![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/NLYAGain.jpg\" "\\"NLYAGain\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nAmerican Capital Agency (AGCN) is yielding 19.97%.<\/p>\n
This morning, Deutsche Bank wrote<\/p>\n Annaly (NLY.N),USD17.85 Buy Price Target USD22.00 NLY may fall today. Good time to pick up some shares. You can write call options on both NLY and AGNC<\/p>\n CNBC talks YRCW today on Squawk, beginning at 9 AM. <\/strong>Meantime, YRCW is volatile. Or as they say in Australia, its stock moves up and down faster than a whore’s drawers.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n How housing prices have moved. This chart from the New York Times<\/em> is really interesting:<\/p>\n If you want to see it actual size, click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Search your computer.<\/strong><\/span> Many of us run our lives on our laptops. Finding things is often irksome. Here’s Harry’s Searching Tips:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Make sure you name all your files descriptively.<\/p>\n 2. Organize your files into logical folders. For example. “My photos\/Family\/Thanksgiving2009.<\/p>\n 3. You can rely on Microsoft, maybe. It has now baby search engines in Outlook 2007 and Outllook 2010 and in Windows 7.\u00a0 If you’re using Outlook 2003 (as I am) I prefer the old Lookout<\/em><\/strong>. If you want a copy, send me an email. Microsoft bought the company and messed it up. It will only work on Outlook 2003.<\/p>\n 4. I use Everything<\/em><\/a><\/strong> to find files, but not what’s in them. Everything, like Lookout, is flawless.<\/p>\n 5. I don’t use software to be able to search inside <\/strong>files. If I were, I’d use X1 Professional Client <\/strong><\/a>or dtSearch.<\/strong><\/a> The reason I don’t is that these comprehensive search engines work all the time. <\/strong>They make huge indexes<\/strong> — as big as 20% of your entire hard drive. They just slow things down. They’re overkill for most of us.<\/p>\n If you want to read more (and you really don’t), Network World<\/em> magazine has a big piece “Data mining for your desktop.<\/strong><\/a>“<\/p>\n Inception<\/em>, the movie, got a huge applause.<\/strong><\/span> I slept and puzzled. It’s a loud, long movie — 2 1\/2 hours. Rotten Tomatoes<\/em><\/a><\/strong> sums it up:<\/p>\n In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a single idea within one’s mind can be the most dangerous weapon or… In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a single idea within one’s mind can be the most dangerous weapon or the most valuable asset.<\/p>\n The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/strong> wrote in typically flowery, obtuse language. (Read if you plan on seeing Inception.)<\/em><\/p>\n The relationship between movies and dreams has always been \u2014 to borrow a term from psychoanalysis \u2014 overdetermined. From its first flickerings around the time Freud was working on \u201cThe Interpretation of Dreams,\u201d cinema seemed to replicate the uncanny, image-making power of the mind, much as still photography had in the decades before. And over the course of the 20th century, cinema provided a vast, perpetually replenishing reservoir of raw material for the fantasies of millions of people. Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he were writing now, he would have to acknowledge that they are also, for many of us, made out of movies.<\/p>\n And movies, more often than not these days, are made out of other movies. \u201cInception,\u201d Christopher Nolan\u2019s visually arresting, noir-tinged caper, is as packed with allusions and citations as a film studies term paper. Admirers of Ridley Scott\u2019s \u201cBlade Runner\u201d and Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001\u201d will find themselves in good company, though \u201cInception\u201d does not come close to matching the impact of those durable cult objects. It trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage.<\/p>\n So \u201cInception\u201d is not necessarily the kind of experience you would take to your next shrink appointment. It is more like a diverting reverie than a primal nightmare, something to be mused over rather than analyzed, something you may forget as soon as it\u2019s over. Which is to say that the time \u2014 nearly two and a half hours \u2014 passes quickly and for the most part pleasantly, and that you see some things that are pretty amazing, and amazingly pretty: cities that fold in on themselves like pulsing, three-dimensional maps; chases and fights that defy the laws that usually govern space, time and motion; Marion Cotillard\u2019s face.<\/p>\n Ms. Cotillard, her most famous movie role evoked by occasional eruptions of \u00c9dith Piaf on the \u201cLa Vie en Rose\u201d soundtrack, is the film\u2019s principal enigma and its chief signifier of emotion. She is not, however, exactly a character in \u201cInception.\u201d Rather, at least as far as a first-time viewer can guess, she is a projection in the subconscious of her husband, a specialist in corporate mental espionage known as Cobb and played by Leonardo DiCaprio with some of the same twitchy melancholy he brought to \u201cShutter Island.\u201d<\/p>\n To say too much about their marriage would be to risk compromising some of the pleasures of discovery tucked into a carefully crosshatched, multilayered story. Better to explain what Cobb does for a living, since that exhaustive enumeration of the metaphysical rules of his profession occupies an awful lot of the dialogue in Mr. Nolan\u2019s script. Using a combination of drugs, wires and other vaguely Matrix-y methods, Cobb and his co-workers penetrate the minds of their slumbering targets, usually for the purpose of extracting hidden information. But a wealthy client named Saito (Ken Watanabe) induces them to try the much more difficult trick known as inception, which involves planting an idea someone else\u2019s mind that will bear fruit in the real world. \u201cThat\u2019s impossible!\u201d more than one person has occasion to exclaim.<\/p>\n In any case, Cobb and his team are trying to induce a young man (Cillian Murphy), whose father (Pete Postlethwaite) is a business rival of Saito\u2019s, to break up the company he is about to inherit. This bit of commercial intrigue provides the fairly banal material foundation on which Mr. Nolan\u2019s phantasmagorical world is built. The pursuit of competitive advantage by well-dressed, emotionless men is hardly the stuff that dreams are made of, Humphrey Bogart\u2019s observations at the end of \u201cThe Maltese Falcon\u201d notwithstanding.<\/p>\n And the content of those dreams, once Cobb and company have dropped into their mark\u2019s sleeping mind, is often curiously pedestrian. Most of the time, one group of guys with guns chases another, in cars across the rain-soaked streets of Los Angeles, on foot through the corridors of a retro-elegant hotel, and on skis and snowmobiles through an icy Alpine landscape from which James Bond might recently have departed.<\/p>\n A lot of this is \u2014 what is the critical term of art I\u2019m looking for? \u2014 pretty cool. And the heist-movie cast of mind-cracking technicians is also cool. Dileep Rao is the shaggy, anxious nerdy one. Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are a pair of wisecracking specialists in something-or-another, and Ellen Page is the architect. This means that she designs the physical environments in which the dreams take place, and also that, like a precocious sophomore in a graduate seminar, asks the right questions and spells out the obvious connections.<\/p>\n She also notices that Cobb\u2019s personal issues are clouding his ability to work, and putting the rest of them at a vaguely defined but serious risk \u2014 a graver danger than just waking up. (The conceit that they\u2019re all dreaming takes some of the edge off the movie\u2019s violence, since it\u2019s hard to grieve for extras who are just \u201cprojections\u201d in some else\u2019s mental theater. On the other hand, that is pretty much what all movie characters are. This is what I meant by overdetermined.)<\/p>\n Cobb, whose life depends on suppressing emotions and memories that he cannot control, is thus a typical Christopher Nolan hero. His air of guilt and sorrow \u2014 the sense of unfinished psychic business pushing against his conscious intentions \u2014 marks his kinship with Christian Bale\u2019s Batman, with the detective played by Al Pacino in \u201cInsomnia\u201d and with the anguished amnesiac played by Guy Pearce in \u201cMemento.\u201d Mr. DiCaprio exercises impressive control in portraying a man on the verge of losing his grip, but Mr. Nolan has not, in the end, given Cobb a rich enough inner life to sustain the performance.<\/p>\n The accomplishments of \u201cInception\u201d are mainly technical, which is faint praise only if you insist on expecting something more from commercial entertainment. That audiences do \u2014 and should \u2014 expect more is partly, I suspect, what has inspired some of the feverish early notices hailing \u201cInception\u201d as a masterpiece, just as the desire for a certifiably great superhero movie led to the wild overrating of \u201cThe Dark Knight.\u201d In both cases Mr. Nolan\u2019s virtuosity as a conjurer of brilliant scenes and stunning set pieces, along with his ability to invest grandeur and novelty into conventional themes, have fostered the illusion that he is some kind of visionary.<\/p>\n But though there is a lot to see in \u201cInception,\u201d there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan\u2019s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness \u2014 the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity \u2014 that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can\u2019t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.<\/p>\n And the limitations of \u201cInception\u201d may suggest the limits not only of this very talented director, but also of his chosen art form at this moment in its history. Our dreams feed the movies. The movies feed our dreams. But somehow, our imaginations are still hungry.<\/p>\n Susan loved the movie. So did the Manhattan audience, which applauded enthusiastically. Me? I sort of get it, though who was shooting at whom and why totally escaped me.<\/p>\n Check. Check. Check. <\/strong>At the time IBM had “Think,” my company had “CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.” It was much more effective. Any time you change anything, check. Verizon added my voice lines to my new FiOS. They didn’t hunt them and they turned on their voice mail, killing mine. This confused the few callers I have, who thought I’d died or, worse, not paid my phone bills.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The big “check” is changing or “upgrading.” Repeat after me: <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Newer is not always better. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Change is not always.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Change brings consequences, most of dubious value and all time-consuming. Capping the financial gusher.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n You can make your own silly graphs at GraphJam.com.<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Stephen Laws: EPS $2.41 to $2.57. While 2Q core earnings beat our estimate, core earnings declined sequentially due to faster prepayments. We expect this trend to reverse in 2H10, as core earnings benefit from slower prepayment speeds. We would be buyers ahead of the improving 2H10 earnings, especially if shares are weak due to the 2Q core earnings being below the 2Q dividend. Given the recent capital raise as well as a reduction in our funding costs assumptions, we are increasing our 2010 and 2011 core earnings estimates. Reiterate Buy and maintain target of $22 per share.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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