Got the email today. Very Funny!!!

This was an awfully thougtful son concerning his Father, wasn't he?

An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

Dear Vincent:
I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won't be able to plant! my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over? I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.
Love, Papa

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Pop:
Don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried.
Love,
Vinnie

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Pop:
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love you,
Vinnie


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Saw this on Bloomberg today.

Commentary by Matthew Lynn
June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Plenty of people will dismiss the recent stock-price recovery as a dead-cat bounce. Even more will call it a bear-market rally.
Yet as equity prices creep higher, the bears may soon have to concede defeat. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index has gained about 15 percent since early December and most other major benchmarks have made solid gains in the same period. At some point, it will become known as the 2009-2013 bull market.
Only one thing is missing: a story. A real bull market needs a simple narrative that convinces investors that equities are worth double what they were valued at only a few months ago.
So what could be the story this time around? There are four plausible candidates: rising savings, accelerating inflation, a takeover boom, and the scarcity of capital.
Markets need stories as much as any Hollywood scriptwriter does. Stock prices go up, down and sideways for reasons we will probably never quite figure out. Human brains find that hard to handle, so we like an easy explanation that puts things in order. Chaos and randomness are the scary alternatives.
During the bull market of the 1990s, we had the dot-com, New Economy story to explain the surge in stock values.
During the 2003-2007 bull market, we had globalization and the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
And for the next bull market? Here are four “stories”that could be used to justify it.

Save Money

The Savings Story: People are putting money aside again. The U.S. savings rate in April jumped to 5.7 percent, the highest rate for 14 years. Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners LP in Greenwich, Connecticut, estimates it will reach 9 percent, compared with a low of minus 2.7 percent at the peak of the housing boom. There's no mystery about that. Households, much like banks, are repairing their balance sheets, and they can only do that by saving more.
The same will probably be true of other heavily indebted economies such as Britain. All that saved money has to go somewhere. With interest rates close to zero, there’s no point keeping it in the bank. Instead, a wall of money is about to descend on the market, creating huge demand for equities.
The Inflation Story: Central banks around the world are following the policies of “quantitative easing,” or what used to be known as printing money. At a certain point, it is bound to cause high inflation rates, or at the very least an investor fear of surging prices. It may already have done so.

Real Assets

You don’t want to be holding cash while inflation makes it less valuable by the day, and central banks keep creating more of the stuff. Instead, investors will switch into real assets that can hold their value, such as stocks, real estate or commodities. Equities are the simplest to trade, and more demand equals higher prices.
The Takeover Story: The last rally was all about the emergence of the BRIC economies. This one will be about them buying North American and European assets. The rising BRIC giants are going to need technology and brand names, and they
will want to buy them. That is already happening -- Russian interests just acquired a big stake in General Motors Corp.'s European unit Adam Opel GmbH.
Expect a massive takeover boom as the BRIC giants clamor for the prizes. They will end up paying a premium for trophy assets, another good reason to push up the value of equities.

Access to Capital

The Shareholder Story: Over the last decade, chief executive officers loved to talk about shareholder value. Mostly it was just nonsense. CEOs didn’t need stockholders because capital was easily accessed from banks or the bond market. If that didn't work, they could get a friendly private-equity firm to buy them out, or pay a crazy price for a unit. Shareholders were about as influential as the cleaners or the secretaries, and ranked about as high in corporate priorities.
Now that is about to change. In the coming years, capital will be in short supply. The only place that companies will be able to get it will be from their shareholders. In return, they will have to be rewarded with higher dividends and stock prices.
Now all we need is for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to pick one of those stories, put it into every research note, and this bull market can get some real momentum.
Who knows, investment bankers may be out buying Bentleys again this year if this rally has legs.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)



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Saw this on Wine Spectator Today.

Moderate wine consumption extends life of female patients in Yale study

While scientists struggle to find common ground on alcohol consumption and its relationship to breast cancer, moderate wine drinkers may find comfort in a new study that links the beverage to lower death rates among female non-Hodgkin's lymphoma sufferers.

According to an unpublished epidemiology study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 100th Annual Meeting, held April 18–22 in Denver, those stricken with the ailment who drank wine regularly for 25 years before diagnosis enjoyed better survival rates five years after being diagnosed compared to nondrinkers. Wine drinkers were also more likely to be disease-free after five years.

Lead author Xuesong Han said that repeat studies are necessary before making any health recommendations. "This conclusion is controversial, because excessive drinking has a negative social and health impact, and it is difficult to define what is moderate and what is excessive," said Han in a statement. "However, we are continually seeing a link between wine and positive outcomes in many cancers."

This study, conducted at the School of Public Health at Yale University, was the first to examine the link between alcohol-consumption patterns among female patients and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. According to the National Cancer Institute, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma afflicts lymphocytes or white blood cells. The disease can occur at any stage of life and can progress at varying rates. The institute estimates that 66,120 new cases were diagnosed in the United States in 2008, with nearly 20,000 deaths in the same year.

Han and her team examined data on 546 women who had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and found that those who drank wine had a 76 percent five-year survival rate, compared with 68 percent for non-wine drinkers. The wine-drinking survivors were also more likely to be cancer-free after five years—70 percent of those studied who drank wine were disease-free after five years, while 65 percent of non-wine drinkers showed no signs of cancer. Han said this is equal to a 25 percent to 35 percent reduced risk of death.

The women were typically lifetime wine drinkers who responsibly consumed the beverage for at least 25 years prior to getting cancer. Women who showed a preference for beer or spirits did not see an added benefit.

Han told Wine Spectator that since the epidemiological study had an observational design, the researchers found a clear association between wine and lower death rates among the study population, but they don't yet know the exact reason behind the protective effect.

Considering the emerging evidence from cell and animal studies that certain polyphenols such as flavonoids and resveratrol from grapes act as antioxidants, this could play a protective role against tumor initiation and progression, Han said.

"The chemical composition is definitely a possible underlying explanation for the association we observed," she said. "We also could not exclude the possibility that wine drinkers may have a better lifestyle in other aspects, which may work together for their better health."

Han said more research is needed and added that personally, she would like to see if measuring white wine versus red wine shows a different result. She added that the importance of wine should not be overlooked. "I think if you are already in the habit of drinking wine moderately, then don't worry about changing, especially given the established protective effect of moderate drinking and heart disease, and the emerging results of protective effects for certain types of cancer and cognitive functions."

"However, if drinking alcohol could put you on any other risks, for example, if you have liver disease or breast cancer family history, then it's better not to drink any type of alcohol," she said.


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Saw this on Bloomberg today.

Commentary by Matthew Lynn
May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Smart investors know that if you can pick the start of a bull market, you can make a lot of money. The problem is that these points aren't easy to identify, so it may be best to choose investments that follow a general pattern based on national habits.

Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developmentoffered some indirect help by publishing its findings on social trends in the 30-nation grouping. So what are the big bets for the future that we should be making now? Here are eight to consider:

French coffee producers: The French sleep more than people in any other country, catching 9 hours of shut-eye a night on average (with the U.S. ranked second). In a competitive global economy, France will have to wake up as its working day gets longer and falls into line with the rest of the world. Its people will need some coffee to get them going.

Italian pay-per-view sports broadcasters: If you are going to be a guy, Italy remains the country of choice. Italian men, three decades after the arrival of mainstream feminism, grab 80 minutes more leisure time than Italian women. The reason: Men do less housework. If you include the few minutes it takes to stack
the refrigerator with beer, you get the duration of a soccer game. So there are no prizes for guessing why Italian guys never get out the vacuum. Broadcasting AC Milan matches looks like it will be a great business for a long time to come.

Finnish technology companies: Maybe you think it is just a quirk of fate that mobile-phone maker Nokia Oyj, Europe’s most successful technology company, happens to come from one of the region’s smallest countries: Finland. Think again. The Finns are just about the smartest people in the world. Finnish students get the highest scores for math and science, just ahead of Koreans. Smart people equal smart companies. There will be plenty more Nokias in the decades to come.

British burglar alarms: With the U.K. economy going down the tube, and with unemployment rising, there isn’t much prospect of a drop in crime, which is already a big concern. In the U.K., 10 percent of male teenagers aren’t in school, employment or training, a rate second only to Italy within the OECD. One in three girls aged 13 to 15 said they got drunk regularly, the highest in the world, while the boys were only just behind the Danes when it came to consuming alcohol. With figures like that, crime can only rise. Any company making alarms, locks or closed-circuit television cameras will have a strong tide of demand to tap into.

U.S. fast-food companies: President Barack Obama may be trying to revamp the image of Americans in the rest of the world, but there are some things that will never change. Typical Americans remain determined to get as many calories down their throats in the shortest amount of time. They spend 75 minutes a day eating -- only Canadians and Mexicans dedicate less -- while maintaining the highest obesity rates. There is only one way to keep up that kind of performance: more burgers, fries, pizza and cookie-dough ice-cream. Ignore the anti-obesity campaigns. The fast-food industry promises a healthy future -- for its shareholders, not its customers.

Portuguese drink companies: Most of us might think of Portugal as a fairly cheerful place with plenty of sunshine, beaches and some great soccer players. Not so. The Portuguese are getting more miserable every year. So are the Hungarians, the Canadians and the Americans. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been growing more satisfied with life, with the Turks leading the way. Everyone knows that miserable people drink more alcohol. Some beer producers should be a good bet.

Austrian cigarette suppliers: In the Anglo-Saxon world, we think smoking is on the way out, or at least restricted to developing nations. Wrong again. The Austrians report the highest rates of teenage smokers in the OECD: 24 percent of 15-year-old Austrian boys smoke and 30 percent of 15-year-old girls. Since smoking is addictive, and no one takes it up in their 30s, Austrian cigarette suppliers should do well for decades. And so will the pension funds: Not too many Austrians will be drawing payments into their 90s if they are all puffing away in the playground.

Turkish pre-schools: As countries become richer, more women work and the kids get bundled off into childcare. If that holds true, the Turks have a long way to go. Less than 20 percent of Turkish toddlers aged 3 to 5 are in childcare, compared with an average of 73 percent for the OECD as a whole. Korea and Poland also have very low rates. If Turkish, Polish and Korean mothers start going out to work the same way women do in the rest of the developed world, there will have to be a huge expansion in the childcare industry.
These social trends should help put your portfolio in decent shape, as markets fluctuate over the next 20 years.

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Category: Puzzles
Description:
This puzzle game is about harmony. Solve the entagled loops until perfect harmony is reached.
Instructions:
Click to start. When left clicking a tile it will rotate 90 degree. With the left and right cursor keys you can navigate between already solved levels.
Control Scheme:



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