thing about human nature (I doubt this is unique to me) is that I’ve worked harder at it, and enjoyed it more, ever since. It’s more fun to do things we’re not obligated to do.

And there’s this: Where else could I get my poetry published? The New Yorker? No, not The New Yorker.

Later that year, after 109 minutes on the phone with tech support, I wrote my second roses are red (and in that same column, the perfect poem to accompany a gift of jam).

I don’t quote those here because they were not my best work. Nor, let’s face it, was this one in August of 2001:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue;
Yesterday’s column
Counted as two.

Or its slothful variant the following August:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Yesterday’s column
Will just have to do.

In truth – using advanced Google tools to scan the past 2,500 columns for meter and rhyme – I find but one column that was worth half a dime: my March 30, 2001 column with its kick-ass financial haikus and the little poem that I once, so long ago, submitted to The New Yorker. (Yes, The New Yorker.)

NTMD

I still think Nitromed is a poor value, given the severe challenges it faces. I am keeping some of my puts and especially (because no tax is due on the profit unless I cover it) some of my short position. But the market doesn’t work on value alone – hopes, dreams, rumors and fashion all play their roles – so with the stock down two-thirds (to $7.32 last night from more than $22 a share when we started betting against it in July), it could be wise to take a chunk of your profit. You’ll be happy you did in case some unexpected announcement leads to irrational buying (hope springs eternal – not that I can readily imagine what such an announcement might be) and to short-covering (shorts like to get out of the way of irrational buying). And if the stock just keeps on with its more or less steady march to oblivion, you’ll be glad you made even more profit on that portion of your position you held to expiration (theirs or its, whichever comes first). (Okay, that was irresistible but unfair – the furthest-out puts expire in September, and Nitromed certainly has the cash to last past September.)