Thoughts at Large: 19
Posted on May 27, 2014 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

• If I owned a piece of land that jutted out into the water but had no place where a boat could land, I would call it Moot Point.

• His casual pleasure is my extravagance.  My sense of necessity is lost on you.

• We can live in a culture of violence, or we can choose something else.

• Readers of The 100 Billionth Person may have already suspected this: I do not exist between blog posts.  That’s right.  Minutes after each post, I suddenly evaporate into a quantum nothingness and only re-materialize days later when the universe reaches a point of critical boredom.

• Do you know what’s really awful about questions that are left hanging?

• I have not been and never will be a season-ticket-for-the-orchestra kind of guy.

• By the time I finally decide to start sending text messages, everyone else will have phones with implants that transmit audio and video messages directly to the brain.  Texting will be as outdated as The Tea Party is now.  The only life form that will understand and respond to r u ok will be an oak.

• There are two kinds of people in this world: those who kill spiders they find in their homes and those who let them go unless the spiders are really big or ugly, then they turn into the first kind of people.

• Shooting firearms for sport is an activity that satisfies man’s prehistoric hunger to launch projectiles.  I would not be surprised if men at the shooting range were found to salivate upon seeing that first bullet hit the target (that would be an interesting study).  There are far less violent ways for men to set an object in motion and follow its trajectory toward a target.  Here I would suggest golf.  In golf, unlike shooting, the projectile doesn’t create a hole — it quietly falls into a hole that is already there.  Eventually.

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The Trend, Revisited
Posted on May 17, 2014 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

Once again, the news media are reporting new highs in popular stock market indexes.  Does this mean it is a good time to invest?  Or is it a good time to sell and take profits?

I have absolutely no idea.  What I can do is tell you where we stand relative to The Trend.  (For details, please refer to my earlier post on this topic.)  After a little programming, I was able to add an information box to my sidebar that shows:

  • the current price of the S&P 500 index (updated every hour)
  • the predicted value of the S&P 500 index based on The Trend
  • the percentage difference between the index and its predicted value
  • the number of days that the index is ahead or behind its trend line

The S&P 500 index increases, on average, 7.1% every year — some years more, some less.  Since the index often goes up or down 1% or more in a single day, small departures from The Trend are meaningless.  As I write this, the S&P 500 index is almost right on trend — neither “on sale” nor historically overpriced.  It could stay this way for years, or the index could plunge or skyrocket overnight.  But it will inevitably return to the trend line.

For what it’s worth.

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Her Sweet Surprise
Posted on May 11, 2014 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

Sweet Surprise AdSometime in October of the year 1969, a sixteen-year-old brown-eyed Pennsylvania boy sat down and wrote the words to what he counted as his seventy-first song.  Like his hero John Lennon, the young man was inspired by an advertising poster — but not for a circus, as was the case when Mr. Lennon penned Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.  Rather, the ad that caught the youngster’s eye was for a Mother’s Day flower arrangement called “The FTD Sweet Surprise.”  Such was the humble yet stirring origin of the song Her Sweet Surprise by the naive, somewhat talented Pennsylvanian boy, Craig H. Collins.

Collins did not use his middle initial at the time.  No matter.

Collins would go on to record Her Sweet Surprise four years later (late 1973 or early 1974) in his Carnegie-Mellon University studio (aka dormitory room) in jug-band style, with his friend Rob Simbeck.  Collins provided electric guitar, the signature acoustic guitar run, percussion and main vocal.  Simbeck played acoustic guitar fill-in and lead as well as some higher-than-currently-imaginable vocal harmonies and an introductory burp.  Just recently, Collins decided to digitally remess with the original, forty-year-old, two-track analog tape, adding bass, keyboard and percussion parts.  The result can be heard here:

 Please listen to this selection on a decent sound system.  At least use headphones or earbuds.
Don’t even think about playing it on your tinny little laptop.

I am pleased to announce that, on June 24, 2014, the esteemed auction house Sotheby’s will make available the only known draft of the lyrics to this landmark song (along with lyrics and personal effects of another musician of the 1960s and 1970s).  In the copy of the draft (below) you can see that changes were made to the lyrics prior to the final recording.  As the manuscript expert Richard Austin said, “Here you have a chorus that is such an iconic piece of history, but it clearly didn’t arrive fully formed.  And you wonder, if he chose another rhyme, would it have had the same impact?”

Her Sweet Surprise - Lyrics

How does it feel, to be a complete unknown?


[raw]The draft lyrics are expected to fetch between $1 and $2 million* at auction.  All readers of The 100 Billionth Person are invited to submit bids.  For convenience, you may enter your bid in the Comment section of this post.[/raw]

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* Bidders, please read the above carefully.  The minimum bid is $1.
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