Chocolate, The Stock Market and Movies
Well, I’m about to buy my third chocolate bar as I watch the market drop 600 points before my very eyes. But a lot of us knew that a bit of a crash was on its way as we run out of government stimulus to prop everything up, and as it becomes more and more common knowledge that the U.S. is in a debt spiral.
Sea salt chocolate, by the way, is absolutely amazing.
So what the hell is happening? Well, most of us that live in the Hamptons have the ability to gauge how the stock market is doing by how well we are treated by the New York City tourists that come out. For example, if you are a waiter in the Hamptons you know that the stock market is doing well when you screw up an order and the guy at the table says, “Don’t worry about it, just send out another filet and I’ll spot you for the mistake. Here’s a 50 for your trouble.” [expand]
And you know that the stock market is doing bad if you are a real estate agent in the Hamptons and your customer says this to you after you’ve show them your 50th listing: “This is nice, but do you have anything that is a steal? We are looking for a home that will basically be given to us.”
Yep, it’s been ugly out there the last couple of days.
So the stock market has wiped out the gains it made for the year in a matter of hours, so what? No big deal, right, RIGHT?!?!?!
Well, it’s definitely bad out there, pretty much the only thing that is doing well is gold, so if you got some jewelry or you are a gold investor, good for you.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: until we figure out that we can’t have a consumer-only economy, we are in big trouble. I’ve been worried about this since college when I studied economics and watched as we outsourced American jobs to other countries. Manufacturing, producing, building things is what an economy is, you can’t just take that away from a nation’s economy and expect everything to work itself out on borrowed money. Eventually, the nations that you outsource your businesses to figure out how to buy goods themselves. Remember when Henry Ford built automobiles and then paid his workers enough money to buy those very automobiles? Remember that in history class?! Where are the economies now? They are quickly being sent out of our country and into other countries and then we are simply borrowing money to cover the difference. IT’S CRAZY!!!!
I digress. I need to think about something else.
I’d like to segue right now into a very, very good movie that I just saw in the theater last night, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I really thought that this movie was going to be terrible because I’ve never been a big fan of C.G.I. integrated into movies to the point where it is basically the whole movie. But I will say, this movie really delivers and I highly, highly recommend that you watch it. The regular readers of this column will know that I know movies and always make sure to let them know about them.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not just good, it is awesome. I bring movies that I see up to the awesome level based on one factor, and that factor is whether or not the audience clapped at the end of the movie.
The audience at the Southampton movie theater last Sunday night clapped when they watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and therefore, it was awesome.
When I left the theater, I wanted to climb a tree.