Holiday Weekend

I'm thinking about having a barbeque on Monday to celebrate Memorial Day, and inviting over a neighbor who is a World War II veteran.

Menu: steaks, baked beans, garlic bread, salad, beer.

I need to clean my fine electric grill for the summer, and make the beans in advance. My bean recipe is quite famous among my friends here. They are best made a day or two early. Then all those tasty molecules have a chance to combine into even more tastier varieties with one cycle of cooling and re-heating. See, chemistry can be fun !

I might even go to the shotgun range this weekend for a bit of trapshooting fun.

Inflation

Blabberg actually has an long interview this morning with a European economist about "inflation" ... he agrees with me and explains the facts. Mirabile Dictu !

Markets

Doldrums coming. I am doing nothing, except taking money from my Alpha Fund to pay my taxes for June 15, pay for my Rome vacation and for my barn renovation. I had put a lot of money into it to buy stocks in the big drops of Q1 and sold lots of those on rips. Alpha Fund was far too big for my risk level ... hehe ... as a "retired" investor. So cutting back for now makes sense.

Krypto Fund seems balanced OK with its overweight allocations to stocks and underweight allocations to cash and TIPs. Real estate and gold are at their normal allocations.

Some Arithmetic

At $4/gallon of gas and driving an SUV getting 20 miles per gallon, the cost per mile is 20 cents.

For a small car getting 40 mpg, the cost is a dime - 10 cents per mile.

So an upper middle class Yuppie family living in exurbia, and having to drive their SUV 20 miles every shopping trip, pays $4 per trip. That adds up. If they spend $100 on the trip, their cost is 4% more just for the transportation.

Now an X-er living in an older suburb, driving a 40 mpg compact and having a 10 mile round trip to shop, pays only $1.

These numbers really add up over a year and will certainly affect choices over time.

Word of the Day

"Jizz" - noun [$10]
Jizz means the characteristic (immediate) impression given by an animal or plant.
Sentence (1): A cardinal's jizz must be its bright red plumage and dignified demeanor.
Sentence (2): Unfortunately, W's jizz as a boob turned out to be correct.

Note: This definition is from The Oxford Concise Dictionary and is the only meaning given in it. I see now that the Urban Dictionary on the Internet has another slang usage derived from the "essence" of this meaning.