There seems to an endless supply of tasteless wedding cake toppers:
Our parents would’ve loooooved this one.
This is a standard porn position. So I’m told.
Not even if the couple are both marine biologists.
The marital bed as cake topper! Bow chicka wah waaahhhh…
Ooh! It’s Sarah and Todd Palin!
McDonald’s often caters to the culture of the country it’s in, which is why I’ll occasionally check out Mickey D’s when I’m travelling in Asia or Europe. There’s India’s Chicken Maharaja Mac, Israel’s McShawarma and McSpaghetti in the Philippines, which serves spaghetti the way God intended: with cut-up hot dogs in the sauce.
Oftentimes, it turns out to be junk, but it’s interesting junk, such as this Thai Green Curry Burger:
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
It’s quite telling that almost every article on the recent restrictions on short selling (or “shorting”) stocks includes a couple of paragraphs explaining what short selling is. The shortest explanation — “It’s making money by betting that a stock will go down” — is counterintuitive. The English idiom “to sell something/someone short” adds to the confusion, because it means “to underestimate the value of something/someone”, which is essentially the opposite of short selling.
In this article, I’m going to explain the basics of short selling and give you enough background material for you to read articles about the current state of the financial world without getting complete confused. And yes, I’ll make it fun.
About five years ago, I attended a gala and at one point had the accordion-assisted privilege of enjoying some cocktails with some very pretty ladies, an event I chronicled in this entry.
An excerpt:
At one point in the evening, I was having some Campari-and-sodas with a group of charming young women, all of whom were wearing The Little Black Dress. The one who was sitting beside me cupped her hand, turned to me and whispered “See that guy? My friend Lisa* longs him.”
(* Not her real name.)
I interpreted “longs” as “longs for”. However, later on in the conversation, some guy took a seat beside Lisa and started hitting on her with the grace of a rhino on NyQuil.
“Ugh,” said She Who Sat Beside Me. “She really shorts him. I think we’re all shorting him.”
That’s when it clicked. The girls all worked in the financial industry together; in fact, it seemed that most of the attendees at the gala were in finance or had at least written their CFA exam.
They’d adopted the terms longing and shorting for dating. If they liked someone, they “longed” him; if they didn’t, they “shorted” him.
The blog entry caught the attention of Globe and Mail editor Carol Toller and ended up being a short piece in the Our Town section in January 2004. This appearance gave it considerably more exposure, and for the next little while, I was approached by a number of friends and readers who suggested that I write an article explaining longing and shorting. I thought it was a good idea, and it sat in my “things to blog about” list for the next five years.
With the recent events on Wall Street, most notably the current ban on short selling shares of specific financial institutions, I thought that now might be a good time to take that article off the “to do” list and make it real.
This is the form of investing that makes intuitive sense. In longing, a.k.a. “buying long” or “going long”, you buy shares in a stock that you think will go up in value. At some later time, you sell them for more than you paid for them, and thus you make a profit.
Once more, with feeling:
The concept is so simple that I’m pretty sure that you already knew what longing was, even if you were unaware of the term.
It’s usually after this explanation of longing that people ask “Then how can you possibly make money on a stock that loses value? You’d have to be on the Bizarro World!”
To which I’d answer: “Exactly.”
Superman comics in the 1950s and 1960s were full of some painfully, stool-softeningly dumb ideas. One of them was the Bizarro World, the home of imperfect duplicates of Superman and Lois Lane, where everything is backwards.
On the Bizarro World, you enter through the exit and exit through the entrance:
You demonstrate affection by throwing tantrums on Bizarro World:
You win Bizarro World races by coming in last place:
On one Superman comic, Bizarro bonds are shown to be selling like hotcakes because they’re guaranteed to go down in value.
Since everything is (somewhat inconsistently) backwards in the Bizarro World, you, as a Bizarro investor might try to “go long” in reverse order:
Believe it or not, that’s how shorting works.
Since the Bizarro World doesn’t exist, we’ll have to accept a couple of real world constraints.
The first is finding a way to sell shares you don’t own. In “regular” shorting (a.k.a. “covered” shorting), you borrow the shares from a broker who would typically have a lot of them and is willing to lend them out for a fee. (There is a way to sell shares you don’t own without first borrowing some. It’s called naked shorting and it’s the “extreme sports” of short selling.)
The second is to make sure that enough people in the market think that in the long term, the share value of the stock will go up. The broker keeps a pool of those stocks because s/he thinks that in the long term, they will appreciate. S/he’s happy to lend them out to short sellers who are planning to make money on the occasional dip in value, but believes that its price’s trend over time is upward.
And now, the basics of shorting, with special guest stars The Monopoly Guy and Mr. David Hasselhoff:
Now that you’ve got the basics of shorting, you can read about the details that I didn’t cover. Some good places to start are:
I did has cheezburger: Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, circa 2005.
Photo from the Daily Mail — click it to see the original.
Be thankful that you’re not stalked by paparazzi. They have a knack for bringing out the ugly in you, as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (pictured above) clearly shows.
You might know Mr. Panayiotou by his stage name, “George Michael”, and from his recent arrest in a public bathroom in Northwest London for possession of drugs classified as “Class A” (read “crack”) and “Class C” (read “marijuana”). This isn’t his first “crack in a public bathroom” arrest, although that last one dealt with crack of a different sort.
First, a warning to owners of real estate: if you have tenants, this series of photos is going to give you nightmares.
Here’s the text from a posting on a forum at Houston-Imports.com:
This has nothing to do with the Hurricane. We had a resident who had an outstanding balance for over a month and no one could get ahold of her. The Bookkeeper went inside after so many tries to leave a note and this is what we found:
I’ve posted some of the photos below. For the whole set, go see the original posting.
Here’s the entrance. This does not bode well…
In the living room, we see that the if you remove the middle cushion from a couch, you’ve got a handy built-in trash can. And who needs an ashtray when you’ve got an armrest?
If you thought that the living room was loaded with trash, it’s nothing compared to the bedroom.
Here’s the computer. It looks as though the tenant uses the mouse way more than they keyboard.
I’ve saved the worst for last: the bathroom. The toilet looks out of commission, which probably means that the bucket was its replacement.
According to the post, there are supposed to be two cats in the apartment, but they haven’t been able to find them. Needless to say, the stench is powerful.
How do people end-up living like this? Mental illness? Crystal meth? Extreme laziness?
I think that this cat is about as close as we’ll get to a real-life Bill the Cat (without animal abuse, anyway):
This one’s from The Week:
Here’s one from the webcomic Sinfest that takes a cue from the film Titanic to remind us that the rich will go on:
Here’s one featuring a name that you should familiarize yourself with: Phil Gramm.
He was an official economic advisor to the McCain campaign — at least until he called America “a nation of whiners” in an attempt to downplay the idea that the country was in a recession. He’s also one of the guys behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which led to the deregulation of the banking industry that led to the current crisis.
He’s still with the campaign on an unofficial basis and often travels with McCain. McCain also drops his name whenever questions of economics come up.
And finally, a poke at Reagan’s joke “The nine most terrifying in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”
