Write about cartoons … write about humour … write about music …
I grew up in a house full of humour, much of it inexplicable. We used to get these Giles cartoon books, for example, from a favourite Aunt every Christmas, [thanks and I miss you, ed.] and because they were political (or not always funny), and British, one often had no clue what was what. But the drawing was fantastic, and it was well worth the wade:
What put inexplicable humour into my mind was many things, but in particular, lately we have had an addition to the household, my ancient mum, and I have been looking for ways to entertain her, without overwhelming her. Inexplicable British musical humour from our past has been a great hit in this dimension.
I inflicted this kind of music on my children when they were my captives, and listen to it [an embarrassing amount, ed.] when alone. Songs like Tom Lehrer’s Elements
and New Math are better known, but his lyrics tend to the dark side, and while anti-war stuff is all well and good, it is sometimes not suitable for the under ten crowd. But it didn’t quite stop me, and “Oedipus Rex had a strange complex, he loved his mother,” is a great lyric and a good summary of the play too:
I am a sunny side of the street person, however, which brings me to the inexplicable British humour of Flanders and Swann, which I have been listening to with my mum.
While their banter, like a Giles cartoon, is sometimes dated and bizarre, they still make me laugh out loud when I listen to them. Their I am a Gnu even made it onto the Muppets, raising the gnu to such status that I have a niece who dressed as a gnu for hallowe’en. [She kind of needed a sign, like the time someone I love dressed as a willow tree and only her sensei knew exactly what she was right away, ed.]
This is one of my all-time favourites of theirs, that I have loved since a child. It used to get played during the fund-raising campaigns for an initially excellent Toronto radio station that my parents listened to and supported. It is played to the music of Mozart’s Horn Concerto #4, in Eb major, which I include to help showcase their brilliance,
but I like Flanders and Swann’s version better:
And speaking of the sunny side of the street, here is the first animal song they wrote, which has lovely lyrics about the joys of being a sloth, one being that hanging upside down makes a “smile of every frown”, something their music has been doing, once again, this time for mum, whose foot can’t help but tap.
A magical combination, music and humour. And a Saturday to find one’s inner sloth.
How sweet to be …
Good Morning ❗
The sun is coming out here, I’m past my second cup, and pondering a second pot, as I peruse my usual news feeds. My niece flagged me on this tea vid on facebook yesterday, and it seems to fit the topic, cheeky British humour and all. Enjoy.
A cup of tea is my first answer for almost all problems, no kidding. My second answer happens to be unmentionable, but also solves arrows to the heart.
That reminds me of this Flanders and Swann song:
Here’s one off of Ritholtz’s blog right away. The topic, the outlook on life, and indeed even the writing style remind me of a certain favorite hausfrau from Ottawa…
Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things
And I might add, if you want more acetylcholine in your brain, eat more eggs. Fears about cholesterol are all bullshit.
That is a really interesting article – and I do like eggs. I better feed some to mum!
i didn’t find the article i was looking for, but this is close enough. nice subject matter today.
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/29/lack-of-seriousness-the-last-interview-with-vonnegut/
I browsed through the comments (I know, danger! danger!) and this one caught me eye:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/anyone-can-learn-to-be-a-polymath/#comment-1110208089
hi all,….tired and sore but pushing the rally button till 11;00 or so. tunes are likely as i go for Xty’s option#2.
i warned ya…not sure how this brain cell fizzled up.
a note of appreciation..
green guy emote, and i have become fast friends.
i was here. strange times…..and Xty i agree.
Pete runs fast and loose with juke keys. some Van.
old Jackson
it’s intermission from my movie. if you need to get out of the booth for a few minutes, now is your chance.
44 – i made it to zero zero, CST to boot. so i beat you by two hours old man. 😎
Woodpecker do you have a recipe for vegetable soup that you are willing to share? I’m tempted to go with sir green guy emote soon. and good morning.
Good morning. You never know what a search for Mrs Green might turn up:
Marcelle Milo Gray
Mrs Green Garden
And I am very glad to find out I am a polymath, not a multi-tasker. That was a really interesting article, EO, which I forwarded to my offspring. That comment was really touching.
I think I should add a puzzle to the front page to keep all of our “brains” working, and I was looking at rebus puzzles, the irritating ones inside a box. I think I find them irritating because they seem either easy or impossible. I did force myself to figure out sudoku, sort of, but lost patience and I would like to smash a Rubik’s cube with a hammer, basically. I do like crosswords though, and used to do the cryptic ones. But they need to be written well or they are frustrating.
We stopped getting a newspaper ages ago, though, so no crosswords unless I search them out. My brain will be rusty! It is just like Nasim Taleb’s anti-fragility. If you don’t use it you lose it, and if you use it, it gets stronger. Ah, life.
Mrs. EO does the sudoku and the ken ken in the paper every day. Sometimes starts the crossword but rarely finishes. She’s better with numbers than words, just like everyone else in the family. Those things all bore me though.
My daily mental exercise, and entertainment, for pretty much all my adult life, has been the daily drama of the investment markets and financial planning. Though, as I repeatedly have pointed out, I’ve decided I wasn’t adding value with any analysis of fundamentals and have chucked that all overboard and put everything on more of a chart driven autopilot. I have a model, and now I spend more time thinking about and tweaking the model than thinking about debt/GDP ratios or any such tripe.
Long story short though, ignoring the fundamentals saves me a great deal of time, but may let the mind go soft as well. I may need to take up something entirely new.
I tend to be obsessed with things for a short time, gaining a serious level of expertise, and then, sometimes practically overnight, lose interest and move on to something new. A serial expert, as it were. Blackjack, chess, homebrewing, genealogy, and astronomy are just a few of the things that have taken my every waking thought for a period of time, and then…poof, collecting dust.
I wonder what will be next? I think my wife would lobby for something actually useful, like home repair. 😥
Basic carpentry would be awesome. Small engine and appliance repair. Painting. Landscaping. Just off the top of my head …
I too am a serial hobbiest, with intellectual pursuits too. And I have trouble finishing long books.
me too. everything you guys said. i will keep posting photos and over time you will see that i am a polymath squared.
i don’t think it matters but i have lost interest in our initial common endeavor – stock trading. it’s not just that i lost pretty much a decade of gains in the last few years either. it’s just not fun for me if i can’t use my brain – you know, the fundamentals.
i have 11 books on my nightstand. i have started all of them, finished 4.
for 44…
I thought our initial common interest was precious metals. And I must admit I’ve pretty much lost interest in that as well. And that is an interest that lasted decades, through ups and downs. The only thing about it that demands my attention now is an embarassingly large position in physical metal, which is slow to unwind. And as you know, I’m all about the money…
Hope you guys won’t banish me for this admission.
Before hitting “post comment” though, I will rephrase. In retrospect, the initial common interest was simply making money. Metals and miners were in the bubble phase of a roaring bull. It was easy to find common ground, make friends, ignore differences, and be happy. There were profits everywhere. Now, the bull is dead, and the blogs and chat rooms have been boiled down to a ragged few delusional ideologues. Ideologues who have either taken fantastic losses, or who have been sociopathic liars the whole time and never had any real skin in the game to begin with.
Left/Right. Doomer/NotDoomer. Etc/Etc.
All things could be glossed over as long as we could fall back to just talking about how much our metals and miners had gone up the previous week.
Then the tide went out, and things got more difficult.
sorry if guilty of generalization. in my case, i started with the stock message boards and eventually ended up meeting you guys at a certain place/time because that blog had the best format and features, and also had sensible moderation. i traded mostly tech initially – from 1998 – since i was employed in telecom. but i have always had an interest in the precious metals, and also in actual mining. so it was a natural fit because of that too.
i think the site still would be well below peak now even if the gold bull had continued uninterrupted. once you get a certain element dominating an online forum like that, it’s very difficult to get back your novel, original community.
but yes it is true that the tide has gone way way out, and many of the site’s leaders were swimming naked. i don’t think i’ll attach an image to this post. 🙂
I was trading miners in the late 90’s. You would think that any halfway sane or intelligent person would have learned their lesson right then and there, and never gone back. And I swore I wouldn’t.
After 9/11 I turned to oil companies and got the Peak Oil bug. It really worked out fantastically well for me, even with the wipeout in ’08. I gave back more than I wanted to, but less than I might have. I would occasionally compare the major oil company indexes to the metal and miner charts just to see if I was missing anything. Gold was doing well, but I was doing better.
Then around late ’09 I was looking at a gold chart and said to myself, “next time it goes over $1200, it’s never going to look back” and I went back in, hog wild, against my younger self’s better judgement. We all know how that all worked out. Up, then down. Big. Net, a modest loser, mostly because I was slow to bail on the miners. And the physical stack still haunts. The worst part of the recent history is the opportunity cost of having a lot of capital mostly out of the general market over the 2010-2012 period. But overall, I’ve lived to fight another day. Retirement plans remain within the realm of the possible.
Nowadays, I’m back to simply trading indexes based on moving averages, which is what I was doing long before I got greedy and started trading miners back in the 90’s. I’ve come full circle. I had it right the first time, and prefer to look upon the 1995 to 2012 period as a case of temporary insanity.
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
this picture symbolizes what the miners have done to my portfolio.
Even as late as mid 2011, I still felt pretty good about my overall results for the prior 10 years, and this included the entire experience of the 08′-09′ crash and the recovery therefrom. I had really navigated that rollercoaster fairly well, and was soundly beating a variety of index benchmarks over the period. But then of course the wheels just totally came off and it took unrelenting pain from summer 2011 to the fall of 2012 to convince me that I really wasn’t so bright after all, and that I really needed to be doing almost everything completely differently.
And I do somewhat blame the groupthinky nature of the old blog for making me go back to miners in the first place, and then hold that losing hand longer than I should have, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with the guy in the mirror. It was my hand on the buy/sell button, and no one else’s.
Nowadays, I’ve set up roadblocks, to protect my portfolio from…myself.
our experiences are really quite similar. i suffered serious setbacks in the tech wreck, and then again in the 2008 meltdown, but neither time did i lose any principle… i only gave back some or most of my gains. but i got caught up in the cult like atmosphere in the metals space through 2011-12 and continued to “BTFD” in the precious metals, way past prudence, more or less drinking the same cyanide laced Kool-Aid that is still being served. you and i were already talking off site the last time i deployed that sound investment advice – remember “Santa’s” (vomit wells up in throat) mother of all sure things, last April? well, that one last ditched attempt to buy the bottom pretty much torpedoed my retirement. yes, in the end i admit that i knew better. but i’m also not so quick to forgive the very same sages who are still out on the internet pumping the very same poison. losing a little purchasing power to inflation in hindsight would be a very nice way to face retirement. live and learn.
Sorry about the thread killers. I’ll go back in my cave for a while now…
Thread not dead? Well, hot patootie, bless my soul!