I thought this was a really interesting take on a declining share market:

Stocks are crashing, so you turn on the television to catch the latest market news. But instead of CNBC or CNN, imagine that you can tune into the Benjamin Graham Financial Network. On BGFN, the audio doesn’t capture that famous sour clang of the market’s closing bell; the video doesn’t home in on brokers scurrying across the floor of the stock exchange like angry rodents. Nor does BGFN run any footage of investors gasping on frozen sidewalks as red arrows whiz overhead on electronic stock tickers.

Instead, the image that fills your TV screen is the facade of the New York Stock Exchange, festooned with a huge banner reading: “SALE! 50% OFF!” As intro music, Bachman-Turner Overdrive can be heard blaring a few bars of their old barnburner, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Then the anchorman announces brightly, “Stocks became more attractive yet again today, as the Dow dropped another 2.5% on heavy volume – the fourth day in a row that stocks have gotten cheaper. Tech investors fared even better, as leading companies like Microsoft lost nearly 5% on the day, making them even more affordable. That comes on top of the good news of the past year, in which stocks have already lost 50%, putting them at bargain levels not seen in years. And some prominent analysts are optimistic that prices may drop still further in the weeks and months to come.”

The newscast cuts over to market strategist Ignatz Anderson of the Wall Street firm of Ketchum & Skinner, who says, “My forecast is for stocks to lose another 15% by June. I’m cautiously optimistic that if everything goes well, stocks could lose 25%, maybe more.”

“Let’s hope Ignatz Anderson is right,” the anchor says cheerily. “Falling stock prices would be fabulous news for any investor with a very long horizon. And now over to Wally Wood for our exclusive AccuWeather forecast.”

Taken from The Intelligent Investor revised edition, by Benjamin Graham with added commentary by Jason Zweig.

A week ago my car without warning decided that it was no longer capable of 300 horsepower and reduced itself to an unresponsive shuddering mess at anything past half-throttle.

I had replaced a hose a matter of hours before this occurred, but after spending far too much time ruling that out (I was convinced I must have caused it so I retraced my steps several times) the next course of action was to change the spark plugs… it’s difficult to get this sort of thing done during the week, so I had to put up with the shadow-of-its-former-self for several days before doing this.

The old spark plugs were indeed pretty well worn and the gap was twice the distance of the new plugs, but replacing them didn’t fix the problem. Having wasted too much time already, I took the car into the mechanic and left them to it. Turns out I was close – the problem was the coils, which basically convert the car’s 12 volts into a stupidly high voltage (over 35,000V) so that the spark plugs can do their business.

My assumption is that allowing the spark plugs to age for too long was what fried the coils; it seems logical that an excessive spark plug gap will cause the coils to do more work which resulted in their demise.

Moral of the story? Check your spark plugs. If I’d spent $60 replacing them a year ago I might have saved myself $550 today.

On the bright side, though, my car feels awesome again.

I happened across this theme this evening from a site called Design Disease. The logo and the header background may have to go along with a couple of other tweaks… but otherwise I like it so far.

In other news, I think I may be having blog design commitment issues.

Incredible.

I quickly grew tired of my previous blog theme, so did some hunting around and came across this one which is extremely minimalist. The last one was trying a bit hard to make boring content look cool; this look gets to the point.

I’ll be tweaking the colours and fonts a bit and possibly reorganising the post layout, but otherwise I think this theme will be a good fit.