CSotD: Friday Salute to the Silly
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Joy of Tech points out that it’s been a little hard to keep track of the disasters raining down on us, much less to plan for them. People have been pointing out that you can say “What’s he done this time?” and everyone knows who you mean, but I think that’s a bit unfair. They might not know if you meant Trump or Musk.
The financial advice remains the same: Unless you are planning to retire in the next five years, don’t play with your portfolio. And if you are, well, you won’t likely make things any better by trying to guess what’s going to bottom out next, though you might shift it into rock-solid stocks so they won’t go any lower.
But, then again, they won’t go any higher, either.
My IRA is in an account that was set up to gradually slide over into those immovable stocks as I grew closer to retirement, and they haven’t changed much. In fact, they’re up slightly from their usual post-New-Year’s slide, though not as recovered as they have been in other years.
It reminds me of when I ran a “Stock Market Game” for students, an activity I hated but which teachers liked and which sold a lot of newspapers as kids created dummy portfolios and tracked them. The teachers liked the math and I hated teaching kids that investing is about making as much profit as you can in six weeks.
But one year, one of the teams started out with a bunch of high-tech stocks, which promptly doubled, at which point they sold them all off and bought utilities, holding a massive lead through the rest of the game and walking off with the win.
This team was from a juvie facility, which meant they didn’t have to be taught how to work a hustle. I thought it was right in the spirit of things.
And speaking of hustles, I heard on the radio yesterday that Americans are expected to bet $3 billion on the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, and that presumably doesn’t include office pools.
Heller is right that any method can work. I won the office pool one year and I have no interest in basketball. I just picked teams roughly at random, and given the number of variables involved, it was as good a method as anything else.
After all, if there were some logical, objective way to predict the winners, there’d be no point in playing the games.
My experience at newspapers taught me that the guys in the sports department don’t participate in these pools, not for ethical reasons but because they’re embarrassed to be beaten by some clerk in the classified department who chose her teams by colors.
As for the $3 billion, I do wonder how many unpaid rent checks that represents and how many kids will be having bread and butter for dinner. I notice the ads for betting companies push proposition bets, like who scores the first touchdown in a football game. You might as well go down to the county fair and bet on the racing pigs, and these gambling addicts would.
Which isn’t so funny.
When they started the lottery one place I lived, the deal was that the profits would go to the schools, which sounds great, but what it meant was that they’d spend the same amount only they’d tap the suckers who bought scratch-off tickets instead of spreading the cost fairly across all taxpayers.
Presumably if the education part worked, the newly-enlightened masses would, over time, quit pissing away their money on lottery tickets. Right: Pull the other one.
Jeremy Banks celebrates the release of the JFK Super-Secret Files, which turned out not to contain many super-secrets except for the names, birth-places and Social Security numbers of the people who worked the case.
But speaking of suckers, as we were, I thought the timing of Banx’s gag was good because Fox’s premier nitwit, Jesse Watters, released his five rules for men and was roundly mocked for it. Guys who fret over their manliness are just the kind who want more information about Marilyn Monroe, not realizing that you could have a pretty good time by polishing up your act and dating Norma Jean from back home.
But that ain’t gonna happen, because some guys are just never gonna catch on. Russell Brand fell for a gag so ridiculous that even he recognized how idiotic it was, but only after he’d posted it online:
Yes, he posted the claim that the assassination was carried out by British TV star Penelope Keith. My question is whether somebody quickly advised him to take it back down or whether he realized how incredibly stupid it made him look.
The old barroom wisecrack is “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” but it’s reversed in Hollywood: “If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?”
Not that Hollywood’s the only place you could use it.
The notion that Vader’s troopers are notoriously bad shots is a common joke, but Brewster Rockit taps into Elon’s weekly report mandate to point out what a colossal failure Vader himself was.
It makes you wonder why the Emperor didn’t fire him, or worse, when Skywalker blew up the Death Star or when the attack on Hoth didn’t work out.
The people who have watched all the prequels and sequels and nyquils probably know the answer to this, but my theory is that Vader has a pee tape squirreled away at Penelope Keith’s house.
The Emperor certainly wouldn’t mess with her!
And on a related note, I wonder how many Star Wars fans saw this Red and Rover and immediately thought about making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. And here’s how the True Believers retconned that blunder: George Lucas employed Herman’s Law, in which one proclaims “I meant to do that,” and thus resolves the problem.
Speaking of technical genius, this Edison Lee strip ran the morning after President Trump revealed that his son Barron is a technical genius because if you turn off his laptop, the lad can turn it back on again. It must be because his great-uncle taught at MIT.
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