What a celebration. What a joy. Today, my town of Austerlitz in Columbia County, NY, filled in the most egregious potholes on our dirt road.
It rains in March and April. No-stop. Hence we move into mud season.
In fact, the local lore is that April brings May flowers. And, Mayflowers brings Pilgrims, but that’s another story.
Meantime, our road is driveable. As I drove home from this morning’s tennis I thought of calling our town supervisor, Rob Lagonia, and offering him $5 for every pothole he filled on Reed Road.
Too late, he had his guys out early this morning. They dumped tons of delicious dirt on our road. Which not only saved me several hundred dollars in road bribes but probably saved me even more money tire aligning which I’d planned for tomorrow morning.
Meantime, my stockmarket (i.e. the stocks I own) continues to collapse, giving new meaning as to how to achieve a small fortune: namely start with a large fortune.
Actually, I’m down another 1.8% this morning. But I’ve been inured to pain.
This morning, these appeared:
They’re called pansies. Jill tells me they’re the first flowers of Spring. We have blue skies and 55 degrees.
I have only a handful of stocks that managed to eke out a rise in today. Guess which leads the pack of risers? Raytheon.
Raytheon makes the Stinger surface-to-air missile. Want to see what it can do to the Russians? Watch this short video and be impressed.
Our stocks have been hurt by the “special military operation” (i.e. war) in Ukraine, at great cost to Ukraine:
This is a building in the town of Borodyanka. I suspect it was hit by a missile launched by Russian plane.
But Washington and London have now seen pictures like this and those of the civilian massacre in Bucha. Here are cemetery workers loading the corpses of civilians killed in Bucha into a truck for transport to the morgue on Wednesday.
Now having digested this Russian mayhem, Washington and London are now motivated big-time to send the Ukrainians the lethal weaponry they need — like surface to air missiles.
Whatever they send won’t be enough to turn the War on a dime. But, to my tiny brain, it looks as though we’re getting close. Would you like to be Russian MIG or helicopter pilot, knowing that those nasty little people on the ground had Stinger and Starstreak missiles that you could do bupkis to avoid.
The Starstreak is from England. It’s like the Stinger, except that it travels at Mach 4 — that’s four times the speed of sound. That’s about 740 x 4 = 2,960 miles per hour. No Russian helicopter or fighter jet can escape one of these missile if it hones in on your unlucky ass. In the video you can see one jet spewing out hot stuff and that lets one missile miss him. But not the next one! Whammo!
This War won’t be over next week. But the west has finally gotten the message that Ukraine is to be saved. If they let it go, then Moldova, Finland and Sweden go. (They’re not in NATO.) And God knows what else this evil man has in store:
The first quarter just ended
Here are the results:
Notice that my tech stocks came in last. Yuch.
It could have been worse. The silver lining in all my recent stock losses has been the stocks I didn’t buy that later fell. The biggest “joy” was not owning Chinese stocks, which are still falling.
I like Quora.com
Here’s are two friends 75 years ago. They’re still friends.
Tasteless cartoons
That’s it.
I’m feeling virtuous. I survived aggressive tennis this morning. I replaced several light bulbs. I cut my toenails. And I made an appointment at CVS for my Moderna second booster. The fact that my stocks are down big-time this morning makes me happy. I figure that 64 days of today’s losses, I could afford this place in Breckenridge, Colorado.
Please don’t email me and tell me my math sucks. The house is actually for sale. Check out Zillow. Click here.
See you tomorrow when things won’t be different. — Harry Newton
