Tengrain wins the Internet today.

My blog buddy Tengrain over at Mock, Paper, Scissors wins the Internet for May 9, 2011 with this sparkling sentence.

Show-girl legged former mayor Rudy Giuliani is now mulling over a seat in the 2012 Goat Rodeo*. But with OBL out of the picture, doesn’t that make him a parasite without a host?

*For those unused to Tengrain's prose, the 2012 Goat Rodeo is the race for the presidential nomination in the Republican Party. It can be inferred by context, but I wanted to make sure it was clear.

A word that should return to regular usage: Mountebank.

Mountebank: a fraud or charlatan; one who makes money by deceiving others.

Etymology: Italian. The direct translation means "mount a bench", which is the way sellers of miracle cures would stand above a large crowd to get attention.

You see the word in 19th Century literature quite a bit. W.S. Gilbert broke up with Sir Arthur Sullivan for a time and wrote an operetta titled The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier in 1892. The play had a long run in London and short run in New York, but is rarely performed today.

Please do what you can to bring this wonderful word back into usage. There are many mountebanks in the world today. Reading about the derivatives market, mountebanks appear to be the engine of the world economy.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Have we seen this show before? The overture sure sounds familiar.

You may have heard that this week, especially yesterday, was a big shock for several commodities including the three that Matty Boy, Investment Advisor to the Stars* follows closely for no good reason other than habit, gold, silver and crude oil. Silver in particular took a massive blow, from about $48 an ounce to slightly less than $36 an ounce, losing roughly 25% of its value in the space of 24 hours. The percentage hits that gold and crude took were much smaller, about 4.5% for gold and 14% for crude. All three still are trading at prices higher than they sold for on New Year's Day.

I bring this up because there was something like this at the end of March 2008. All three commodities were riding high but then took a big single week bump, with silver taking the biggest hit. This was the beginning of the end of the party for the metals, while crude oil rallied back and went to nominal high price records of over $140 a barrel just before joining the other prettier but not as important commodities in free fall. Within six months, we found out that the world economy had been secretly married to degenerate gamblers for several decades, and like all degenerate gamblers everywhere, they eventually hit that very bad streak, bankrupting the world's economy as well as themselves.

Here's my theory. I cannot vouch that it is anything like the truth, but it does sound plausible, which I must advise as Matty Boy, Mathematician is a very long distance from the actual truth. In 2008, the margin calls in the derivatives market were being cashed in, and the losers needed to pay their bad bets in Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Colateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), so they started cashing out other successful bets, the profits they had seen in the commodities markets. These successful bets weren't even close to covering their losses, so over the next six months a hell of a lot of investors were moving off their positions in silver and gold, some handing it over straight to their creditors, others speculating in the only winning game in town at that time, crude oil futures. When crude hit the high end of its roller coaster ride and began to fall precipitously, the last slot machine in the casino that was paying off went bust and it was a flat out panic, which the public was informed about when Bush and Hank Paulson told us they need $700 billion like RIGHT THE FUCK NOW or everything would simply stop working.

Again, I have no idea if that is the case right now, but I am certain of one thing. The problems in the derivatives markets have NOT been fixed. There is still no limit to how much credit the big banks can get in this insane casino, and some may be in the stinky position Bear Stearns was in when it died, $30 of bets on the table for ever $1 of actual assets they had on hand.

The people running the show these days, followers of that disgusting homonculus Alan Greenspan, himself a follower of an even more disgusting homonculus Ayn Rand, tell us there is no way to regulate the markets. Recall that 30 years ago, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market and took a beating. They didn't take the entire world economy with them, but Paul Volcker, who was then head of the Fed, thought the situation was serious enough to institute a rule that banks weren't allowed to lend money to speculators.

Now it's the banks themselves that are lending money to speculators on their own payroll and the free market fetishists in charge of the world economy see nothing wrong with this.

If you are the sort of person who prays, now would be a good time to start.

An obvious observation on a sunny Cinco de Mayo

If you are in a mariachi band and you don't have a gig today ...

have you considered the possibility that you kinda suck?

You know what I haven't done in so long?

A lolz.

More specifically, a lolz cat.

Even more specifcally, a lolz cat of the form "im in ur _______, bein _____."

And now I feel almost magically better.

Sir Henry Cooper: 1934-2011

Muhammad Ali's butt met the canvas only three times in his career.

The last (and easily least) was when the grotesquely out-matched Chuck Wepner stepped on Ali's foot and hit him at the same time. The referee missed it, so it counts to this day as a knockdown instead of a trip or slip. Besides this act of clumsiness or cleverness, Wepner has two other claims to fame: he is the model for Rocky Balboa, a third rate club fighter facing the greatest champion of the last half century, and his wonderfully and horribly accurate nickname The Bayonne Bleeder.

The second time Ali was knocked down was by Smokin' Joe Frazier in the first of their three epic fights, the one Frazier deservedly won on the biggest stage in boxing, Madison Square Garden, following the biggest hoopla for a boxing match in this country from then until now.


The first time he took a seat involuntarily in his career, Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay, and the brash kid from Kentucky had traveled all the way to London, England to meet the British Commonwealth champion Henry Cooper, later to be known as Sir Henry Cooper. Clay was already running his mouth as he would throughout his career, and in the pre-fight lead-in called Cooper "a bum". Cooper said he put lead weights in his shoes to make it to the heavyweight limit of 175 pounds that night, and no one disagrees that Clay was both taller and heavier than Cooper.

Clay was also a once in a lifetime athlete, a natural 200+ pounder with the speed of a man 50 pounds lighter. Cooper could not believe how deftly the bigger, younger fighter kept away from his blows, but at the end of the fourth, Cassius Clay met 'Enery's 'Ammer, the nickname the British sportswriters gave Cooper's vicious left hook. Clay got lucky and the ropes kept his noggin from bouncing on the ring floor, else he might have been out for the count.

The story gets better. Between rounds, Angelo Dundee, Clay's trainer, put smelling salts under his fighter's nose, which isn't legal. He also saw a small tear in Clay's glove and made it bigger, so the ref gave him some extra time to repair the glove. Cooper claims it was an extra two minutes, "all the time a fit man needs". In any case, Clay was ready to go the next round and opened cuts on Cooper's face that forced the fight to be stopped in Clay's favor with Cooper ahead on all cards.

After the fight, Clay took back all the unkind things he said about the plucky British bomber and the two men were fast friends ever after.


Once Clay beat Sonny Liston, became the champion and Muhammad Ali all on the same night, he decided to give Henry Cooper another chance. Older and wiser, Ali used his superior size and reach to jab Cooper's face and once again open cuts. This time, he didn't play around. One encounter with 'Enery's 'Ammer was enough. Ali later said Cooper hit him so hard "my ancestors in Africa felt it".

Ali fought several times in Europe, most notably against the Brit Brian London and the German and European champ, the southpaw Karl Mildenberger, but that first fight against Cooper truly stands out.


I have only once heard a discouraging word about the great Henry Cooper, and I only heard since he died yesterday. He never gave the Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo a shot at the Commonwealth championship. The two fighters were about the same age and it would have been a great contrast in styles. Cooper was known for getting cut easily, the weakness Clay/Ali exploited twice, but he had one of the most feared punches in the game. Chuvalo was not as powerful, but he was as tough as a cheap piece of meat fried on a railroad tie. Some clever Trevor at the time said that if they still let heavyweights fight for 55 rounds like they did back in Jack Johnson's time, George Chuvalo would have been the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

Let me call this a quibble. The travel costs would have been a lot for either Chuvalo or Cooper, and neither had the name recognition of an Ali or Joe Frazier.

I come to praise Cooper as others bury him. I write this post because a horrible cowardly villain died yesterday and the press can't stop talking about him. A brave and honest man, beloved in his nation to this day also died, dead from a broken heart at the recent loss of several loved ones.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Sir Henry Cooper, from a fan.

Sunday Numbers 2.0, Vol. 9: Reciprocal word problems.

Most word problems except the ones involving compound investment are solved with linear equations. They can look very different, like solving how much of two different alcohol solutions to combine x gallons of 25% alcohol solution and y gallons of 50% alcohol to make to make 10 gallons of 30% solution or how 19 dimes and quarters can add up to $2.50, but those kind of problems use linear methods. (The answers are 8 gallons 25% and 2 gallons 50%, and 15 dimes and 4 quarters. Figuring out how to set up the problems is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Let's consider something about the answers. With 19 coins that are either dimes or quarters, the lowest possible answer is $1.90 (all dimes) and the greatest total is $4.75 (all quarters). For the solution problem, the minimum percentage is 25% and the maximum percentage is 50%.

The answer must be between the two known extremes.

Consider the following question instead.

One drain pipe can empty a pool in 2 hours, while a smaller pipe can empty the same pool in 4 hours. How much time will it take if they work together, provided that they don't get in each others' way?

I always hate to use this phrase, bit it should be obvious the correct answers are not between 2 and 4 hours, but instead less than 2 hours.


This problem is solved using reciprocals. If a pipe can do the job in two hours, let's assume it finishes 1/2 the job every hour. (Depending on the physics, this assumption might not be accurate, but let's leave that alone for the moment.) Using this assumption, that means the smaller pipe which takes four hours finishes 1/4 of the job in an hour.

If we agree that they can work without getting in each others' way, in one hour they do 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4 of the job. Once we add the reciprocals together, we reciprocate the sum to get the answer. The reciprocal of 3/4 is 4/3 or 1 1/3, so the two pipes working together finish the job in 1 hour and 20 minutes. This means opening the second pipe is only a 40 minute savings over doing the job with the first pipe alone.

This may very well be the trickiest word problem type around, though others involving rate, distance and time might also get the the award.

Some of those next week.