Parades Suck

I hate parades. They are boring. It's like watching my neighbor put up holiday decorations (at least his light up).
Parades celebrate peoples ability to walk in a straight line while giving a mediocre, at best, performance.
Then you have crappy host announcers that are usually drunk, and editing that focuses 5 minutes on one float and 2 seconds on the next. Also, floats adorned with advertisments, and bad singing & acting you wouldn't even find off off Broadway.

Parades need excitement! Take a queue from China. Put in a couple of hot air balloon torches for some big fire bursts. Have a giant chicken & cow walking with 10,000 firecrackers going off on a stick. Throw in some smoke grenades or fog machines.
Jazz it up parade coordinators, this is the 21st century!!!

Vote Obama (or Clinton)

Bush, both stupid and stubborn, is the worst thing that has happened to this country. I cannot in good conscience vote for McCain because his ideals too closely resemble Bush's. Obama may not be the best choice, but he is by far the better choice.
I will not exchange my civil liberties for security.

New Tropicana OJ Bottle

The new Tropicana bottle design sucks! The lid does not stay closed to shake the OJ!!
We had 2 major spills because of it.

Goodbye Tropicana. Maybe if you get back to screw caps I'll buy again.

FOOD ALERT

TBHQ, tert-Butylhydroquinone – You might have noticed this new chemical in some food you buy and eat. It's a new food preservative being used, I presume, to replace or help lower the amount of hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils already being used. As you know, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils decrease good cholesterol and increase bad cholesterol – a double whammy. (I avoid these foods like the plaque wherever possible.)

Anyway, butane (yes, that's lighter fluid) is used in the production of TBHQ and comes from natural gas and crude oil. Yuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Butylhydroquinone :
"In high doses, it has some negative health effects on lab animals, such as precursors to stomach tumors and damage to DNA.[1] A number of studies have shown that prolonged exposure to TBHQ may induce carcinogenity.[2] Other studies, however, have shown inhibition against HCA-induced carcinogenesis (by depression of metabolic activation) for TBHQ and other phenolic antioxidants."

Maybe it's just me, but I thought that food production was efficient to the point of no longer needing questionable preservatives. If I buy cookies, I know they wont last more than 2 weeks before they're eaten. So that brings the question, just how long are these foods sitting around before they are sold to the public? Months, years?

It's bad enough knowing what can go into the production of flour, eggs, butter, and sugar (very basic cake ingredients) let alone adding man made chemicals for the sake of making money.

Movie Ratings - IMO

This is a post not about the extremely flawed and outdated MPAA, but about what I feel a movie should actually be rated.

Take Talladega Nights, it's rated by Encore at 3 stars. This is by far too generous IMO. It should get no more than 2 stars. The first portion of the film is like pulling teeth for me and others. We had to force ourselves through it at different viewings until it took a 180 degree turn and became watchable.

(Actually it could be that the negative opinion of pay-tv movies channels showing mostly 2 stars or less movies most of the time is causing them to upgrade the rating on lesser movies.)

More later.

Movies/Films

Any movie that focuses on a woman crying over love loss is a chick flick. I was just watching The Holiday, when I decided to post this thought. Not that chick flicks are bad or negative, just pointing out an idea.

Frosted Mini Wheats Bite Size UPDATE

Kellogg's must have read my blog or have gotten wise to there own quality control. I have not seen "KBA" boxes for a while. Instead, boxes marked "KBC" are junk! There's the same old problem of overcoated/undercoated pieces.

Avoid KBC boxes.

The Financial Effect ii

This week started the new CNBC Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge.
I started playing on Monday and have done reasonably well, IMHO.

My 5 Portfolio results for the week ending May 16:

_______________GAIN_____TOP PERCENTILE____RANK
Portfolio 1.____ +5.8%________7.3%________44,320

Portfolio 2.____ +6.1%________6.6%________39,868

Portfolio 3.____ +6.7%________5.1%________30,823

Portfolio 4.____ +7.4%________3.9%________23,468

Portfolio 5.____ +5.5%________8.3%________50,558
All w/o any formal business training :)

For Poops & Giggles

Given the recent Mothers Day where my wife forgot to get a card, she asked if I could pick one up for her while picking up her script (prescription) at 9 pm the evening before.
Upon reaching Rite Aids surprisingly generous Mothers Day card section, there were four other young men perusing cards. I found this funny. So I went around to other side of the card wall for a B-day for our niece (also upon wife's request). Needless to say the section looked like a 5 year old went through mixing them all :P
So I got back to the Mothers Day side (still with the 4 young men) and was joined by yet another young man. I sidled to the end of the row for the best vantage point and wishing I had my camera. – THAT would have made the best Mothers Day card – 5 young men looking at Mothers Day cards, independent of each other.

TIP: When in a rush for an event card (b-day or whatever), and you don't have the time to read through them all, just do a once over to find the card slots that have the least cards left in them. Those are the popular ones that will likely satisfy your recipients needs in a pinch.

PS. I try to avoid cards because rarely do they satisfy my thoughts/feelings accurately.

POLITICS

I'M FOR CLINTON. She (& Bill) have the experience. Period.

Obama is a politican that America will not elect. It's a fact that America is still strongly racist.
I don't like Obama because he cannot think on his own. He cannot do live Q&A. He gives speeches, nothing more. And he talks "black/ghetto" to minority groups and "Kings English" to predominantly white groups – this is a typical politician.
Also, Obama wants to raise capital gains tax the highest (~28%) of all the candidates.

To me it appears that popular people, politically related or not, merely support Obama for their own personal publicity because it's the history-of-racism redeeming thing to do.

It's unfortunate that this democratic primary is about race and women.

I think the best opportunity to have a democrat in the White House is to have the Primary winner choose the other as a running mate.

Imagine either:
Obama – President

Clinton – Vice President

OR

Clinton – President

Obama – Vice President

UNSTOPPABLE!

I think the next best thing would be to have Edwards as the democratic running mate.

More On Frosted Mini Wheats

I have ID'd the bad boxes of cereal. I avoid the boxes with the letters "KBA" adjacent to the date. KPA is good.


KBA boxes have been consistently bad: mostly uncoated or overcoated (glops of coating) pieces, and broken pieces.

The Financial Effect

(STOCK MARKET)

What's popular this year, 08:
Financials- Currently down
Retailers- Currently down
Energy- Currently up
Agriculture- Currently up

I own:
AMD- Advanced Micro Devices (a "Cramer" 'wall of shame' company/CEO)
KMX- Carmax (a "Buffett" stock pick)
EP- El Paso (a "Cramer" stock pick)
WBC- WABCO (a "Buffett" stock pick)
CEDC- Central European Distribution Corp. (a "Cramer" stock pick)

I use a mix of popularity, value, future/past growth, technical analysis (basic charting), personal feelings & intuition, and an OK grasp of 'what's happening' in the realm of my interests.

My thoughts about buying/selling these stocks:
(which may change at any moment depending on the news related to each company, etc.)

To me AMD is a good value at anything below $9. My next buy would be $6.05 or less. I missed the last drop to ~$5.90 because I was sleep deprived and wasn't thinking clearly. Oh well. This will see $21 again, but I'm not telling you when :)

KMX. I'd buy at $18.50 or better, and consider selling at $29 if I don't sell it for a better value elsewhere. The financial crisis (for lack of a better word) I believe is keeping this stock price down and slowing the current demand. But I believe this company is poised for good growth over the next 1-2 years. I think (50/50) that it may see $24-26 prices within a year.

EP. I'd buy more if it dropped to below $15.40, and probably consider selling at $21+. But given recent news regarding its expected earnings and the nat gas boom, I may decide to hang on a while (throughout the year).

WBC. I bought this at $40, very near it's low. Currently I'm up over 22% since I bought it early this year. I bought it for my kids, too. I don't plan on selling this company for a long time. It's a Buffett owned stock, as well. So far it's doing very well and has been flying under the CNBC news radar and isn't grabbing a lot of attention. I have a good feeling about this company.
I think that it will drop back down to @$45 again and possibly even $43-42. I think this is going to be 'a slow and steady wins the race' stock.

CEDC. I was finally able to decide between this company and FMX. I admit I was somewhat impatient when I chose CEDC, but you can only wait so long before you opportunity changes. FMX never went back below $42 and CEDC has a beautiful chart, so I chose CEDC at $60. I wouldn't be surprised if CEDC's price dropped to $52-49. I would buy more. This is another 'slow and steady wins the race' company. I expect it to continue rising for at least a year or more. I believe this can easily make it to $75-85, beyond that - ? if it consistently outperforms analysts expectations it shouldn't have a problem exceeding $100/share w/o becoming overvalued. I think that outperforming analysts expectations with a $2.7B growing company won't upset the analysts too much. A larger company would need a more stable outlook so as not to surprise analysts and give the image of a company that isn't controlling itself.

Stocks that will meet my chopping block at some point:
AMD
EP

Stocks that may meet my chopping block at some point:
KMX
CEDC

Stocks that I intend to hold, lest really bad news befalls them:
WBC

Misses:
BNI Burlington Northern Santa Fe. I really wanted to get this one for my kids because they love toy trains (and it was in line with a long range outlook). By the time I found it's range (between $78 and upper $80's) and set a buy price @$78, it haphazardly kept going up, into the $90s and finally surpassing the $100 mark. Oh well.

Took a Big Hit:
SIGM Sigma Designs. This one I bought at @$40, very near its low at it's range at the time. The upper end was around $49. After a couple of times in the upper $40s I decided to sell it the next time it went up. It didn't. It went down into the upper $30s, then lower $30s. So I held tight and waited. Upper $20's :P I sold out at $27. It went to $15 and stayed down for some time. It's finally coming back. I think it may make it back to the low $40s. IDK. F@%king shortsellers!

BTW By the way, I'm not a stock broker or related to one.