I Am A Liar

I do apologize for not keeping my end of the promise and posting the surprise I would. I've been too depressed with the stock market rally and losing money to really care and I don't blog at home.

The Dark Knight is WOW.

Here's the surprise it's a short story I've written. Besides the dark theme it's relation to Batman lies in the fact that my stupid ass thought Christian Bale was in the clip that inspired the story.




The handsome man in the black suit walked out of the grandiose ranch with poise cautiously checking his exit steps, making sure to not leave a trail of blood or a clue to his existence. The scene eerily seemed like a reenactment of the ending of No Country for Old Men, where Anton Chigurh checked his boots just after he killed Llewellyn Moss’ wife. He strode confidently to his waiting car a topless black 1958 Chevy Corvette. With his keys in his hand you could hear the heels of his Allen-Edmonds dress shoes hitting the ground as he finally reached his car. The glossy black paint with water droplets shone under the moonlight as he pulled the door open exposing the plush red leather with black piping. The Corvette was meticulously rebuilt it looked as though it just rolled off the production line. He took off his suit jacket and laid it on the passenger seat as he had turned the ignition, the low key rumble had briefly interrupted the night’s slumber. As he put the car in gear and began to drive off into the night, Dionne Warrick’s cover of Anyone Who Has a Heart began to take over the man’s eardrums. In a twisted sadistic way, jazz and classic rhythm and blues calmed him after a hit it made him feel slightly tranquil. The night roads were open and slick with rain allowing him the luxury to test all 270 horses and the three speed manual. The open air, breezy 79 degree summer night caused his long black mane to flow in the wind and his black tie to flutter. No he wasn’t going to another hit, he was returning to the one woman who showered him with unbelievable affection. It’s hard to understand why he wears what he does, or even does what he does but in some twist of fate he’s actually good at it. It’s hard to imagine a hit man that cares as much about his appearance as he does, very few professionals could even afford a Ralph Lauren Black Label suit, yet a black one is his main staple. Add on a white dress shirt with French cuffs and a skinny black tie you’d have the perfect example of an extra from a 1990’s Quentin Tarrantino movie. Ironically the man goes by Black; it’s hard to say why although you certainly wouldn’t want to question him. Another thing about him is he’s the quiet type; he observes and listens but for those who have had the misfortune to hear him speak would agree that he speaks eloquently although with a broken English accent. The needle on the speedometer began to creep up past fifty MPH, the transmission was full of life on the third gear and the wheels turned into a dream of black rubber and chrome surrounded by a cloud of white. The empty road provided a place of solitude for him; he contemplated and gathered his thoughts as his exit was approaching. As he pulled into the driveway of his beachfront house, he noticed all the lights were out, causing him to take more caution as he entered the property. He stealthily entered the bedroom where his girlfriend was in a deep slumber. He leaned over to kiss her forehead and delicately sat down on the edge of the bed. She started to rise from the bed and began to kiss him passionately as though they were lovers separated by a war. But they were at war, a war she knew nothing about and a war he wished didn’t exist. Black noticed a calling card for him tucked on the edge of a mirror, an Ace of Spades. He kissed her back but knew he had to depart, the last few shreds of humanity in him felt guilty to tear apart the beautiful woman who let him into her heart. The Ace of Spades was the calling card of a new job, a new obituary, a new cemetery plot, casket order, gravesite and a devastated broken family. He gave her that look that said he had to go, she kept clutching him, not wanting him to go, hoping for him to stay. He couldn’t look her way as he pulled away and left. It’s not easy being Black.

When I Die Fuck It I Wanna Go To Hell

Yesterday was such a bad day for me that I wanted to buy one of those^. I lost about 9% in my positions. The Dark Knight is tomorrow.

Merrill Lynch missed by a HUUUUUUGE margin, good for me I shorted them before earnings. Google and Microsoft did too, classic suckers rally things are still pretty bad.

Oil is no longer a viable option. I'll be posting my equities strategy soon. Think Steel.

Callum Doesn't Want to be a Nigger Part Deux

I figured it wouldn't be prudent to discuss a dead man after he died so I wanted a week after his burial to write about him.

This fine piece of American Legislator is Jesse Helms, Republican from North Carolina (please don't take your shirt off or spin it around your head like a helicopter) the most notoriously racist Senator in modern history.

First off, let me say RIP. I fear God and karma and refuse to let anything bad to happen because he was an asshole.

I don't feel like delving into his career the wikipedia article is a good idea of the douchebag he was.

I must admit he deserves props and respect to sticking to his true feelings and not changing over the years, its tough to find that kind of quality in people these days. Strom Thurmond accepted change and a black baby.

But I certainly hope he did not instill those values in his children or that they had enough sense to reject such teachings.

RIP, but the world is better off without bigots like him.

Callum Doesn't Want to be a Nigger

This is a compilation of several things I have heard and seen and caused me to think.

First off I know what you're thinking Callum is black?!?! Yes my friends I am, I was named after Sir Callum McCarthy an investment banker. Not quite sure why but it makes me sound distinguished. Anyways the video posted below is Nas' Be a Nigger Too.



The problem I have with this and Nas is that he's the rap game's Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, he hasn't been socially or culturally relevant in years. And the gimmics are lame.

My point is being a Nigger isn't cool or something to celebrate, I had family staying in SW DC and their hotel was near the club H20 and Zanzibar. I was amazed that people would stand in the line for hours only to be subjectively granted or denied entry to the establishment. But that's not the thing I was stopped behind a car only for him to be blasting old Jay-Z with no bass thinking he was cool and driving around haphazardly. He had an obnoxoius vanity plate but something I didn't care to remember. I grew up around rich white kids who called me nigger on whims nad constantly have to deal with stereotypes but it's fine.

I just don't want to be a nigger too, NaS.

Why So Serious? Three Days...

Excellent WaPo article on the Joker this past Sunday I had to share it with all.

The Joker's Onto Us What Does It All Mean When Batman's Enemy Is More Interesting Than the Dark Knight Himself?
By Hank Stuever Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 13, 2008; M01
"I 've been thinking lately. About you and me. About what's going to happen to us, in the end. We're going to kill each other, aren't we?"
That's the Batman talking, a couple of decades ago, to his archnemesis, the Joker, in the opening pages of a graphic novel that changed both of them and made their relationship more wonderfully sick.
Usually the Joker is the one who articulates the nutty codependence here. Almost every time they meet, Joker has the gall to remind Batman that they are each nothing without the other, and he usually brings this up as Batman is kicking the holy-moley-frijoles out of him, in an almost erotic moment of sadomasochism. Joker loves it, laughing his head off with each punch. (And Batman loves it, yes?) The world doesn't quite understand, even though these two have been going at it for 68 years.
"To them, you're a freak," Heath Ledger's Joker tells Christian Bale's Batman in "The Dark Knight," the new sequel opening Thursday. "Like me."
As if Batman didn't have enough problems, around which entire dissertations have been written, around which our cultural admiration for him is built: Batman has unresolved orphan grief; Batman has difficulties with authority, drifting literally above the law; Batman is rife with hints of inappropriateness (how many teenage boys have been his Robin by now?); Batman stands for fascism; Batman has bad manners (who told him it was okay to crash through the skylight? Why does he disappear when you're asking him a question?); Batman has terrible girlfriends (Catwoman, for one), whom he treats badly anyhow; Batman has issues, which are most evident in his vigilante scare tactics. It's all right there!
But the problem of Joker, the cruel terrorist with the permanent rictus and appalling clown face, has nagged Batman in one way or another since 1940. Writers and artists (and filmmakers, and actors) adore the Joker because the narrative dynamic is so arresting, as a pure visual: The guy in the black pleather get-up who lurks around parapets at night is the good one? And the clown is the bad one?
Sometimes, especially in the 1950s and '60s, their tangles were built for laughs. (Oh, that Joker -- spray-painting priceless works at the Gotham Museum of Art!) "Hoo-hoo-hoo, Batman! Hee-hee-hee!" -- and that was about as interesting as going to a cheap circus.
Later, in the '80s, the Joker story lines and depictions got scary enough that you didn't want to sleep in the same room with your comic books, even if you were 23. All of Joker's antics -- where does he get purple-and-green-striped helicopters? -- never trumped his infamous calling card, a joker from the deck, left on corpses. Corpses with frozen stares and frozen smiles.
Batman's villains all work from a starting point of derangement or misplaced rage, but they're also Type A enough to have plans and goals, for robberies, heists, control. From the first, the makers of the early Batman comic books felt Joker should be a mass killer, and that there shouldn't be any reason why he kills, other than it introduces anarchy into Batman's world. This was awful to think about back in '40s drugstore America, when there wasn't a serial killer with a new fetish greeting you in every airport bookstore and on the screen -- a killer clown, imagine!
"Batman" creator Bob Kane and others (parts of the Joker story-line inspiration and concept are alternately, and disputedly, credited to a ghostwriter, Bill Finger, and an illustrator, Jerry Robinson) took their cues from the 1928 silent movie adaptation of Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs," starring Conrad Veidt as the tormented soul with a garishly immobile smile that had been carved onto his face as a child. The plan was to kill Joker off in an issue or two, maybe because he was too scary. But, as comic book legend has it, the last panel of Joker's debut story was redrawn on deadline. That way, Joker could escape death and return sometime later. Hahahaha, Hoo-hooo-hoo, To Be Continued? . . .
* * *
Joker came back again, and keeps coming: as an elaborately prankish bank robber in the 1950s, when the comics had been chastened by censors; as Cesar Romero's buffoonish baddie on the "Batman" TV series in the '60s; as a deranged post-Carnaby Street dandy with Charlie Manson undertones in the '70s.
Once the best comic books grew up and became graphic novels, the cruelty and psychosis of Joker became fuller and more terrifying. This is the Joker who possesses such superhuman intelligence that it has made him insane. Instead of becoming more of a cartoon, he became quiet and deliberate and that's where he got creepy. There was a lot more blood.
Most famously, Joker became Jack Nicholson (or vice versa) in director Tim Burton's smoky 1989 update of the entire franchise. Nicholson, with a prosthetic grin, embraced the part as profane camp: "This town needs an enema!" Nicholson/Joker plunged off a tower at the end -- splat -- left staring up at the night while a laugh box in his coat pocket cackled on.
This became a variation on Joker's eternal escapes, and he's been killed a time or two, but then, so has Batman. (This threshold was crossed years ago. Don't ever stop and read seriously a newspaper story about the dramatic "death" of some comic book icon, good or evil, as hyped by the publisher's marketing department.)
* * *
The world has become much more accustomed to anarchy as a form of trendiness, and in a way the Joker is a symbol of that. Also, it helps his case enormously that people have a special, deep loathing for clowns. (We are a generation of coulrophobes -- thank you, John Wayne Gacy.)
Joker is a good fit in a culture fully accustomed to the discriminating yet random psycho. Fashionistas also like nightmare clowns, those punky androgynes in three-piece suits with mascara intentionally streaked. (Forget Charlie Manson and think Marilyn Manson, in an ill-fitting Thom Browne suit.)
Joker loves being on -- nay, interrupting -- live TV, a lot like our real-life bad men of the 21st century. (Osama bin Laden could have enhanced his scare factor considerably if he'd only employed just one bit of English in his grainy videos from the caves: Greetings, people of Gotham. . . .)
Batman pays a visit to Joker's cell at Arkham Asylum, that Gothic criminal mental ward on the outskirts of town (Gotham's own St. Elizabeths), in the opening pages of the classic 1988 graphic novel "Batman: The Killing Joke." (It's just been reissued in a deluxe edition, to capitalize on the culture's full-on Joker moment, which reaches a frenzy now with the late Heath Ledger's turn in the part.)
"Perhaps you'll kill me. Perhaps I'll kill you. Perhaps sooner -- perhaps later," Batman tells his foe, starting to sound like he'd banged bongos in a men's support group. "I don't fully understand why ours should be such a fatal relationship . . ."
But the Joker isn't listening.
He's just playing solitaire with his cards. The Joker isn't listening because it's not really the Joker, it's a jail-cell impostor. Batman grabs him and runs a Batgloved finger over the face, and the white makeup comes off, and now he knows: Joker is on the outside, in the world, escaped again. In every Joker story this is always the best moment. He is not where you think he is, and the joke's on you, and you are always two steps behind.
* * *
Batman is a bore, isn't he, beneath all that sculpted latex? He's at his best as a concept, a shadow, drawn alone on his vantage points, in lots of dark ink, talking to himself in thought balloons. Put him on a movie screen, and then he has to speak aloud more than he gets to brood, and then . . . something . . . isn't . . . quite right.
But thank the Devil for Joker.
The villain is always more interesting, right? People write about the hero, but come Halloween or Comic-Con, they dress up as the bad guy.
Audiences with high expectations for "The Dark Knight" shouldn't be blamed -- once they see Ledger's mesmerizing take on Joker -- for wondering why the whole movie couldn't just be about him instead. Why do we have to go through Batman at all?
"You complete me," Ledger's kinetic, unhinged Joker explains to Bale's stony, gruff Batman (managing to mock Dr. Evil mocking the drippy dialogue of "Jerry Maguire").
This time Joker's a greaseball, at once evoking Norwegian metal rockers, Jame Gumb (the killer from "The Silence of the Lambs") and deranged drag queens. He's someone everybody wants to beat up, not just Batman, and everyone has a go at him. Previous Jokers came with a variation on the same origin story, where a younger Joker is kicked into a vat of chemicals by a younger Batman, turning his skin white, his hair green and his mouth into that grin. This Joker is simply smart, bizarre and damaged. His grin is a nasty cheek-to-cheek scar, which he likes to tell people was carved on his face by an abusive father. The clown makeup is something he wears.
Not since Baby Jane has lipstick been so scary. See how much simpler it is without the vat of chemicals, without the complications -- more awful when it's redacted? Who needs explicit origin yarns, when you can just as easily freak people out with too much Maybelline?
Batman moves around stiffly here, trying out his new computer-vision sonar software. Joker moves like a disturbed dream. "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger," he says, and: "Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the little emotions." They took away about 60 percent of the cackling and maybe half the one-liners Jack Nicholson would've liked, and just let Joker ooze into each scene. This is no longer a comic book; this is the Joker we deserve, having ratcheted up our appetite (and tolerance) for death masks, violence and anomie.
Joker sits in a Gotham City holding cell and asks the cop guarding him, "How many of your friends did I kill?"
"Six," the officer says.
"Six," the Joker mouths silently, gleefully astonished at his own achievement.
Wait for the part where Joker terrorizes a hospital. He's dressed as a candy striper. It took him a long time to get here, but he's made us forget entirely about Batman.
Finally, in this reevaluation of Joker, there is the obvious matter that the actor playing him died in January, not long after completing the film.
That's a whole other story, about which much has been written, and there is no denying that Ledger's pill overdose increases the macabre fascination we get this time from watching Joker. Ledger's meaningless death is what passes for deeper meaning in the pop world of outsize comic books and the celebrity costume party of superhero movies. If the Joker were real, he couldn't have planned a more cruel joke.
In all the fretting this spring about whether this would affect the marketing of "The Dark Knight," people found it very difficult to say the awful, Joker-like truth: We like it better because of it.
Batman, the vigilante: so yesterday.
Joker, unhinged, bringing death: so today.
Who needs whom the most, now?

I was right on oil, right on gold.

Covered my Goldman short for a nice gain and am kicking myself for not shorting RIMM like I should have, 8% gain lost.

Have a nice weekend.

Reason for my Hiatus

Well I had conferences first and then I was assigned to a project in another office. Essentially demoted. I worked on the 10th (top) now I'm on the 9th in a bigger office, nobody I know and a downgrade in every imaginable aspect except good looking women. First downgrade? I'm in a fucking cubicle I used to have my own office, but even the director deputy director doesn't have an office.

Thats not the reason though, I just happen to work with some of the craziest women ever. So I was sent down here to be productive except things have been so poorly done I've been idle much of my time here. My computer was supposed to be transferred first...It took a week and me hanging in my old office to finally get it moved down so it's been shitty.

The only bright spot is that there are much better looking women here, but I guess that because you'd expect stuffy old white men to work for the Secretary.

Due to me being in a cubicle I can't blog in peace any more and an constantly looking over my shoulder fearing my lack of privacy.

This sucks...I'm looking for a new job.

PS, I had intended to share a short story with you all that I wrote but I think I'll wait until next week to correlate with the Dark Knight releasing.

Money Never Sleeps, Pal...Redeux

I was in such a rush to leave the office I forgot a few key points. Oh and I was right about oil and gold.

Well if you don't want leverage I'm not sure about a non-levered oil short ETF but you can always short USO (if its available). Buying USO though makes you a [Daniel Plainview]Speculator[/Daniel Plainview] and the enemy of the general public.

I had intended to tell you to short all the indexes on any and all strength. To do so you should buy DXD, SDS and QID. For non levered soultions you could buy DOG, and short QQQQ. DXD and DOG are for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, QID and QQQQ are for the Nasdaq and SDS is for the Standard and Poor's 500. Admittedly I'm not too fond of SDS because it (S&P 500) has strength in energy stocks typically making it less likely to see large selloffs, although I do like it for it's tech strength. I'm bearish on tech.

Good Luck and Good Trading

EDIT: I would also short these into any strength, retailers, banks especially Lehman Brothers (LEH), Research in Motion (RIMM), Valero (VLO) when oil is low, United Airlines (UAUA) and other airlines except Southwestern (LUV) following the same principle as Valero. Valero is a small sized oil refiner who buys oil then turns it into the various objects it's used for key word "Margins"

Money Never Sleeps Pal...

If you managed to catch my blog when the title was "Greed is Good" then you might realize I was running with a Wall Street (the movie) motif.

Since it's so easy to claim I'm right AFTER the fact, I'm going on a limb and posting my predictions for the next few days.

Well the stock market is a scary place right now, although I am making money it's not for everyone. I would in my humble opinion buy gold and oil and any and all dips. Especially gold although it is a bit expensive for me. Naturally I wouldn't expect you to be buying troy ounces of gold or barrels of oil but here's what you can do.

GLD-thats an ETF (exchange traded fund) it allows you the ability to own a fund with the flexibility of a stock. it should move in tandem with the gold futures market. If you want to bet against the weak dollar you can buy currency baskets such as FXY (yen) FXE (euro) and FXB (british pound). I own FXY and it seems to be the most volatile of the three, before you buy any be sure to read about any economic uncertainty in those regions. The pound seems to be the least stable of them, the Euro gives more gains and the Yen is more volatile.

If you want to trade oil you can also trade oil stocks as well. USO is my pick its another ETF but I would advise strong caution and a hedge against losses. If you don't believe in oil's rise you can also buy DUG. DUG is an ultrashort meaning for every percent gained or lost in oil it will do twice that. Be careful though I once lost 40% on an ultrashort. I would buy DUG after any new daily highs.

I do advise caution on any and all transactions and best of luck don't act just because I say so.

I Suck at Blogging...

I've been busy the past few days. First I had to attend a confrence for work. Surprisingly there were attractive women there, but I had to maintain my professionalism so couldn't get any numbers.

But I did get to see President Bush. My line of work? I deal with politics and politicos, let's just say I'm known at the White House.

The highlight of that was on Friday (the final day of the confrence) I went to this nice restaurant called Thaiphoon. Naturally the greedy bastards added a 20% gratuity to the bill but it was good food but very noisy.

On my way there I managed to realize that DC's infamous gayborhood, DuPont circle is a nice place to scout out white girls. But Foggy Bottom and Georgetown still seem to be the best.