Market report.

February 24th, 2022

Last year, Mike the Musicologist and I were talking about stuff. MtM suggested it might be interesting to take the money from our stimulus checks and invest it…in gun related stocks.

Thus was born what I refer to as “the gun hedge fund”, even though it technically isn’t a hedge fund. It is more just a collection of gun related stocks that I think have good growth potential. I have one (or in some cases, two) shares in each of the following companies:

I haven’t really been “trading”, per se. I’ve bought these stocks to hold, and any dividends I’ve reinvested in more stocks. This is just for fun, and experimental purposes. It’s also a way to use money that I’d otherwise probably have spent on whisky and women, or just wasted.

This has been going on for exactly a year today. What have the results been so far? Well, I funded the account with $408.10. As of the close of the markets today, my positions (and accumulated cash) are worth…

…$417.82. So I’ve made $9.72 on gun stocks over the past year, or roughly 2.3% on my initial investment. That includes the dividends I’ve received and reinvested over the past 12 months ($21.38), so, on the whole, I’ve probably lost money.

Better than what I would have made if I put the money in a savings account. I’m not too stressed, since I’m mostly doing this for fun.

Who did the best? As far as I can tell, Olin (bought at $32.78, closed today at $48.82) and Vista Outdoor (bought at $33.38, closed today at $34.39).

I can’t find a way in the Schwab app to graph the entire history of this account over the past 12 months, but looking at the history of all of my accounts, I was actually doing pretty well right up until February 21st. Then my accounts fell off a cliff. I blame the Ukraine and the vertical integration of the broiler industry for that.

Two side notes:

1) For all the complaints I have about work, this job has let me personally own stock for the first time in my life. I already had a Schwab account because I’ve been buying company stock on the employee purchase plan, so it was easy to open a second account for the gun hedge fund independent of that. The hardest part was moving the money from my bank to Schawb. (I think I also had to send them an ID.)

2) My employee stock purchase plan had $205 cash in it that I couldn’t do anything with: I couldn’t buy more company stock, and if there’s a way to reinvest dividends, I haven’t found it yet. So yesterday I opened a second personal account, because I wanted to keep the gun hedge fund as a thing by itself, and bought…one share of Apple.

Apple closed today at $162.74. I bought this morning at $152.42, so I’m already up $10.32 on that one share of AAPL, or more than the gun hedge fund made in the past 12 months.

Posted in Guns, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

Red Boat, Red Boat, Red Boat…

February 24th, 2022

Yes, it is a tongue twister.

It is also the fish sauce I ordered and which arrived yesterday. (Previously.) Please note that this is not cheap. Please also note that I paid for this out of my own pocket: it was not a trade or barter deal for advertising.

My regular lunch during the work week is dried noodle soup, generally jacked up with some additional low-sodium chicken broth and another condiment. Sometimes I use one of the Tabasco flavors (either the regular or the scorpion pepper), but I’ve also used Angostura Bitters. Both of those work pretty well, but I thought I’d give the Red Boat a try.

When I opened the bottle, the smell was really strong. It didn’t bother me, but it might be borderline offensive for people who aren’t big fans of fishy things. I added about a half-teaspoon to my noodles before I cooked them.

After cooking, you could tell there was something there, but it was very slight. I suspect a lot of the fish sauce volatilized off during the cooking: something like this happens with Angostura as well, but the bitters leave enough behind to give it a much more pronounced flavor.

Next time, I may try adding the sauce after cooking, and, depending on those results, may go up to a full teaspoon. Also, since I have the fish sauce, I do want to try making Parthian Chicken now. (However, I need to get lovage and asafoetida. Both are readily available from Amazon, and might even be at my local Whole Paycheck or Central Markup.)

Posted in Food | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2022.

February 24th, 2022

Followup NYT obits for Bob Beckel, Gary Brooker, and The Amazing Johnathan.

William Kuenzel has passed away from cancer at the age of 60. I’m noting his obit because this is a bizarre and troubling case, that got Robert M. Morgenthau (NYC’s liberal DA) and Edwin C. Meese III on the same side.

Mr. Kuenzel was arrested in November of 1987 and charged with killing a convenience store clerk. His roommate, Harvey Venn, initially told police Mr. Kuenzel was probably asleep at home, but later changed his story and claimed Mr. Kuenzel pulled the trigger. Mr. Venn got a reduced sentence for testifying against Mr. Kuenzel. Mr. Kuenzel refused to plead out.

Despite apparently exculpatory evidence, including incriminating blood on Mr. Venn’s pants — which he said was from a squirrel but which the prosecutor admitted was the victim’s — Mr. Kuenzel was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to be electrocuted.

It gets worse.

Mr. Kuenzel met with more than 20 years of resistance to his hope for a new trial because of a late filing of an appeal in 1993 — a procedural issue that he could never overcome in state and federal courts even after Alabama’s state assistant attorney general in 2010 turned over evidence that had been withheld at the original trial. It included handwritten notes from Mr. Venn’s police interview in which he said that Mr. Kuenzel had been in bed at the time of the shooting.
The cache of new evidence also included a transcript of the grand jury testimony of a witness who had been equivocal about seeing Mr. Kuenzel and Mr. Venn in the store as she drove by in a car, but who testified with more certainty at the trial. Her testimony provided critical corroboration of Mr. Venn’s assertion that Mr. Kuenzel had been an accomplice.

The Supreme Court refused to review his case in 2013, and again in 2016.

Had he not died, he would have eventually been scheduled for execution.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Geopolitics.

February 24th, 2022

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I am not an expert on geopolitics.

If you’re looking for Ukraine coverage, there are a lot of people covering it who are much smarter than I am.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 23, 2022.

February 23rd, 2022

Mark Lanegan, singer. (Queens of the Stone Age, Screaming Trees)

The Amazing Johnathan (John Edward Szeles).

Detroit native Szeles gained mainstream fame on Vegas headliner Criss Angel’s mid-2000s reality TV show “Mindfreak,” and often injected gonzo, faux-gore bits into his shows. Signature shock value moments included pretending to suck on his own dangling eyeball, slitting his wrists and spiking his own tongue.

…

The “alt-magician” gained further notoriety as the subject of a controversial 2019 Hulu documentary, “The Amazing Johnathan Documentary.” The film followed Szeles, then 60, as he mounted a comeback tour after defying his terminal illness diagnosis — and simultaneously dealing with an ongoing drug addiction.

Gary Brooker, of Procol Harum.

Arthur Feuerstein. He’s probably one of those people you’ve never heard of, but the obit fascinates me (for reasons that will become apparent shortly).

Mr. Feuerstein was a chess player. A really good chess player. How good?

Over his career, Mr. Feuerstein had a record of one win, one loss and three draws with Mr. Fischer.

More:

At the 1956 United States Junior Championship, he took third, behind Mr. Fischer. He then edged Mr. Fischer for the United States Junior Blitz Championship, in which each player had five minutes for the entire game.
The third Rosenwald tournament, played in October 1956 at the Manhattan Chess Club, is usually remembered because of Mr. Fischer’s remarkable win against Donald Byrne, Robert’s younger brother. But Mr. Fischer finished in a tie for eighth, while Mr. Feuerstein was third — just behind Arthur Bisguier, another New York prodigy, who had won the United States Championship two years earlier.
Then, in the 1957-58 championship, Mr. Feuerstein tied for sixth with Arnold Denker, a former champion, and Edmar Mednis, a future grandmaster. Mr. Fischer, who was then only 14, won the championship, beating Mr. Feuerstein in the process for the first and only time…

The NYT obit describes the 1950s as being “a golden age for the game in the United States, particularly in New York City”. It would probably have a limited audience, but I’d read a book about this time in the chess world.

Anyway, Mr. Feuerstein didn’t want to turn pro. He thought professional chess was “too unstable and too poorly paid”, so he went into the corporate world. But he continued to play as an amateur.

Then, one day in 1973, Mr. Feuerstein, his wife, and their dog were driving to their vacation home. They got hit by a semi.

The dog was killed. Mrs. Feuerstein broke her back and spent six weeks in a cast.

Mr. Feuerstein suffered a horrible head injury. The doctors on his case gave his wife an extremely negative prognosis.

Then one day Mr. Feuerstein woke up, pulled the breathing tube out and began trying to talk. A nurse called Alice, who rushed to the hospital. She found him playing chess with the neurosurgeon, who had also been called.
Years later, in a profile that appeared in 2012 in Chess Life, the magazine of the United States Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, Alice Feuerstein said her husband, after waking, did not even know what a toothbrush was. But, Mr. Feuerstein recalled, “I remembered everything about chess, even my openings.” He also recalled that he had won that game with the doctor.

This isn’t a miracle story. According to the obit, Mr. Feuerstein was never able to work full-time again.

But he did return to competition at something approaching his pre-accident ability, sometimes beating grandmasters, and he remained a master-level player into his late 70s.
He played his last tournament in October 2015, when he was nearly 80, and scored 50 percent, with one win, one loss and a draw.

Cancer got him at 86.

Posted in Chess, Music, Neuroscience, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 22, 2022.

February 22nd, 2022

A mega sized roundup today, mostly due to FotB RoadRich.

Frank Pesce. Among his credits (other than the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies and “Top Gun”) are guest spots on “Jake and the Fatman”, “Miami Vice”, “Airwolf”, “Blue Thunder” (the series), and “The Master”.

Lindsey Pearlman. She appeared on “Vicious”, “Chicago Justice”, and “General Hospital”, among other credits. She was 43.

Zoe Sozo Bethel, Miss Alabama 2021.

Along with being named Miss Alabama 2021, the mother of one was a conservative commentator who was involved with organizations such as Project Veritas, Liberty University and Turning Point USA, the Heavy reported.

Bob Beckel. He used to host “The Five” on the Fox News Channel.

Beckel was campaign manager during Democratic Party nominee Walter Mondale’s ill-fated run for the presidency in 1984.
He also served in the State Department during the Carter administration.

Peter Earnest. He used to work for the CIA…and went on to become the first executive director of the International Spy Museum. I’ve never been there, but my beloved and indulgent sister and her family have. One of these days, I have to make it back to DC.

Mr. [H. Keith] Melton, an early member of the museum’s board, was instrumental in hiring Mr. Earnest, and Mr. Earnest later helped persuade Mr. Melton to donate the bulk of his remaining collection, approximately 7,000 items, including the ice ax used to assassinate the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Just in case you were wondering. Also:

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2022.

February 18th, 2022

Jim Hagedorn, House member from Minnesota.

Gail Halvorsen, the original “Candy Bomber” from the Berlin Airlift. Instead of writing a fuller obit here, I’m going to point you to the much better one Borepatch wrote.

For the historical record: NYT obit for Ian McDonald.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

New Yorkers Discover Fire.

February 18th, 2022

Others buy wood at their local bodegas, they said, and use old pizza delivery boxes as fire starters. As for Ms. Weisenberger: “This year I discovered you can Seamless firewood to yourself.”

(Subject line hattip.)

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 16, 2022.

February 16th, 2022

A long time ago, I wrote about reading Car and Driver when I was in high school.

“Ferrari Reinvents Manifest Destiny” was one of those pieces of writing that hit me right between the eyes at exactly the right time.

Julian settled into the driver’s seat and gave the Millennium Falcon–like controls a momentary glance. Then he stamped on the accelerator with an expensive loafer and redlined the 308 up through the gears to a hundred miles an hour through the potato fields and abandoned burger stands without time to even take his hand off the shift lever until he hit fifth, and when he did have time to take his hand off he used that hand to plop a Blondie cassette into the Blaupunkt and a quarter-ton of decibels came on with “Die Young Stay Pretty,” and the scenery exploded in the distance, bush and tree debris flying at us while my eyeballs pressed all the way back into the medulla, and that quadruple-throated three-quart V-8 wound up beyond the vocal range of Maria Callas, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, leaving, I’m sure, a trail of shattered stemware in the more prosperous of the farmhouses we passed along our way.

…

And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, take over all that Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?

…

It made me wish I didn’t belong to the Republican Party and the NRA just so I could go out and join both to defend it all.

P.J. O’Rourke wrote an awful lot of other great stuff, but this is what I’ll remember him for.

NYT. John Podhoretz. National Review. (Edited to add: Reason.)

I’m going to miss him.

Kathryn Kates, actress. She was most famous as the bakery counterwoman on two episodes of “Seinfeld”, and also appeared several times on “Law and Order: SVU”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and other TV shows.

Posted in Books, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Down a dusty rabbit hole.

February 15th, 2022

I’ve been reading Admiral Cloudberg on Medium for the past couple of days. What got me started was his writeup of the Überlingen disaster: what really hooked me was the one before that, on Ameristar Charters flight 9363.

I think a lot, if not all, of these accidents have been covered on “Mayday”, but I have trouble getting “Mayday”. Complete episodes are spotty on YouTube: I think Prime Video has some episodes, but not all.

And I can read a Medium article a lot faster than I can watch an episode of “Mayday”. It helps too that Admiral Cloudberg’s a pretty good writer, so these summaries are also more interesting than reading the Wikipedia entry.

If you read a bunch of these back to back, you can see certain recurring themes. Sometimes, it’s poor crew resource management (or, in rare cases, really good CRM). Sometimes it’s fly-by-night operations cutting corners. Sometimes it’s known problems (like wind shear, or controlled flight into terrain) that take years and technological advances to mitigate. And sometimes it’s just plain bad luck.

I remember hearing about the Lokomotiv disaster, as it was pretty big news worldwide when it happened. I didn’t keep up with the investigation or the aftermath, so this was kind of a surprising thing to find in an article about a air crash:

After thousands of fans gathered at a stadium to say goodbye to the players before their remains were sent for burial, a surprising story was uncovered: the team’s former captain and star striker, Ivan Tkachenko, had secretly been giving large sums of money to sick children in Russian hospitals. Just moments before the fatal flight, he anonymously donated $16,000 to pay for a life-saving surgery for a 16-year-old girl that he had never met. Up until his last moments, he was trying to make the world a better place, without telling a soul.

Damn allergies, you know?

Posted in Planes | Comments Closed

Wonko the Sane had the right idea.

February 14th, 2022

Shot:

It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

—Wonko the Sane, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Chaser:

Posted in Stupid | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2022.

February 14th, 2022

Ivan Reitman. THR.

IMDB. Everybody plays up “Ghostbusters”, but he also did “Stripes”, produced “Animal House”…and let’s not forget “Cannibal Girls”. (Never seen it, but it sounds like it could be fun.)

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2022.

February 13th, 2022

Ian McDonald, co-founder of King Crimson and Foreigner.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Lars Eighner. I’m not sure how many people outside of Austin recognize that name. For those long time Austinites, this should be a blast from the past.

Mr. Eighner lost his job and spent three years homeless on the streets of Austin with his dog. He wrote periodically for the “Austin Chronicle”, and eventually published Travels With Lizbeth about that experience. He published two other books after that, but those were less successful.

I’m going to put this last obit behind a jump. I’m noting it because it’s a sad sundae with chopped sad and a sad cherry on top.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art, Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

I like bagels.

February 13th, 2022

Shot:

Chaser:

Posted in Geek, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 11, 2022 (supplemental).

February 11th, 2022

NYT obit for Douglas Trumbull.

NYT obit for Bob Wall. Includes the Bruce Lee vs. “O’Hara” fight from “Enter the Dragon”.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

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