I got a mailer today from “The Team for Democratic Voters,” suggesting I vote for the slate including Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, and so forth — and also for Prop 16, a PG&E initiative to keep away competition from public utility companies like SMUD.  (I pay less than half the electricity rate through SMUD than many in neighboring cities using PG&E.)

I checked the official California Democratic Party web site, and they endorse voting No on 16.

When I check the fine print, it says, “This document was prepared by Democratic Voters Choice, not an official party organization.  Appearance is paid for and authorized by each candidate and ballot measure designated by an *.”

There were stars by Props 14, 15, and 16 — and the suggested votes for these propositions are exactly the opposite suggested by the Democratic Party.

There are stars by a couple of candidates’ names, too, but only one (Dave Jones for Insurance Commissioner) who has an actual endorsement from the party.

It’s clear that this mailer is pure fraud, designed to mislead voters into thinking these propositions have endorsements from the people whose picture is on the flyer, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

And by making this arrive the evening before the election, they reduce chances of anybody mounting a campaigning pointing out their deceptive, slimy tactics.

I suspect this ain’t illegal, but it’s clearly wrong.

“C’mon kids, get out your math books,” called Mrs. Rugg.

Some groaned, but others enthusiastically pulled out their hefty, neon green
math books bearing the the words “Holt Mathematics” in thick white letters. Along with these books, the classmates pulled out their Math journals, spiralbound notebooks filled with graph paper and bursting with arithmetic and ‘math doodles’. The class usually used slideshows for math, but there was a storm raging outside and the power was out. Suddenly, Sarah, one of the students, saw fit to call out.

“Energyyyy!” she called. Jacob quickly joined in.

“E-e-e-energy!”

The scene that followed was later referred to as “The Pineapple Incident.” However, that is a different story. After about ten minutes, Mrs. Rugg managed to take control of the situation again.

“Alright class, turn to page five hundred sixty seven,” she commanded. From there, the math lesson commenced as usual for all the students—save one.

Mira Williams had woken up that morning at seven o’ clock, hastily thrown on some fresh clothes, brushed her teeth and hair, and gulped down a cup of cocoa. After getting in the car, she remembered that her math was on the counter and ran to get it, only to find that her dog had chewed it into tiny pieces. After trying to salvage the situation by sticking the pieces together with Elmer’s Glue, because there didn’t seem to be any tape on hand, she jumped in the car and arrived at school just as the bell rang. She was utterly exhausted.

As the math lesson started, she noticed something strange about her math book. It was wiggling, pages, cover and all, as if trying to break free from some invisible trap. As she stared in disbelief, it began to wriggle free from its speckled book cover and crawl about on the desk, and the instant it shed its speckled skin it lunged towards Mira. It hit her in the stomach and she nearly cried out, but thought better of it. What if she was only imagining it? She would look like a fool. Besides, even if it was real, she didn’t want attention drawn to herself. Mrs. Rugg had already told her twice today to concentrate on the lesson, and she certainly didn’t want to get into any further trouble. So she grasped it in both hands and held it tight.

Making an agreeing nod as her classmates chanted an answer to a question she hadn’t heard at all, she attempted to stuff the book back into its cover. Sarah was giving her a funny look, but the book was below the top of the desk so it appeared that Mira was simply twitched sporadically at random intervals. She attempted to keep a straight face, which is difficult when you have a heavy math book clawing at you left and right.

The demonic entity had already given her enough paper cuts for a month, and she didn’t know if she could keep it contained much longer. She opened her desk as quietly as possible, keeping the monstrosity at bay with one hand, and grabbed the first thing she could find, which happened to be a gel pen. She stabbed the book with all the force she could muster, and it began to bleed ink and make an awful gurgling sound which sounded rather like someone chanting pi while drowning. While it was occupied thus, she stuffed the creature into the book cover. Having bought herself some time, she rummaged around her desk for a safety pin and pinned the book to its respective cover. Glancing at Sarah’s book, she turned to the correct page and gave sigh of relief.

“All right, Mira, what should we replace the variable x with?” asked Mrs. Rugg.

Mira didn’t know the lesson at all, much less the problem.

“Err, can you repeat the question?” she said as innocently as possible.

“Were you listening at all?”

Mira hung her head in shame.

“All right, Mira, remember your goal, and don’t let me catch you daydreaming in class again. Okay, get paintbrushes from the counter, class, we’re painting out model volcanoes,” she said.

Mira only sighed and chose a paintbrush with a particularly pointy end.

This surfer/skater clothing company was a purchase back in 2006 at some $35 a share, and then I piled on more as it dropped to $25 and $18.  I sold most when it bounced back up to $38 in 2007, and I just sold the last of it at $20.44.  Mostly a breakeven stock.

I should give them credit for not collapsing during the bad year, like most companies did, but I’m trying to trim my portfolio of companies I don’t really understand, and this is one of them.

I’m sitting on a lot of cash, on the theory that the other shoe of our mortgage crisis hasn’t yet dropped.

Looks like Obama may be reading my blog.  Sweet.

Here’s my post from January 2005, when I first bought QLTI:

QLT Phototherapeutics (QLTI) develops eye disease drugs. Down 2% since I bought it. Very high risk, but good upside potential.

I knew nothing about Visudyne, their main drug, or any of the other stuff they were developing.  This was a recommendation from Motley Fool Hidden Gems, which I was experimenting with at the time as a method for finding tiny companies with growth potential.

I originally bought in 10/04 at $16 per share.  Over the next year, as their shares continued to drop, I bought more at $12, and $10, and $8, and $6.  I don’t know why I still liked them.  Looking at their financials, their sales and cash were still going up in 2005, and I didn’t realize that their drug trials were going poorly with new drugs, and that their old Visudyne was about to be superseded by a competitor’s superior product.

Oops.

I sold a fraction of it at $9 in 2006, and bought some more at $5 in 2007.  They started gushing money seriously around then, and I stopped being interested.  Their stock recently bounced back over $5/share, so I dumped the rest of it.  Their financials look less miserable than they did over the last couple of years, but still seem poor.  I’m glad to be rid of this embarrassment.

Over the years, I piled $8336 into this company, and took $4109 out, losing more than half.  Could be worse, I guess, especially for a stock I categorized as “very high risk” when I bought it.  My memory is fuzzy, but I’m guessing the upside potential was if their new drugs had panned out.  They didn’t.  If they had, it’s easy to imagine that this might have been highly profitable.

The worst thing is that this so-called investment was in Mary’s IRA account, so I blew her retirement money. And there’s not even any tax benefit for the loss.  Poo.

Kathryn Bigelow won the best picture and director Oscars this year for The Hurt Locker (***1/2). I enjoyed the movie, though it didn’t quite make my “best of the year” list.

I’m still thrilled she won — she’s been one of my favorite directors for years, since a vampire romance in the mid ’80s:  Near Dark. (It’s kind of Romeo and Juliet, except the Montagues are all undead.)

She also did one of my favorite movies, Strange Days. That one isn’t generally highly regarded, but it, like The Hurt Locker, is a character study, and not a genre movie (science fiction in the case of Strange Days, war movie in the case of The Hurt Locker).  Fools people, I think.  Also, it gave me a crush on Angela Bassett.  She also did the surprisingly enjoyable Point Break and the adequate K-19: The Widowmaker.

It might seem odd that she gets to be one of my favorite directors with so few movies, but one can say the same about James Cameron, Peter Jackson, or Quentin Tarantino.

While The Hurt Locker didn’t make my list, it’s pretty much just as deserving (or more) than the ones I picked, which are not the best films, but my favorites.

Triangle is promoted as a horror flick, and it didn’t even get a US theatrical release, dooming it to obscurity.  The poster implies a terrifying thrill ride.

There’s a crazy with a bloody axe on the cover, for heaven’s sake.  Everything says, “cheap slasher flick.”

This is miserable marketing in the highest degree.

Admittedly, cheap slasher flicks do more box office than Triangle did, so I can see how they might have thought pretending that’s what it was might have sold some tickets.

Alas, it fails miserably to deliver the terror and gore. This is only a bad thing if that’s what you’re looking for. If you’d rather have a thoughtful, somewhat eggheaded mystery, you’re in luck.

Admittedly, people who like movies that make you think are in limited supply.  But hey, I’m one of them, so I dug it.

I’m not going to ruin the story.  Some people suffer misfortune on a sailing trip, and end up having a miserable time.  This is no gore-fest, but it’s got some violence, and is probably too complicated for kids, even if they’re as desensitized to blood as mine are.

Anyway, pleasant surprise.  I think the most underappreciated movie of 2009.

I still haven’t seen every good movie from 2009 — some haven’t come out on DVD, and some I just haven’t gotten around to.

The IMDB got rid of their PowerSearch feature, which let me trivially make a list of every movie from any year or group of years, and sort them by how much I liiked them, and so forth.  Sigh.  I still rate most every movie I see, and they keep the data, so it’s still useful.  Their new Advanced Title Search is much less useful to me if I can’t weed out all the movies I’ve already seen, though.

Anyway, my big three movies:

• Avatar. Yeah, the storyline is kind of commercial and gutless, but it works, and the visuals are breathtaking, and I dig that in movies.
• District 9. Also a visual treat, despite its (relatively) minimal budget of $30 million.  Thought provoking, and great character development.
• Up. Another great Pixar flick.  The trailers for this made it look like Disney crap, but it exceeded my expectations.

More movies I loved:

• (500) Days of Summer
• Coraline
• Inglorious Basterds
• The Hangover
• Triangle
• Watchmen

Triangle is the obscure one in that list.  Maybe I’ll do a review of it tomorrow.

I’ve been buying and selling Apple stock since the late 80s, and it’s been good to me.

It feels like almost the only company I’ve purchased in the last couple of years — I bought 50 shares in February 2008 at $121, then it went up (but not quite to my sell price) and then back down again, and I bought another 50 shares at $84.  I sold today at $221.

My logic is that the current stock price already has the iPad priced in as a huge success.  Everybody’s saying they’ll sell maybe 5 million iPads this year, and 10 million next.   And it’s possible.  Apple executes well, and has long gotten over the initial market hump with hype alone.

But it’s also possible this won’t be a giant hit.  It might only be a moderate success, like the iPod Touch, or something of a dud, like the AppleTV.  I’ll leave out the possibility of an embarrassing failure.  But it is a possibility.

Also, Jim Cramer was on TV pushing Apple, always a sign that a stock has peaked.

I like stocks that have a good chance of doubling.  Apple’s great, and will grow for years, but my hunch is that there’s a good chance the stock will drop below $200 before it hits $400.

Here’s an article I wrote almost 15 years ago.  Maybe I’ll post later about how the Clan Lord karma system evolved.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_29/vetneo.html