FIVE RULES FOR MEN TO FOLLOW TO A HAPPY LIFE:
>
> 1. It’s important to have a woman, who helps at home,
> Who cooks from time to time, cleans up and has a job.
>
> 2. It’s important to have a woman, who can make you
> Laugh.
>
> 3. It’s important to have a woman, who you can trust
> And who doesn’t lie to you.
>
> 4. It’s important to have a woman, who is good in bed
> And who likes to be with you.
>
> 5. And It’s very, very important that these four women
> Do not know each other.

"Would you have stopped?  Most old farts wouldn’t have.  We need to recover our inner little kid."

 
A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats averaged $100 each.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?
.

Walking can add minutes to your life.
This enables you at 85 years old to spend an additional
5 months in a nursing home at $7000 per month.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
My grandpa started walking five miles a day
when he was 60.   Now he’s 97 years old
and we don’t know where the hell he is.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I like long walks, especially when they
are taken by people who annoy me.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
The only reason I would take up walking is so
that I could hear heavy breathing again.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I have to walk early in the morning,
before my brain figures out what I’m doing.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I joined a health club last year, spent about 400 bucks.
Haven’t lost a pound. Apparently you have to go there.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Every time I hear the dirty word ‘exercise,’
I wash my mouth out with chocolate.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I do have flabby thighs,
but fortunately my stomach covers them.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
The advantage of exercising every day is so when you die,
they’ll say, ‘Well she looks good, doesn’t she?’
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
If you are going to try cross-country skiing,
start with a small country.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I know I got a lot of exercise the last few years
- just getting over the hill.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
You could run this over to your friends
but why not just e-mail it to them!
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
We all get heavier as we get older,
because there’s a lot more information in our heads.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Every time I start thinking too much about
how I look, I just find a Happy Hour
and by the time I leave, I look just fine.
 

Q:  What can a man do while his wife is going through menopause?  

Oil hits $100 a barrel, and that’s all the media can talk about.  ONE story a day with bad news in it, that’s the limit.  Mr. Newscast Producer said, "Don’t mess with the shoppers."  (Well, he may not actually have  said it for publication…but  he would have said it…if he’d been in a mood to be honest that day.)

And yes, gold also closed at an absolute new high on January 2, 2008 - $856.40.  Both CNBC and Bloomberg blathered on all day about oil, and conveniently forgot about the new high in real money. 

(And don’t get me started about how the new nominal high over $850 is nowhere near where gold should be on an inflation adjusted basis.  Even the dopey calculator at www.bls.gov says an $850 price back in 1980 should be over $2000 today.  Chevrolets were $7000 in 1980.)

This could be a pretty interesting year for commodity-like things.  But don’t tell Big Media.  They’d only ignore it anyway.  "Hey, look at that bikini over there…"

I sent out an Xmas Card this year extolling the virtues of commodities. Feedback has been underwhelming. I should have done a video. Well, Sam Zell did. Sam Zell is a Forbes 400 kind of guy who’s made a pile of dough being way smarter than the next guy in the real estate biz. Among other projects, he made a lot of money in the 1980’s with real estate limited partnerships, and then made a lot money rolling those partnerships up into a REIT empire in the 1990’s. He entertained offers in the $37 BILLION range for his publicly traded Equity Office REIT from smug private equity types who were in diapers when Sam started building wealth decades ago. Yeah, yuppie puppies are going to put one over on old Sam…the guy known as the "Grave Dancer" for the way he’s buried guys in financial deals over the decades. In an investment dictionary, next to the definition of "Sell High" at the top of a market, there’s a picture of Sam Zell. Anyway, Sam took some of his play money and created a Holiday Greeting video with a voice-over and a song highlighting meaningful images of moving money - his take on where we are at the end of the 2006 financial pagent.  He updates his Christmas message every year.   Watch and wow. www.yieldsz.com

Whoopie, a new 12,000 high for the Dow, and how nice for the Replicants. Could I rain on this parade? Oh, but of course.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) of 30 stocks is calculated by adding up the dollar closing prices of 30 “representative” stocks of our economy and then dividing by a divisor. I’ll slow down if I’m going too fast for some of you…

The DJIA Index is denoted in “points” not dollars. And the divisor has gotten adjusted over the years as stocks in the Index are subtracted and others are added, or stocks that are there split their shares. (Known in the biz as giving you two $5’s for a $10)  You want an Index as popular as the Dow to have a certain consistency - that it will open somewhere near where it closed the night before.
Anyway, the current Dow Industrial Index divisor is currently 0.12493117. (And you thought you were nit-picky.) That means you can take a 30 stock Raw Score of about 1499 and divide that by the teeny divisor.  Or take the raw score and mulitply by 8. Yeah, 1500 times 8…carry the 4…comes out to about 12k. (Nightly Business Report says, $1 of stock value is more than 7 points in the DJIA. Can you smell the “Never give a customer an even break” aroma?)

Well, since most, I mean more than HALF, of the Dow 30 stocks actually trading lower than they were back in March of 2000, I decided to do some research.  Nobody was really explaining HOW parts of index could mostly be lower, and yet the Index itself was hitting new highs.  And isn’t that nice for the Replicrooks.
In one of my old adult ed workbooks, I’d written down that as of June 5, 2000, the Dow’s divisor was 0.18238596. That means that the Dow’s March 2000 high of 11722 had a Raw Score of approximately 2137. I’ll skip the decimals and the slight mismatch on dates here.  I want you to know though, that my Hewlett Packard 12C calculator did these calcs with batteries to spare.  At the Dow’s high back in the spring of 2000, $1 of stock value equated to only about 5 and a half points on the Index.

Presto Reducto, our new high on the Dow has been caused by reducing the divisor…and the public snoozes on.

(And don’t even get me started on the drop in the purchasing power of the money invested in the Dow stocks - caused by the 30% dunk of the dollar in the last 6 years…)

On Planet Wall Street, figures may not lie, but we should bet much more often that liars can still figure, especially in an election year.  Over 43% of the population DO figure that somehow the Bush Administration lowered the price of gasoline in the last 2 months.  Why won’t the public consider the possibility that other scams are at work in our other markets?

Non-hierarchical comedian Robert Newman addresses a Brit audience and makes the history of oil actually interesting as well as informative. He charged money for this? 45 minutes with laughs and fancy video graphics. For that time in your day when you have…some time.