Okay, so the title doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s a spin on Arsenic and Old Lace, that splendid little play about old women and their passion for arsenic murders, all done very humorously.

Of course, there’s nothing funny about the current incarnation of death by arsenic.

…must come down, or not?

Here’s what got me thinking.  The Wall Street Journal reported today that the recent run-up in the Dow Jones average is almost unprecedented.  First, it’s been 978 trading days since the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 10 percent, the second longest such run on record.  Second, the market has gone 135 trading days without a 2 percent downward correction, the longest such stretch since 1958.

One thought:  Time to sell outright or short sell.  (You didn’t know I was a day trader, did you?  haha  More likely, I’m just a daydreamer!)

Frank Gehry has designed and won approval for a project (pictured) that will completely transform Brooklyn while also providing a new home arena for the New Jersey (?) Nets basketball team.

So, what’s the first thing that happens?  Lawsuits by NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) individuals and groups.  The first phase is scheduled for completion in 2010, but these lawsuits should gum up the works for a couple of years.  Same thing happened near me when the San Diego Padres got permission to build a new baseball stadium–lawsuit after lawsuit.

People who want everything to stay the same forever should move to Russia, where that’s exactly what happens, be it communist or (harhar) capitalist.

 

This is a good one.  Actually, two good ones. 

First comes the inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, and his Kyoto Accords, whereby “industrial polluters” could trade credits with polluters who reduce pollutants and so on until they reached the Monopoly equivalent of Park Place and all those nasty chloroflurocarbons and Global Warming (must be capitalized because it’s a serious subject) would be neutralized and finally melt away (stupid pun intended).

Now comes the spectacle of the London Accords on trans-fat calories.  Sacre bleu!  What’s going on?  Are we getting too hot and too unhealthy/fat at the same time?

Okay, so it’s no secret that the Demofiends hate the exercise of American power, if not America itself.  But that’s not their latest little dirty secret.

This secret is masked by the ruling party’s need to fake nobility and adherence to higher causes and values, into which it appears a lot of the public is buying, sadly.  Thus the recent ruckus and opposition to the Bushian “surge” idea to reinforce troops in and around Baghdad–play your trump card, the war.

What, however, have these same Demofiends been saying for the past four years?

I have some roots, recent ones, in the American labor movement, so it came as no surprise to me that the Big Three are bleeding red, Ford just having posted its biggest annual loss in corporate history at $12.7 billion.

My last job, before being personally consigned to the junk heap of Baby Boom economics, was with a union representing teachers.  When the incoming president eliminated several positions because of supposed financial issues, that cast me aside.

My position as Mr. Unlucky was thus firmly entrenched, but what happened next was ironic–and illustrative–beyond belief.

What was that poem’s phrase, “not with a bang but a whimper”?

I heard the whimper today.