I have always loved the ocean. Back when my dad temporarily left my family to go get his PhD, we lived by the water. Some people live by the water in fancy condos. We lived by the water in a ghetto. Not all beachside properties are created equal. He didn’t LEAVE leave. He just had to go and get an education. We stayed behind. It wasn’t so bad. Unless you don’t like dog shit floating by while you are at the beach. It wasn’t really a beach. No sand. Lots of rocks. In fact, lots of kids defecated there, too. If you could get past the shit, the place was really quite nice.

I have a tiny body of work here at the IBC blog site. If any you liked any of my posts, wow. Thank you. I have very little left to say now. The things I have not said, I want to keep to myself. I actually surprised myself with all the information that I have already shared with all of you.

Despite all the shit I have seen on the beach when I was young, my favorite vacations involve just sitting on a beach, watching the waves crashing in. Waves rolling in does nothing for me. I like the drama and danger of large waves splashing foam and danger when they collapse on to nothing they never wanted to harm in the first place. Just nature’s way. I don’t see any any shit on the beaches any more. I left them behind. IBC or 12631 are great locations, though. Looking into the waves, I see new life. Good ones.

I was listening to ChessNwine’s daily market recap tonight. He often mentions Japanese candlestick chart patterns and today he used the expression “dragonfly doji” to describe GDXJ from yesterday. That got me thinking about candlestick expressions in general, and I realized that they have a vaguely sexual vibe to them. I mean, doesn’t “dragonfly doji” sound like some technique you might find in The Joy of Sex? Anyway, that got me thinking about Japanese and eggs. Watch the video below to see why. And that led me to wonder how CALM was doing. Wow. Eggs are in a bull market.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqA-mP0MhZg

I like to pretend that I am too sophisticated to use foul language in the title of a post. Within the body of a blog, all is fair game even when it is foul.

But before I mouth off with four-letter words, an update on my first child’s progress with high school applications. You might remember from my previous posts that my son had been applying to high schools. Well, he received his first letter yesterday, and from the school on the top of his wish list. Fortunately, it came in a large envelope, stuffed with material. You know what that means. He casually read his acceptance letter, set it down, then nonchalantly resumed whatever it was that he was doing.

My wife and I looked at each other with puzzled looks on our faces. I asked my son, “aren’t you excited about getting accepted to your first choice of school?”

“Dad, it’s just another four years of studying.”

Shit, he’s right. I have to hand it to him. He summed up in a few words what it was really all about.

Speaking of shit, the market has the color and texture of of it. Despite the fact that the SPX and NDX seem to go up every day, the broad market isn’t really green. It isn’t really red, either. It is red and green combined. I think that gets you something in the shade of brown. Admit it, at some point in your lives you’ve touched shit. I did it by accident, but some of you strange ones actually might have squeezed some in your hand on purpose just to see if you could knead it like dough. The market right now has the consistency of healthy shit. It looks nice and firm, but it is in fact squishy. The average stock — and by that I mean small caps — is not going up with the large ones, and if that doesn’t change this market might experience the onset of diarrhea. Unless you are really twisted, no one wants to touch that wet mess.

I want to think about something clean, however, as in a clean break of the Russell 2000 over 830. Preferably 832. That will really get things moving, so to speak. Rip! Rip! Rip!

*Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkpWk8FJsys

Come to think of it, I do remember a green pasture in Florida.

When I was 6 or 7, I always had to stay after school until 5 before one of my parents could pick me up. My dad was busy with graduate school. My mom was working, trying to help ends meet. So I read in the library while I waited for one of them to come fetch me.  These days, there is no way that any respectable elementary school would allow a child to wander off beyond the watchful eyes of a school employee. Back when I was 6 or 7, however, no one blinked an eye when a young child decided to go out by himself to play in the brown-green grass that grew under the Florida sun.

One day, I  became tired of reading Curious George, Homer Price and Encyclopedia Brown. I looked out the window, looked at the lawn, and I had an urge to run on it. I closed my book and returned it to the proper place on the shelf and walked out out of the library. When I stepped onto the grass I ran as fast as I could. When you are 6 or 7, no matter how slow or fast you are, you always feel fast when you run by yourself. I felt fleet of foot. I must have been running against the wind because it whistled against my ears, making me feel as though I was running even faster than I was. I still remember when I stopped running, only because I couldn’t run any longer. I was heaving in deep breaths and smiling.

And now, here I am. I am still running. When I stop, heaving deep breaths, I hope I will be smiling.

I hope Ze Fly has a good time in FLA. Do me a favor, Fly? Go to a Krispy Kreme (but without your kids) when you get bored with theme parks and wait for someone to piss you off.

As long as I am blogging at this moment, let me give you a little history about the stock market in 1995. With memories of the 1987 crash still fresh in everybody’s minds, even though the market climbed in 1994, a lot of people were bearish at the start of 1995. “This climb can’t continue,” yada, yada, yada. To the consternation of every bear and underinvested bull, the market went up 7 months in a row in 1995 without a monthly pullback. But it gets better — even if I start counting from 1995 (ignoring 1994) the market climbed 11 quarters in a row without a quarterly pullback. Even after that one-quarter pullback, the market charged higher.

We are now in February with about a week and a half left in the month. I am betting this month will be the second month in a row this year that the market goes higher. The first quarter obviously has not ended yet. Wrap your minds around this for a moment: even if the market does not go up 11 quarters in a row from here, what if it goes up only, say, 5?

These days music has escaped my soul. While I wait to recapture it, there will be no more music videos for you. The Fly occasionally has a good one. Listen to his.

When I was a kid, we were living in Florida at the time, my dad got picked on by some redneck at a fucking Krispy Kreme. This was back in the 1960’s. In the deep South. If you looked smarter than the average redneck back then, you got picked on. What the redneck did not know was that my dad knew mixed martial arts before the expression MMA was invented. The redneck went down.

Today some rude jerk said something to me in a very public place that was, well, rude. In front of my son. He could have expressed his feelings in a more gentlemanly manner. I got rude right back. This guy probably had 40 pounds on me, but I didn’t give a shit. I was actually itching for a fight.

Son, I apologize for letting my emotions get the better of me. Even though I could have beaten that asshole if we actually did end up tangling, I had already lost by losing my temper to begin with.

No doubt you have once or twice visited your local cathedral of consumerism, the ginormous shopping mall, and found yourself standing in front of one of its directories to find a particular store. I have this theory that some guru of mall design decreed from upon high that no mega-mall should have more than one map per square mile. It always takes me longer to find a map and locate a store than it does for me to actually make a purchase once I find the store. I suppose mall designers made maps scarce to force consumers to walk by at least 118 stores before reaching a directory. That way, the consumer might actually enter a store she originally had no intention of visiting and make an impulse purchase. Well, anyway, once you find the mall directory and fight for position with other people trying to view the same map, the next thing you must do is find the little arrow on the map that says “You Are Here.” Finding this little arrow is not always easy, as some mega-malls are so huge that you actually forget which floor you are on. So you look around to see which stores are next to you to get your bearings and then try to locate them on the map. Often, once you finally spot the store you were looking for, you realize that your destination is on the other side of the mall and on a different floor, at least a good mile away. As you eventually approach the store you were looking for, to buy the special chop-o-matic you need to cook your holiday dinner, you see it — another directory just a few steps from your destination. Shit. Makes you want to, like, shoot someone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwlQQP4RxqI&feature=related

I’ve been busy doing stuff, so I haven’t been able to post anything the last coupla-three days. There wasn’t anything special to be said about the market, anyway.

Let me introduce myself. Hi, I happen to be a Christian. But I also happen to to respect my Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist friends. I have a friend who happens to be an atheist, but that is OK with me. We all just happen to be, as in “to exist.’  The reason I am OK with my atheist friend is because atheism and deism are not necessarily mutually exclusive in terms of the way we want order in the world. He is a good person. I can’t remember exactly, it was so long ago when I took a certain college class in philosophy, but I think it was Immanuel Kant, a strict logician who condensed ethics into a few non-religious rules, who said that his belief in God was simply of leap of faith. Just because you don’t believe in God, or you believe in a  different god, or you don’t believe that Jesus was was the Messiah or you believe whatever else Kant didn’t believe in, I think Kant  would have been cool with that.

Every year around this time I  say the same small prayer. Peace on earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiXjbI3kRus

1. I don’t want to spread rumors, but is Rick Perry gay? Not that there is anything wrong with that.

http://gawker.com/5868489/all-your-rick-perry-gay-sex-rumors-collected-in-one-handy-book?tag=2012

2. Newt Gingrich declares in debate that he will be a dictator if elected President and fire federal judges whose views differ from his own.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/15/gingrich-abolish-anti-american-ninth-circuit-judges/

3. Sergio Garcia’s ball goes right, his club goes left.

http://deadspin.com/5868627/sergio-garcia-didnt-need-that-club-anyway

4. Watch “Batman” star Christian Bale getting roughed up by Chinese police when he tries to visit blind activist.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/entertainment/video-christian-bale-roughed-chinese-police

5. “Tim Tebow is now praying that he never becomes the Rick Perry of the NFL,” and other reactions to Perry’s comparison of himself to Tebow in last night’s debate.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/rick-perry-tim-tebow-gop-presidential-debate274402

1. Look carefully at this picture. Fox News goes after Romney in typical Fox fashion.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/fox_news_really_hates_mitt_romney

2. The official website for The Amazing Spider-Man is now up.

http://www.theamazingspiderman.com/

3. Putin is looking younger than ever. Plastic surgery, anyone?

http://gawker.com/5868191/can-we-talk-about-how-ridiculous-putins-plastic-surgery-is

4. A list of elevator disasters throughout history.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/14/crazy-elevator-disasters.html

5. Watch video describing the life of tomorrows U.S. tennis stars at USTA player development training center.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/tennis/story/2011-12-11/usta-player-development-center-cover/51936260/1

6. I stumbled onto these old (August 2011) photos of Rihanna, drunken queen of Barbados.

http://www.thesuperficial.com/photos/rihanna-drunken-queen-of-barbados/0801-rihanna-bikini-parade-25