Howard Lindzon cracks me up. Endlessly. Continuously. His latest rant is all about Asshat’s from 2008 put on by one of his new companies StockTwits. I’m not really sure what an Asshat is since I don’t pay any attention to the public market, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with people that consider themselves experts in trading public equities.
It’s definitely NSFW, rude, crude, and crass, but that’s how Howard likes it.
The first night of 24 Season 7 went better than expected. I’m looking forward to tonight’s “surprises”. In the mean time, here’s an assassin joke that puts it all in perspective.
Job Opening
The FBI had a job opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews and testing were done, there were three finalists; two men and a woman.
For the final test, the FBI agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun. "We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair…….Kill Her!"
The man said, "You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife." The agent said, "Then you’re not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home."
The second man was given the same instructions. he took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about 5 minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, "I tried, but I can’t kill my wife." The agent said, You don’t have what it takes. Take your wife home."
Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions – to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one after another. They heard screaming, crashing and banging on the walls.
After a few minutes all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman, wiping the sweat from her brow. "This gun is loaded with blanks," she said. "I had to beat him to death with the chair."
MORAL: Women are crazy. Don’t mess with them.
Jack Bauer would be proud. Don’t underestimate Renee Walker.
CU just received a $17 million grant from NASA to probe the faint sounds of the early universe and better understand the lunar environment. I wonder if the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies will adopt Pink Floyd as their official band. Whenever I hear of something NASA is funding, I think of the exchange between Josh and Leo in the West Wing episode The Warfare of Genghis Khan.
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised. Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel’s exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer?
Leo McGarry: Where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
I think Go Fast is making my Jet Pack.
Given that I have poor impulse control, I want it now.
There are many things I love about my wife Amy, but I especially like her brain. Over the holidays, she came up with the idea for having a year of living alphabetically. As a writer, she spends a lot of time with words and – besides have one of the most amazing vocabularies I’ve ever encountered (I don’t every have to use the lookup feature on the kindle – I just should “Amy, what does “ossiferous” mean?) – she’s really good at not misusing dashes or having run-on sentences.
B is for Being. The first part of this week is being brought to you by the letter B and Amy explores Buddha’s last words. If Buddha was Yoda, he would have said “Best you do, there is not less or more” before he died.
I do this every year just because it’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s now officially 2009 – time to update all those copyright notices if you haven’t turned the ending year into a variable. What’s the point of these stupid copyright notices on the bottom of every web page anyway?
Kudos to Matt Blumberg at Return Path for (a) reminding me about this and (b) having his copyright notices automated. Google – not so automated. Microsoft – not so automated (although Live appears to be). Yahoo – automated! Ask – not so automated. Ebay – not so automated. IBM – not so copyrighted! I could go on but it’s time to go have lunch with my partners.
As 2008 winds down, Amy and I are having a traditional New Year’s Eve filled with debauchery. She’s eating a bowl of tomato soup with cheddar cheese and crackers in it; I filled up on appetizers at our friends’ house down the block where we hung out until the late hour of 8pm so we could make it home in time for bed by 10:05pm (yes – we consider that midnight here in Colorado.)
Earlier today I had a fantastic last run of the year. I did one of my traditional “5-ish” mile runs in Keystone, hammered it the whole way, and set a PR by about four minutes. The high altitude and hill training of the past few weeks are definitely having a positive impact. Since I nailed the last run of the year, I thought I’d do a twist on the traditional “year by the numbers” post (especially since no one really wants to talk about financial numbers right now) and do my running year by the numbers.
I ran 1041.83 miles in 2009. I managed to do this over 205.23 hours. Included in this were five marathons – the slowest in 5:47 in February in Sedona and the fastest in 4:39 in Huntsville in December. I’m up to 14 marathons (and states) on my quest to run a marathon in every state in the US by the time I’m 50. And – as everyone who reads this blog knows, my jihad on my weight continues. Fortunately I’m down three pounds for the year – from 211.5 at the beginning of the year to 208.5 right now.
Goals for 2009: Six more marathons, at least one sub 4 hours, and weight below 190.
Plus I’m now a level 12 on Mafia Wars.
Happy new year everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed Feld Thoughts in 2008. See you in 2009.
Erin Griffith at PEHub has a dynamite link to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from 15 years ago that is a perfect description what’s going on today in the “subsidy economy.” I love Calvin and Hobbes – it’s a close second behind Bloom County for me.
My father, Stan Feld, is a retired endocrinologist. He wrote a beautiful blog post yesterday titled The Therapeutic Magic Of The Physician Patient Relationship: Part 1. In it he tells the story of almost flunking out of first grade in the Bronx. The punch line:
“There is no question in my mind that this approach to medical care and the therapeutic effect of the positive physician patient relationship saved my academic life.”
I’m left handed so I can completely relate to this story – I had an incredibly difficult time learning how to write legibly, although my parents (and teachers) were much more appropriate in how they chose to approach it. My dad’s story, which is a powerful story for any parent to read, has several deep lessons it in, including ones around trust.
“The simple way to put it is medical care has and is being commoditized and dehumanized. These attributes are the common denominator to patients’ complaints about the medical care system in 2008. I cannot justify or condone physicians’ behavior.
Our healthcare system has to change. It must support the humanizing elements or the patient physician relationship. It has to nurture mutual trust rather than distrust between patients and physicians. A healthcare system that supports distrust, physician and patient penalties and adversarial interrelationships does not permit this princely profession to offer the kind of care physicians are capable of.”
I read my dad’s post yesterday before I wrote Valuing Competence vs. Loyalty. While they address completely different contexts and circumstances, if you squint you’ll get the common thread between them both. That thread is trust.