Month

Hope all goes well… “My…legs…don’t…work,” groaned Osama bin Charlie, in a tone that fell a few pitches short of emergency. Mara and I sat up, puzzled. You see it was Spring Break in Santa Barbara. So we’d hit the mountains. To carve turns with the older three. Ditching our little man all day long, to terrorize ski school; six grueling hours of snow-plow. The groans grew closer, as he elbowed his limp torso toward our

Week-in-Review: Mon: Chinese PMI 48.1 (8mth low), Hamada hints at more BOJ easing, PMI’s; EU 53.2 (2mth low), German 53.8 (4mth low), France 51.9 (3yr high), Fed’s Williams “neutral FF rate fell sharply in recent yrs – approx 0% in 2013,” Russia kicked out of G8, S&P -0.5%; Tue: Egyptian court sentences 529 Brotherhoods to death, NSA spies on China’s Huawei Corp, Weidmann “negative rates more appropriate to curb

Hope all goes well… “For the first time in 10yrs, CNN ratings have blown through the roof,” said the TV personality. Naturally, given my passion for news, I no longer watch. “You know why?” he asked. I had a couple guesses, but kept quiet. “Every story since they wrote the Bible has a beginning, middle and end.” So now, if a story has no ending, people get trapped, stuck, and don’t know how to move on. “CNN knows thi

The drought broke, the floods flashed, the land slid. So naturally, we headed for the hills. Parked at the trailhead, and our Suburban flew open. Out spilled four kids, my loyal golden. Rattlesnake Creek roared below. We raced to its bank. Wolfie leapt into the gurgling waters, plunged beneath the surface, proudly retrieved a large stone, dropping it at my muddy feet, tail wagging; his kind heart bigger than his brai

“This is huge, as big as it gets,” said the brilliant scientist. It is indeed. You see, we’ve discovered a signal from the universe when it was just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old; back 13.8bln years ago, when a mysterious atom-sized point of energy went Big Bang! This primordial signal confirms the theory of cosmic inflation. Which we now know is woven into our very fabric, and means th

Bleep… Bleep… Bleep… Technicians tracked the secret course. It landed softly, quietly, at an undisclosed location, on Kazakhstan’s desolate steppes. Military trucks raced to the snowy scene. Gently lifted the brave crew from the craft; two Russians, one American. They’d returned after 166 isolated days of working together, in mankind’s noble symbol of cooperation, exploration, progress; the International Space Statio

“iRobot makes the Roomba and this telepresence robot – of course I bought one, I buy all these kinds of things,” said the brilliant investor, an engineer, racing down Highway 1 in his Tesla. “Google was buying every private robotics company under the sun for 50x revenue, so the masses bought iRobot dreaming it’d someday be worth that kind of multiple,” he continued. “But Google had already passed on iRobot; you know

Hope all goes well… “This is my favorite quote daddy,” announced Teddy, my 8yr old, completing a collage for his school, Roosevelt Elementary. “You do know I named you after Teddy Roosevelt,” I said, “He’s one of my favorite people in all of history, probably America’s greatest president.” And my little guy, full of chutzpah, an extraordinary zest for life, smiled broadly, proudly. Then Teddy read the quote, laughing

Hope all goes well… Eric’s been removed from power. The People’s Republic of Peters is now under our absolute control. His hollow “Be home soon” promise grew wearisome. His “Let them eat cake” refrain was pathetic, outdated, doomed. The “Unless we kill it at work, there will be no allowance, no food on the table” claim was shameless propaganda, a barefaced lie, perpetuated to serve no one other than himself. He fled

Week-in-Review: Mon: China Feb PMI 50.2 (HSBC PMI 48.5 – 7mth low), NK launches 2 rockets into sea, Russian stocks -10% (CBR hikes 150bps to 7%), US Jan personal income +0.3% (+3.6% yoy), personal spending +0.4% (+3.5% yoy), PCE prices +1.2% yoy (core +1.1%), Feb ISM manu +1.9 to 53.2, Jan construction spending +0.1% (+9.3% yoy, 22% below 2006 highs), Feb vehicle sales +0.7% (+15.5% yoy), S&P -0.7%; Tue: PBOC Zho