UP WHEN ITS DOWN, OR, GAMBLING

This isn’t a media consumption or creation thing, exactly, but I thought I’d relate this story about what a crappy investor I am.

As background, I NEVER buy individual stocks.  I was surfing around the world of investment websites, however, and I noticed that Fannie Mae (FNM) was trading at well under a dollar a share.  On the theory that the company would either be nationalized (in which case the shareholders would lose everything, total wipeout) or eventually return to some kind of a normal trading price (over $5/share, at any rate), I thought it would be a good bet to plunk down some noncritical amount of cash on the sucker.   This has nothing to do with the underlying soundness of the company, mind you.  I’m not even sure that I understand what FNM is (some kind of public/private hybrid?) —  I know it will look bad for the government if it nationalizes it, so they will probably avoid that at all costs.

On June 8, 2009, I bought 250 shares of FNM.  It was at $.68/share on that particular day.  Why did I choose that day?  Beats the hell out of me.  It dropped like a rock for a while – it was down to $.30 at some point in the 52-week period.  Since I’ve owned it, it’s been down in the 50 cent range.  Disaster!  Today, it’s up to $1.70/share.  My calculations show me that I have an enormous  paper profit — well over 100% in under 2 months.   (The volatility of a bear market!)

But this is why it’s gambling, and why I’ll always be the guy stuck at the nickel slot machines.  I think I’m probably right about this pick, and that it  may go up some staggering amount (percentage-wise) in the next months or years.  I don’t have the money (or the stomach, if you look at it that way) to really place a serious bet on the matter, however.   But also, the amount that I was willing to bet was so small that even an enormous profit, in terms of percentages, is not worth taking.  So I’ll just let it ride. 

See, a good investor would walk away with the earnings and be happy at his good fortune (whatever the nominal amounts).   Now, however, I’ve gotten greedy AND lazy, and won’t do it. 

People who make money in the stock market are either 1) emotionless robots, 2) wild optimists who just happen to get lucky, 3) crooks, or 4) some mixture of the above.

THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)

I recently watched this film, as a result of  — well I don’t know what.   Why do people watch things?  I was pleasantly  surprsed at how well it stands up, mostly due to James Cagney’s performance.   Check out this scene of domestic bliss with Tom (Cagney) and his girlfriend having breakfast.   

There’s a surprising sexual undercurrent in this movie — nothing graphic, of course, but strong.  Especially notable was scene in which an old prostitute helps a drunk Tom take his shoes off.  Kneeling at his feet, she looks up at him meaningfully  and says, “I want to do things for you, Tommy.”  (Later on, of course, he slaps her down for seducing him when he was drunk.)  I couldn’t find a clip of this, unfortunately.   A lot of freedom in the pre-Hays Code period, I suppose.

Also, I found it interesting that this film, which indisputably glorifies the exciting, lawless and violent life of the criminal, is bumpered at the beginning and end by lengthy text pages explaining how the film is just an “examination” of this lowlife type, showing him as an example that society has to deal with, etc.  Meanwhile, the “good” characters (idiot mother, studious brother Mike) are complete milksops next to the electric Tom.

A couple of trivia notes:  There’s a scene in which Tom’s enemies shoot at him with a machine gun, barely missing him and hitting the wall over his head.  It’s extremely realistic in the film, for a good reason: the effect of the bullets hitting the wall was produced by shooting a machine gun at James Cagney.  So the story goes, the shooter was supposed to aim wide of Cagney, but instead “missed” and  shot directly at him – the star was only saved because he happened to trip and fall at the exact moment.   Cagney laughed the event off, but later was instrumental in founding the Screen Actor’s Guild, the union which would put an end to such unsafe practices.  

So we have unions to thank for film directors no longer shooting guns at their actors.  Go organized labor!

Also, the story goes that the actress in the grapefruit scene above had an unhappy ex-husband, who used to go to the movie just for that scene – and he had timed it so that he could go in, see her get a grapefruit smashed in her face, and leave.

And finally, a scene of Cagney’s total badassery, as he takes revenge on the mobsters who shot at him with said machine gun.  (The head mobster’s name is “Schemer.”  There’s another scene — in the gun shop — before the particular one I like.)

3 QUESTIONS

Just this morning, I ran across this post posing three bloggy questions that persons such as myself who operate webpages such as this  one should be asking themselves.  In the name of justice, honor, the Oxford Comma, and being cool, I shall answer them for myself.

1.  Am I consistent?  The point of this being, do I provide my readership with content at predicable intervals?  Do I have regular features that they can look forward to?  Do my readers know that, when they spend their valuable internet time-tokens on a visit to Overestimated, will they get high-quality postings of the type and tone they’ve grown to know, love, and rely upon?

Answer:  No.  Those who come to this page expecting new, trenchant, regularly posted  material — well, if you haven’t figured out that by now that it ain’t comin’, you have my pity.   

2.  Am I universal?  Rather than using my blog as a personal diary, am I addressing issues of general interest, to which a wide variety of readers can relate?

Answer: No.  Seriously, no. 

3.  Am I transparent?  Am  I getting any bloggy kickbacks for my work here?  Will a positive review (of, say, The Road To Wigan Pier) get me rewards under the table (lifetime membership in the George Orwell Appeciation Society and a free years’ supply of louse-infested tripe)?

Answer:  I am sorry to say that I receive no reward, neither monetary nor social nor emotional nor meretricious, for writing on this blog.   I would be happy to accept any of the above —  minus the tripe, of course.

Damn. I had hopeed for a perfect score.

WORSE THAN A CRIME, PART THE SECOND

Same set, same characters.  The group is telling “walked into a bar” jokes.  The host lays one on us: “A baby seal walked into a club.”

Har har.  Not my kind of joke, but I appreciate it. It’s a specialty number, obviously meant to be used when a group is working through a string of these. 

Something like one millisecond later, the host’s wife walks in the room, gets a whiff of the conversation and says, ”A baby seal walked into a club.” 

Ugh. 

Just to wash that out of the brain here’s one that my wife heard somewhere this week:  A man goes to the supermarket, and as he’s checking out the cashier girls looks up at him.   ”You must be single.”

He is taken aback.   ”What makes you say that?”

 ”Because you’re so fucking ugly.”

I SHOULD PUT SOMETHING HERE

Shouldn’t I?

FIRST INKLINGS OF FAME

Andrew Sullivan posts an email I sent him — I am the middle anonymous reader.  He edited my text, but I think it’s better for being edited.

THE RECENT UNPLEASANTNESS

I haven’t posted much lately, for which I am kind of sorry.  Here’s a short roundup of what I’ve been reading:

A Lost Lady: This was not so much bad (which I had expected) as puzzling.  The story was competently told, and it was brief, which is a virtue.  The Wikipedia entry for this book says simply that “the novel is regarded as having a robust symbolic framework.”  I take this to mean that you can use the word literally a lot when talking about it:  Mrs. Forrester was literally a fallen woman (because her husband found her after she had fallen down the side of a mountain);  sparks literally fly in a private moment between Mrs. Forrester and Mr. Ellinger (they are sparks of static electricity), after his stroke, Mr. Ellinger is literally marking time until his death (he sits watching a sundial).  This wears on you once you recognize it.

But I was puzzled by the author’s attitude towards Mrs. Forrester: a young, beautiful woman who is married to an older railroad magnate, living in a hick town.  After financial reverses and then his death, she is left penniless and stranded.  She uses her fading beauty and her wiles to manipulate some young men of the town so that she can get some money together and leave.  Later on, it is learned that she moved to Argentina and married a millionaire, living the high life until she died.  Sounds good to me.

Our point of view character, though, is totally disapproving, thinking that it’s such a shame how she ended up, etc.  How horrible that she should leave poverty on the frozen prarie and remarry a wealthy man.  I mean, what a mistake!  She did have to sleep with a couple of unpleasant types to get there, and she becomes a bit of a drunk, but so what?  Strange.

I also read  The Plague, by Albert Camus.  I don’t have a lot to say about it except that I found it riveting.  Also, the copy I got out of the library was this funny version that semeed to have has all the margins sliced off,  so that the resulting book was tall and skinny and the text ran to the very edges of the paper.   Strange.

Continuing the Trashcan Diaries, I’m reading Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien.  I can only describe it as a “ripping good read” — it’s an extremely detailed comic book, but well done and entertaining.

WORSE THAN A CRIME

Recently I was at a friend’s house with a couple of other guys.  We were  sitting around the TV.   On these occasions, the host’s wife usually hangs around the periphery of the group but doesn’t really participate — it’s an apartment, so there aren’t too many other places for her to be, etc.  She’s generally fine.  No complaints.

The last time I was there, our host stopped to tell a very short Heaven/Hell joke about a  soul who had been sent to Hell by mistake.  God threatens to sue the Devil to get him back, and the Devil replies, “Where are you going to find a lawyer in Heaven?”  Ho ho ho.  That’s fine.  It was organic to the conversation, whatever.  I happen to be a lawyer, but I don’t really care about that kind of joke – it is an unavoidable part of life, best to get it over with quickly, etc.  (The religious aspect of  it doesn’t bother me at all, mostly because of my total lack of belief along those lines.   Another conversation.)

But then my friend’s wife jumped in:  “Here’s my favorite.”  And she proceeded to tell a really LONG joke, taking a few minutes, complete with a moment in the middle when she seemed to lose the thread and started hmm-ing and err-ing.  Somewhere in there, I had a precognitive flash: My God, this joke has exactly the same punch line as the one her husband just told.  A few of us had the same idea, I think, because you could feel the squirming in the room.  

So there we were, listening to this joke that not only wasn’t going to be funny (because it wasn’t great to start out with and wasn’t getting the kind of delivery that could carry the day) but literally had no chance of possibly being funny except possibly as some kind of ironic anti-humor which was clearly not what was intended.

And so it was.  Where are you going to find a lawyer in Heaven?

Worse than a crime, I tell you.

SECOND RATE UPDATE

I showed the below post to a friend, who said I was too pessimistic. We’ll see.

Still reading A Lost Lady.  It’s really short;  I’m just lame.  Also,  it’s better than I expected.  Not setting me on fire, but it is a straightforward, well-constructed story.  More on that later, mayhap.

Watched the first few episodes of British sitcom The IT Crowd, which were worth the time

Here’s our book lineup:

A Lost Lady, Cather (In progress)

The Plague, Camus (In honor of the swine flu)

The Glory of Their Times, Ritter (In honor of my wife, who says I should read it — and who has impeccable taste)

SOUNDS LIKE MONEY

The title of this post is a quote from an aged relative of mine, her first reaction to hearing the news of a publication opportunity that had been offered to my wife.  The transcription itself  doesn’t do her justice; she gave the last word an exuberant break in the middle, so it was more like munn-nnay!  

To which I naturally responded, No it doesn’t.  Our conversation suffered at that point, with me trying to explain what was good about this opportunity aside from whatever my wife might get paid for it (it’s a royalty-based setup, so that is uncertain) and she giving me the human equivalent of Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.   But we carried on, and she finally came up with an explanation of her own.  “It’s recognition, then?”   

I was able to agree that yes, recognition was probably a part of it.

I don’t want to be too hard on my aged relative — I would have put the conversation aside entirely if I hadn’t heard the same sentiment expressed two other times in the past two weeks.  It’s usually expressed in the following form: I should write a book like _______ and it will be a bestseller and then I’ll be rich!   One person filled in the blank with Watchmen, the Alan Moore graphic novel, and the other filled it in with an actual idea, ”dating horror stories.” 

Let’s take this apart:

1.  I should write a book:  Yeah, you should sit down for about 1,000 hours and write a book. And then rewrite it.  And then realize that it isn’t any good and change it.  And all this on top of whatever you are doing to pay the rent.   

2.  It will be a bestseller:  After you find an agent to take it on who finds a publisher to take it on, and do whatever rewrites they demand, and hope that they market it properly, and Oprah recommends it, and maybe a prominent religious figure denounces it for having too much graphic sex of a particularly titillating sort . . . yeah, maybe it’ll be a bestseller.

3.  I’ll be rich: If you manage to make it through steps 1-2, above, we get to the real crux of the matter — I don’t think you actually DO get rich, at least not on one book.  I’m no expert on the publishing biz, not having had a scrap of my own work published (except for you fine people), but it seems to me that a first-time author would certainly lack any kind of bargaining power  with a publishing house — the type of power that gets you the fat advance and a decent chunk of the royalties.  The people who get those deals are the one who are able to cash in on some prexisting brand that they have created – either  the Hillary Clintons of the world, famous or notorious for other things, or a professional author who has an existing body of work that readers want more of.   I think, without really knowing, that Joe Author’s first book doesn’t make him rich, no matter how successful.  If he’s is lucky, it gets him the chance to write a second.  (And Joe sold the movie rights to that first book for a song well before it becomes apparent that it’s going to be a hit, so don’t be thinking that’s going to make so much of a difference.)

This brings me back to my aged relative, and the notion that my wife’s opportunity, or any Bizarro-world opportunity that might come to me, sounds like munn-nay! (I mean, I would hope that our books would be so wildly popular that Borders would eliminate the entire Self-Help section so as to feature our books, and have to restock the shelves five times a day at every location because of the demand.  Don’t hold your breath, however.)  It doesn’t sound like munn-nay! at all, actually — so why do it?

If you are a creator of art, that’s a question you have to answer — if it’s so unlikely that you are ever going to make a dime off what you are doing, why do it?    Why not just watch TV, or read, or learn to cook, or go out and make some friends and hang around with them?  Or why not just take a nap?  Why spend all that time on your worthless  art?

Figure that out, and then we’ll talk again.