FSX Friday Update

So that happened.  The economy is headed back into recession, Cisco’s customers are grumpy, and China and Apple maybe aren’t going to have a World’s Finest superhero team-up to save us all.  Stock prices were under attack last week, as if, perhaps, by weird alien creatures.

You know, for example.  The Family Stock Index took a real beating, losing 6.7% to close at 926.85, a performance significantly more dreadful than the 3.8% loss on the S&P.  Unlike last week, the breadth was terrible as well, confirming the downward move, with 19 of 20 components lower.  We’re now back at a one-month low.  I blame myself, or rather, the enemies secretly spritzing my headquarters with microbes.   On to the damage report.

Advancers

• Wilson (WILC) +0.7% (Yeah, I don’t know.  He looks a little better in light of all the hall-peeing from the other dog, but not a lot better.  He’d do it too except his pee is neon and I’d catch him.)

Decliners

• Katie (CATY) -11.7% (No kisses from me the whole week.  It’s got to be torture.)
• Marcus (MCS) -12.8% (Not the best week for my bigger little brother.  Bad behavior from his not-soon-enough-to-be-ex-wife seems to have the perverse effect of invoking for him the times when she hasn’t been as unambiguously despicable, all four of them.  His corporate avatar doesn’t like it.  The market wants MCS to stay the course.  For the record, so do I.)
• LEE -14.4% (Ten straight days with a fever now–a personal record.  Unfortunately, not the sort of record the market rewards.)

Dots and dollar signs:

 

Name	8/13/10	Change
Charlotte	$13.46	-0.81
Dustin	$41.16	-0.45
Icarus	$9.78	-0.47
Jenny	$13.33	-1.06
Justin	$2.03	-0.18
Katie	$10.46	-1.38
Lee	$2.43	-0.41
Lisa	$8.05	-0.71
Lucas	$1.70	-0.19
Lulu	$37.88	-2.18
Machis	$8.65	-0.01
Marcus	$10.90	-1.60
Mario	$19.40	-0.67
Marisa	$18.67	-1.66
Nicole B.	$16.57	-0.23
Nicole L.	$55.46	-3.01
Reagan	$23.56	-1.29
Wilson	$5.99	+0.04
Zero	$0.35	-0.03
Zondro	$4.86	-0.03

Kona #5

Notice that Kona isn’t fighting a giant lion or a tiger, or even a panther.  What he’s up against here

is a giant house cat.  Implausible, perhaps.  But there’s a lot here that makes sense–too much sense.  Notice that the sand appears to be on fire where the cat is attacking the people.  I wasn’t there when this happened, but I suspect that maybe there was some kind of party, and some kind of shenanigans occurred, and the cat’s litter box/entire beach was set alight by the revelers.  If you were a giant cat, and a bunch of drunkards set your toilet on fire and danced around it, wouldn’t you do exactly what the cat is doing here?  Wouldn’t you eat them?  It rings true to me.  Is this the sort of scenario someone could have just made up?  I’m going to investigate further, but I suspect Kona himself to be at fault, because look at him!  He couldn’t even think to put his pants back on.  If there were shenanigans, he was up to his loincloth in them.

Two things always happen when some rich young white dude ends up in the jungle (Tarzan, Ka-zar, Kona, etc.): first, he takes off his clothes, and second, he abandons the technological advantages of his native civilization in favor of whatever the natives are using–bows, spears, knives, that sort of thing–seemingly just to prove a point.  I will learn to be like the simple people of this unspoiled land, he thinks to himself, or possibly says in an expository speech of some sort.  So this pampered loser who can’t even not fall out of a plane (Plane Rule #1, I think) would struggle, right?  He would be the worst jungle dude ever.  Only somehow, he’s not.  Somehow he does everything the natives do better than any of them can do it.  He becomes the lord of the jungle, or the savage land, or monster isle, or whatever.  And how is that?  Because he’s white is how.  That’s the lesson of all these stories, most of them from the period of time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the people of the West started to worry about how fat and soft they were becoming with their machines and their instruments.  Hey, Lord Poofershire thinks whilst having tea one afternoon, it is really nice being white, but I wonder how I would fare if I didn’t have all this technology.  So along comes Kona with this message: don’t worry, white person, because if you ever get dropped in the jungle you will definitely end up becoming lord of said jungle, and you certainly won’t be eaten immediately by a giant house cat.  You won’t even have to wear pants, which you know you hate.  And if you’re a woman, you won’t be able to do anything for yourself, naturally, but surely there will be a white lord of the jungle already in place who can save you.  Or maybe a gorilla, which is not disturbing at all.  No worries, have some more pastry.

Jenny Made It

Jenny did this sketch for me on one of those do-it-yourself comic covers (Witchblade #32 as it so happens).  I think she was six, so it’s time for her sister to deliver.

That’s the gold standard, Reagan.  Go get it.

Comic Agglomeration – Day Two

We are into the Xs and the agglomeration will be completed by mid-afternoon.  Reagan has not, however, returned to the stellar form of yesterday.  I allowed the newly-minted colonel to sleep until 9 a.m. this morning; instead of rejuvenation I seem to have gotten lethargy as a result.  It also seems that she was expecting her mother to awaken her early this morning to fix her hair.  No doubt she was wanting some sort of fearsome martial arrangement, perhaps something with red dye and spikes.  At any rate, we let her sleep and when I woke her at nine it was immediately clear that a mistake had been made.  Thus Reagan has made herself available for alternating letters today, if that.  This week’s struggle against Fairly Oddparents for Reagan’s attention has turned against me.

Comic Agglomeration – Day One Progress

By force of will Reagan propelled us through P yesterday evening.   She had exhausted her powers of concentration well before the end; furtive playing with dolls seemed to be occurring whenever I did not require that a specific task be performed.  And yet the progress of the Army of Thirty-Nine Boxes yesterday was far greater than I had expected.  I estimate that we have approximately 2000 comics remaining, a number that ought to be manageable given that we cleared nearly twice that yesterday.  Reagan is inexplicably anxious to finish this business so that we can turn our attention to the resolution of the office nasty.  I can’t say that I understand how she has become so strongly possessed of offensive elan, but that is not to say I will not exploit it.

Brevet Promotion For Reagan

3000 or more comics sorted on the first day of the offensive.  We are through M, having stopped on my account and to Reagan’s consternation.  My damnable foot is swollen and I’ve got to elevate it.  I am promoting Reagan to colonel; no further explanation seems to me to be necessary.  Perhaps my pansy feet and I will be able to keep up with her tomorrow.

Army Of Thirty-Nine Boxes

If you have visited the Empire, you will know what a comic box is and that I have more than one.  I generally use short comic boxes which are each approximately 16 x 8 x 11 and house around 120 standard modern-size comic books in bags and boards.  I could pack more but then it’s hard to rifle through the box.  What’s the point of having all these comics if I can’t look through them and feel better about myself and my station?  I rent a climate-controlled storage unit to house the majority of my inventory and every three to six months I will take a carload of boxes over to storage.  This weekend several tasks that it would have served my overall organizational purposes to complete were forcibly tabled because there were too many comic boxes in the way.  So yesterday I cleared the dining room of everything other than a comic box so that I could create a comic box perimeter around the room, center myself within the perimeter, and execute a massive multi-box agglomeration.  It’s a complex operation involving dozens of feeder boxes, substage boxes, end-stage storage boxes, and long boxes for retention on site.  Naturally I had some misgivings last night when Reagan volunteered to get up early this morning to aid in the agglomeration.  I forcibly set aside my reservations and offered her a command in a new Army of Thirty-Nine Boxes (the number of first stage feeder boxes).  I’m usually forced to rely upon a levee en masse at the beginning of a new campaign, and so it is gratifying that Reagan would freely offer aid.  It was her suggestion that she work along the comic box perimeter and funnel the alphabetized comics to me for the final agglomeration.  So far we are progressing nicely.  We were through the Es with more than 25% of the total behind us before Reagan had a Silly Bandz trading emergency involving a neighbor.  The crisis seems to have passed because she has returned and, amazingly, still wants to help.  Onward then.

July 17 – Artist’s Rendering

Congrats, guys.  I’d like to borrow Superman’s headdress sometime if he lets you keep it.  And the chick on the left.