as promised, some worldly comments. and by worldly, i mean, 'not about me'. and don't worry; they are v. idiotic and v. inconsequential:
- This headline: "The Pantry ekes out a profit" was actually slightly comforting to me. Not because it's the company that owns my Most-visited Convenience Store (sucks that that title now goes to a public co. and not the cute little korean-owned store that i used to go to in the Hearst tower. The little woman owner used to try to teach me how to say "hello" in korean and, on alternate days, asked me if i was, "married to boyfriend yet?" Heck, maybe that's corp-owned, too? It had the familiar feel, anyway.), but because it actually made $43,000 in q2. How's that for piddly stix? I was relieved to see that it is possible to not swing from multiM/BILLION dollar quarterly profits to multiM/BILLION dollar quarterly losses. I was beginning to believe that all public companies were skipping the thousands altogether and denominating everything in m/billions. To be fair, the companies I'm referring to are mainly banks, and when you're earning $XX Billion each quarter, and then the economy goes on a bad acid trip, I guess that kind of thing happens. But still. It seemed weird to me that you could be making several billion dollars in the span of three months and then be losing your dignity in the next. it's not a problem that skimping on clickable permanent markers will help fix. (Enter: Paulson.)
- why is it the beginning of august, and one of the headlines on espn.com is about the friggin NBA? And it's not even anything juicy, like a Kobe affair. It's just speculation on the upcoming season. guh. AND i have to dig through a drop-down menu to get to tennis. guh!
- #15 on the College Football mock draft?? really? No checkerboard end zones or even standing-room-only crowds are going to get us through the season if crompton doesn't have any reliable wide receivers to throw his crappy passes to, esp. against SEC D. Don't doubt my love, though. I'm a skeptic, but I'll be at the opener. And I do like that we're ahead of Florida in a numbers-based ranking. (the non-ultra-obvious 'numbers-based'...)
- I guess this deserves its separate bullet point. Some dude from Liverpool, New York, where I grew up for the first 10 years of my life, has a comment in the mock draft ranking: "Where's the Syracuse Orange?" I want to ask him if he has mental disabilities. The dude from Troy, Michigan, where Joe grew up, is only slightly better in his praise for Maisel's choice of ND at #9. ND at 9 is like UT at 15: Maisel must have a small penchant for tradition before talent.
- what's with the praise for women who have been 'Wall Street investment bankers'? e.g., Jenny Sanford is SO cool because she used to be an investment banker on the Wall Street. Or, the billion dollar divorcee is super cool too because SHE used to be an investment banker on Wall Street. OK, i get it. They're probably v. smart women (except for when making lifelong decisions such as, 'Who should I marry?'), and they can stand on their own. But, from all I can tell, being an investment banker on Wall Street (or elsewhere) merely entails doing some research on Yahoo Finance! and then... buying what everyone else is buying and selling what everyone else is selling. Ok, maybe I over-simplified that a bit. I'm just saying .. I'm not convinced yet that anyone with a Finance degree really knows what the hell they're doing (when they're not picking out wines at client lunches). Like John Oliver pointed out, Geithner can't even sell his house.
- it is amazing what you can learn on facebook...
- what did we do before the internet, again?
