We’re really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they’re right. It shouldn’t have happened, and we’ll take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen for a third time.
The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in no way whatsoever impact our ability to pay our promised dividend of .1% on all investments. We remain financially stable, with significant capital reserves — thanks to you, our valued shareholders — and enough gains from our other departments that the latest debacle in our Trading Department will not affect our ability to make more trades in the very near future.
No, it’s not the $2 billion that JPMorgan Chase blew on derivitative bets, but still . . . → Read More: To Our Investors
Women who say they prefer chocolate to sex either have bad sex lives or exceptionally great chocolate.
Male nipples simultaneously disprove evolution and intelligent design.
Marriage is the most reliable curative for hopelessly incurable romantics.
People who frequently “need to vent” to friends usually have previously failed to say what they really mean to those who inspired their need to vent.
Behind every vast fortune is a master criminal calling himself something else.
Those who employ the locution “eats like a bird” do not have backyard bird feeders in need of daily re-filling.
The most dangerous people are those who dedicate their lives to protecting people from themselves.
Sportscasters who frequently use the phrase “sacrifice his body” don’t understand what the word sacrifice means.
Professional athletes are paid handsomely not for their ability to throw or kick a ball, but for their . . . → Read More: Aphorisms, Epigrams, and Such
Originally posted April 29th, 2012
By Michael Konik
You’ve talked to someone thirty-or-younger recently, so you’re aware that we’re presently living in the blissful state of no worries.
No worries, bro.
The problem for those of us who read newspapers and have some time to think is that there seems to be plenty to worry about — if you’re into that whole caring about stuff mode. The world quite often feels like it’s on the precipice of disaster, a calamity (or apocalypse) about to be perpetrated against humanity by humanity. No worries? Well, not really, bro.
But after 4:20PM, when we brooding types might discover a more charitable and optimistic state of mind, the sentient observer begins to understand that, wow, yeah, everything we fret about already has been fully explained to everyone’s satisfaction and there really is nothing to worry about.
Lehman Bros. Bonuses. No worries, bro. Yes, shortly before the firm’s 2008 collapse, which precipitated the . . . → Read More: No Worries, Bro
Originally posted April 22nd, 2012
By Michael Konik
If you’re reading this essay on MichaelKonik.com, you know that this is a reliable place to find “me,” the me who shares his ideas with the world, whether or not any part of the world is interested. This is where I unilaterally invade my privacy, allowing strangers to read my mind, exposing my beliefs and my doubts, keeping very little secret. You want to know what I think about something? It’s pretty easy to know. My Thoughts are even searchable. Hiding is almost impossible when you’re trying to be unflinchingly honest.
Yet if you’re looking for me on Facebook, I’m not there.
There’s an official Michael Konik Author page, which serves as a publishing conduit for my Thoughts. Dozens – dozens! – of people “like” it. Facebook also offers several Michael Konik Community pages, the equivalent of digital flypaper, where people who are looking for me on . . . → Read More: Free to Be Disconnected
Originally posted April 15th, 2012
By Michael Konik
North Korea is launching rockets, Syria is slaughtering its citizens, and the Filipino community is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign for a crucial election (not for something boring and unimportant like a public office but a cause that’s got folks passionately engaged: the American Idol finals). So the astonishingly weird five-game suspension of Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen — for comments emanating from his mouth — came and went with little comment.
Principles like free speech, you see, are “important” according to moldy textbooks, but, really, let’s be honest: it’s hard to care about silly old constitutional precepts like the First Amendment when we’re permitted to express our opinions in the form of Facebook “likes.” Plus, Ozzie offended a whole bunch of people, and there’s got to be some punishment for that, right?
For those who missed the imbroglio, what the baseball skipper said was that he loved . . . → Read More: Suspension of Disbelievers
Originally posted April 8th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Sometimes our chaotic, unknowable, seemingly random Universe arranges itself with perfect symmetry. In these moments of bracing clarity, authored by a Creator (in whatever guise or nomenclature you prefer) whose sense of irony is matched only by her/his/its sense of wicked humor, our innate foolishness and learned stubbornness are robbed of their pretensions. We see what we have wrought – and then pretend we didn’t, because, despite our professed wish for “change you can believe in,” change is the process we’re most unwilling to endure.
Last week provided several of those The Way It Is moments, with several illuminating events happening almost simultaneously, twinned like opposite sides of a coin, as though the worm-hole theories of modern physicists were getting an earthbound demonstration. Our chief prophet of change you can believe in, President Obama, who seems intent on being as big of a disappointment to as many . . . → Read More: Perverse Priorities
Originally posted April 1st, 2012
By Michael Konik
Braving odds of 176 million-to-1, scores of otherwise sensible Americans, including several of our intelligent friends, were infected with Lottery Fever this past week, standing in lines of up to three hours to buy a ticket at “lucky” liquor stores and gas stations.
The prospect of a $640 million jackpot and the assurance that some of the money would go to our schools made throwing away hard-earned wages seem like an altogether fun thing to do. At $1 a pop, the lottery is a cheap fantasy while it lasts.
Like any fixed-odds proposition, a category that includes almost every casino game, including slot and poker machines, roulette, craps, and baccarat, lotteries are unbeatable. There’s no such thing as a professional lottery player; it’s not a viable way to end up with more than you started with. Sure, someone has to “win” the Mega Millions or Powerball, or . . . → Read More: Lotteries, Poker, and Other People’s Money
Originally posted March 25th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Outrageous. Horrifying. Disgusting.
These were some of the adjectives hurled in the press when news broke that the former world champions of football, the New Orleans Saints, for years had instituted a bounty system that rewarded their players for knocking opponents out the game. Players contributed to an in-house pool and collected $1,000-$1,500 when they scored a knockout. Hitting someone so hard that they required a stretcher or motorized cart to be removed from the field earned a special commendation.
The National Football League, presenters of America’s favorite gladiatorial spectacle, handed down sentences to the malefactors. The General Manager and an assistant coach were suspended without pay for about half the upcoming season. The head coach, Sean Payton, was banned for the entire year. And in a maneuver eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag, the former defensive coordinator and alleged mastermind of the bounty program, Greg Williams, . . . → Read More: Violence Voyeurism
Originally posted March 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In 1969, the Cayahoga River, one of Lake Erie’s major tributaries, caught fire. This provided the kind of visual evidence boring old science never could. Folks got hip: Industry, they realized, was using American waterways as a massive free sewage system for their most noxious waste. Americans got serious about pollution in our water for a minute. Then we all got back to business and tried to forget about the future.
Now our present generation of leaders and decision-makers has its own Compelling Visual to consider as they try to sell the easily sold American public on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which a proprietary cocktail of water, sand, and toxic chemicals are blasted into shale fissures deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The blasting breaks apart the rock formations and causes them to give up oil and natural gas deposits. The Academy Award-nominated (and therefore Good and . . . → Read More: What the Frack!?
Originally posted March 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
If you’re an artist, or have an artistic impulse, or care deeply about art, you probably experience the kind of quiet despair that I find in many of my jazz musician friends, my poet friends, my painter friends, and frequently from myself. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to be part of a culture that finds the work that we do increasingly irrelevant and of little worth (at least in the marketplace sense). It’s depressing to be so astonishingly good at something and yet so relatively uncelebrated and unappreciated. But you must never stop. We — all of us who care in varying degrees about stuff other than acquiring and consuming — are out there. We’re reading, and listening, and looking, and cogitating, and arguing, and questioning, and loving. We can’t be co-opted. We’re too smart and too aware. We’re not going anywhere. And we need you, you specifically, with . . . → Read More: Encouraging Words for Despairing Artists
Poet Robert Pinsky. Pianist Laurence Hobgood. Text, music, and the moment -- what we hear on the new POEMJAZZ recording is two giant artists making something greater than the sum of its parts. While Pinsky recites his lovely words with his unlovely (but weirdly attractive) voice, Hobgood, the longtime arranger and accompanist [...]
Violence Voyeurism
By Michael Konik
Outrageous. Horrifying. Disgusting.
These were some of the adjectives hurled in the press when news broke that the former world champions of football, the New Orleans Saints, for years had instituted a bounty system that rewarded their players for knocking opponents out the game. Players contributed to an in-house pool and collected $1,000-$1,500 when they scored a knockout. Hitting someone so hard that they required a stretcher or motorized cart to be removed from the field earned a special commendation.
The National Football League, presenters of America’s favorite gladiatorial spectacle, handed down sentences to the malefactors. The General Manager and an assistant coach were suspended without pay for about half the upcoming season. The head coach, Sean Payton, was banned for the entire year. And in a maneuver eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag, the former defensive coordinator and alleged mastermind of the bounty program, Greg Williams, . . . → Read More: Violence Voyeurism