money, money, money

I’ve never claimed to be a financial genius. Hell, I can barely manage a household budget. That being said, I think I could give Wall Street a few pointers at the moment.

If, as appears to have happened recently, someone has no job, no income and no assets, don’t give them a home loan.

If you see a bank is making those sorts of loans, don’t buy their shares or go into business with them.

If, as happened overnight, the share market loses 1.2 trillion dollars in one day, you have a problem. Particularly when no-one seems to know where it’s gone.

I don’t understand that. Today you have 1.2 trillion dollars. Tomorrow it’s gone. Where did it go? the back of an all-mighty couch? Did someone hack into the US credit card and buy 400 billion plasma screens to watch the grand final?

I have to come to the conclusion that it was all a big house of cards. All those financial geniuses telling me I should invest my money in stocks and bonds rather than running shoes were full of hot air.

Incidentally – if you were wondering, a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 dollars. That’s a lot of money. If you had a trillion dollars and you spent 1 dollar a second, it would take you 31,600 years to spend it all. The US stock market spent it all in one day!

John Gray, from the Guardian says this is “a shattering moment in America’s fall from power“.

GOSH!
Running
12.75km this lunch-time. It cost me nothing.

yawn

If I sleep tonight, and I fully intend to, it will be the sleep of the just: the sleep of someone who has put in a hard day’s work.

Firstly, I ran 28km in 2 hours 10 minute. That’s no big deal, granted, but stay with me. As soon as I emerged, creaking from the shower I was bundled into a car, taken across town and forced to chase after a two year old. First it was Ceres, where the aforesaid two year-old had great delight in chasing the chickens and picking fights in the sand-pit.

Then, it was a two year-old birthday party. That’s gotta be about the scariest five words in the English language “two year-old birthday party”.

There was cordial, cake, chippies and inevitable tears. Sigh.

I will sleep tonight.

(BTW – here’s the run on mapmyrun.com)

ripped

Well, it’s finally happened. Some three months and god knows how many thousands of pushups later, but my wife has finally noticed I’m looking pretty buff. Thankyou hundredpushups.com

It happened last weekend as I was disrobing, preparatory to sponging the nether regions. The spouse was passing by and said, with something of a shocked quaver in her voice:

“You know, you are pretty strong now.”

She advanced closer and, taking her life into her own hands, gave the shoulders a bit of a squeeze.

“You are! You’re all muscle!”

Very gratifying. Very gratifying indeed.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for commissioning the next Rambo movie, but whoever you are, I’d like you to know: I’m available.

The funny thing is, I can’t actually do 100 pushups in a row. I can do the week 6 of the program no worries, and I can get to 70 or 80 okay. 100 still looks a bit hard.

Running
None yet. I’ve been working from home. Cough. Yes. Working.

Really.

I’ll try to fit in a gentle 12km tonight.

personal best

George Mallory is said to have snapped irritably upon being asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it’s there”.

It was is much the same spirit that I flicked the remote control over to Channel 10 at about 8:30 last night to watch the Brownlow. I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant, I knew it wasn’t going to be fun, I just needed to see if I could do it. To see if I could test the limits of human endurance.

I was going to watch the whole Brownlow telecast.

That was the plan. Truth be told, by about Round 2 I was thinking about getting a drink. By Round 5 my eyes were nodding. I have a feeling I saw most of Round 7, but I couldn’t swear it.

All of a sudden, I was awake and someone was trying to sell me kitchen implements, or porn or something.

I read today, someone called Adam Cooney won the thing. Good on him, whoever he is.

I was secretly hoping Matthew Richardson would win, mainly because he has a big goofy grin and when something goes wrong he sulks like my two year-old son.

If he were to win the best and fairest award for the whole league, that would be some sort of triumph of the human spirit.

As for my attempt at watching the whole telecast, that’s a failure. Maybe next year.

Running
12.8km this lunch-time, taking in the delights of Richmond, Dight’s Falls, Alexandra Parade and bits of Carlton. Here ’tis:

http://www.mapmyrun.com/route/au/Melbourne/531101981508

pain in the…

…neck. What did you think I was going to say? Anyway, I must have been sleeping with my head on backwards last night, because it feels very ordinary.

That’s beside the point. It’s been ages since last I wrote. Hi! How are you? I’m fine thanks, can’t complain. Well, I can actually. Here goes.

Coffee
I used to drink upwards of 10 coffees a day, easy. It was like mother’s milk to me, and no matter how strong, it had almost no effect on me.

Now, as of the Friday before last, I no longer drink any coffee. None. Zilch. Zero.

It’s made for some rather entertaining headaches, as you might imagine. For about a week it was like someone was trying to force a red-hot spike through my forehead, from the inside out. Also, for about 4 days my stomach would churn and heave like a washing machine.

Fun.

So what’s all this in aid of? It’s a secret. I have a secret plan that I may or may not elaborate on in coming editions of this journal.

In the news
I saw this in yesterday’s Herald Sun:

Get fit or you will die young, Kyle Sandilands

Apparently he drinks 30 cups of coffee and 8 litres of coke and smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. Those with his welfare at heart are encouraging the talentless-one to get healthy to avoid an early grave. I, however, don’t have the same charitable disposition: drink and smoke away Kyle!

And today:

A MAN was stabbed three times following an argument over his position in the queue at a McDonald’s outlet in the CBD last night.

Now, I would have thought being forced to wait an extra 40 seconds for a filet o’ fish might be irritating but not worth murder, but clearly I’m in the minority.

Running
Some shorter stuff during the week last week and a 28km run yesterday. Okay, I suppose. Yesterday was a beautiful morning, but I misjudged the direction of the wind and ended up running the last 10k of the run into a howling gale.

Still, whatever doesn’t kill me makes me sweatier and smellier, or something along those lines.

questions that don’t need asking

I don’t know if you saw this in the papers today?

Why did Ernie Dingo blast Kyle live on air?

I mean really, do you really need to ask?

He called Kyle Sandilands a “commercial wanker” live on the radio for two simple, obvious reasons:

1. Kyle Sandilands is a commercial wanker
2. He was too much of a gentleman to say what he really meant

He may be a wanker, but he’s dead sexy isn’t he?

Running
It might have been the wind, a lousy week at work, or perhaps just because I’m a lazy sod, but I had a pretty lacklustre run today. 9km, including a lap of the tan. Ho hum.

not so virtuous

I don’t understand why, whenever a politician is caught doing something stupid and/or naughty, the first thing they do is hold a tearful press conference holding the nearest small child available.

Today, Matt Brown, who’s been the NSW Police Minister for about five minutes, was caught

“stripped down to his “very brief” underpants and dancing on a green leather couch in his office. He also apparently straddled Wollongong MP Noreen Hay’s breasts during the incident”.

As you do.

So, first thing he does is appear in front of the media like this:

I’m not entirely convinced the whole small-child thing is a great idea. On the one hand, it says “family man”, on the other hand, drunken half-naked middle-aged men cavorting about the place is not a nice mental image to have next to 4 year old girls in pink fluffy skirts.

Then again, I have a dim memory of Senator Andrew Bartlett trying a very similar tactic after getting caught staggering about the floor of Parliament three sheets to the wind a few years ago. He seems to have been rehabilitated a bit since then.

Incidentally, why are all my memories “dim”? Is that advancing age? Too many illicit substances? Too much running bouncing my brain around its cage? What was the question???/

Running
An entirely virtuous run last night for me. It was my usual hill session, but no half-hearted floating about the place. It was all hard, hard, hard followed by a nice set of strides. Probably around 15km all up…

a step too far

There are certain types of madness that are soooo out there they have you questioning your own grasp on reality. I’m thinking of Andrew Bolt, Salvador Dali and people who like easy listening music.

Maybe I’m missing something… perhaps Air Supply really were a good band….

No, that’s going too far.

Sometimes, it goes the other way. Sometimes someone who is otherwise quite successful turns out on closer inspection to be so clearly mad that it makes you feel better about your own sanity.

I’m thinking particularly about Dean Karnazes. I suspect most of you know who he is, but if you’re a non-running type, he’s the “Ultramarathon man”, famous for running hundreds of miles at a time, non-stop, over mountains, across deserts and to the South Pole.

I’ve been reading his first book and, with all due respect, the man is off his tree; certifiable, and not in a good way.

If you’ve read his book, and somehow manage to miss the warning signs in the first chapter (where he eats a family size pizza and a whole cheesecake while 6 hours into a 48 hour run), this statement should set off alarm bells:

Running should not be fun …. it should hurt

Um. No.

Running should be fun, otherwise only masochistic loonies would do it. Yes, it can be fairly difficult at times, but in general it’s quite a pleasant way to spend your time.

Then there’s the whole 200 mile run thing, the falling asleep while running thing, and the running-a-marathon-in-running-shoes-at-the-south-pole thing.

It’s people like him who make me feel better about my ultramarathon policy. That is, I’ll run all distances up to and including a marathon, but no further.

That way madness lies.

Running
12 point something not-at-all-loopy kilometres this lunchtime.

That’s not quite true: I did feel slightly unhinged when I ran past Princess Park to see someone had flattened the Carlton Social Club. When did that happen? Why wasn’t I consulted?

I can’t help thinking if they’d held off until the end of the football season, some of the Brendan Fevola unpleasantness might have been avoided.