Previous Columns
8:30 AM Tuesday, March 7, 2006: Turmoil in interest rates. Not a time to be a borrower or a lender, either. Shakespeare had it figured out a long while ago. Watch all the gurus try to predict upcoming rates. Good luck. The Journal has a piece today. Click here.

Discussions of allocation and picking managers. No brilliant conclusions -- except to stay on top and have a short fuse.

Played Skip tennis. Lost, as usual. I think he plays me because he likens me to his sacrificial lamb. Picked Susan up from Ontario Airport at 11:30 PM after uneventful JetBlue flight from New York. Which means I'm trying to write something of sense in this column at 4:58 AM, New York time.

Will do better tomorrow. Promise.

I haven't forgotten those of you I promised material on the Strategic Commodities Fund. Don't get too excited. After 26% up in 2005, the fund is down slightly in 2006.

Up and down. Volatility prevails, and perhaps is accelerating. The solutions are threefold:

1. Diversification.
2. Reconciliation to the fact that some managers will screw up and some will do spectacularly well.
3. Pray that more will do good than those who do bad.

Old Hanukah joke:
During the first day of Hanukah, two elderly Jewish men were sitting in a wonderful deli frequented almost exclusively by Jews in New York City. They were talking amongst themselves in Yiddish .

A Chinese waiter, only one year in New York, came up and, in fluent impeccable Yiddish, asked them if everything was okay and if they were enjoying the holiday?

The Jewish men were dumbfounded. "Where did he ever learn such perfect Yiddish?" they both thought. After they paid the bill they asked the restaurant manager, an old friend, "Where did our waiter learn such fabulous Yiddish?"

The manager looked around and leaned in so no one else will hear and said... "Shhhh. He thinks we're teaching him English."

Math teacher arrested at JFK.
At New York's Kennedy airport, an individual was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search for absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns,' but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'There are three sides to every triangle.'"

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

Senior Moment
This is an apocryphal story allegedly from the police log of Sarasota, Florida... An elderly Florida lady did her shopping and, upon returning
to her car, found four males in the act of leaving with her vehicle. She dropped her shopping bags and drew her handgun, proceeding to scream at the top of her voice, "I have a gun, and I know how to use it! Get out of the car."

The four men didn't wait for a second invitation. They got out and ran like mad. The lady, somewhat shaken, then proceeded to load her
shopping bags into the back of the car and got into the driver's seat.

She was so shaken that she could not get her key into the ignition. She tried and tried, and then it dawned on her why. For the same reason she did not understand why there was a football, a Frisbee and two 12 packs of beer in the front seat! A few minutes later, she found her own car parked four or five spaces farther down.

She loaded her bags into the car and drove to the police station to report her mistake. The sergeant to whom she told the story
couldn't stop laughing. He pointed to the other end of the counter, where four pale men were reporting a car jacking by a mad, elderly woman described as white, less than five feet tall, glasses, curly white hair, and carrying a large handgun. No charges were filed.

If you're going to have a Senior Moment, make it a memorable one!

Harry Newton

This column is about my personal search for the perfect investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor. I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas, concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address is . You can't click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing the Google ads. Thus I cannot endorse any, though some look mighty interesting. If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Claire's law school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click here and here.
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