I KNEW I would find them. Of the thousands and thousands of pictures I have looked at over the past month deciding which to keep and which to pitch and which to send to daughters to pitch (!), I knew I would run across the pics of my run in with a Maple tree.
Of course, they show up AFTER I’ve published the post.
Drat.
As the Sham-Wow guy used to say… or Paul Harvey used to say… but WAIT there’s more… here’s the rest of the story.
My brother was killed in a car wreck about a year before my wreck.
He was driving the Death Trap - a Corvair Monza convertible with four speed. The car that made Ralph Nader famous. We both liked to drive fast. He died. I didn’t. He was just a few miles from home on a sweeping curve. The kind of curve that someone driving a sporty little car would try to take at high speed. The rear of the car passed the front and the Corvair ended up backing into a tree.
Comparing the damage to the two cars, a reasonable person would guess that I would be the dead kid. The damage to the Corvair was a semi-circle crunch that matched the diameter of the tree.
But can you imagine the whiplash?
My dad had to go by the wreckage of the car I was driving on the way to the hospital where they took me. He was positive he had another dead son. Can you imagine the feeling in his stomach?
By the time I was 23 my brother and my son had died.
As an owner of Google, I naturally feel obligated to use their services as often and as much as possible. Why just mere minutes ago I Google Searched ™ is it down for everyone to find DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.
I map my kayaking using Google Maps, email via Gmail, Flickr.com to grab photos like the one above, or Google Images. Google News, Google this and Google that, if it can’t be Googled it isn’t worth it.
About an hour after warming up our fireplace, my husband and I were startled by the rumbling sound of what we thought was a low flying helicopter. My husband darted outside to look for one, but there was nothing of any aircraft in sight. He did tell me about the thick billowing smoke coming from our chimney.
Nervous, I quickly Googled “chimney fires” and within a second the first link caught my attention. At this site I learned that the rumbling sound is what many people hear when their chimney have caught fire! I then called 911 and they advised us to get out of the house right away!
And if you have a Google story, tell Google about it. Just make it as stupid as this one, please.
UPDATE: I just Googled it and Flickr.com is owned by Yahoo.com.
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! But a stock picker says this is a good thing. I’ll leave all the punny stuff for the more lame bloggers (but commenters can have at it.) Investing in funeral homes is a wise and prudent thing to do, says one investment anal-cyst.
I didn’t know there were chain funeral homes. I knew that many funeral homes had multiple locations, but thought they all had a grey haired woman sitting in a back room someplace running things. Ha! Service Corporation Inc. has a friggin’ “brand.”
Seems there are 38 locations within 100 miles of my old bones right where I sit. They have 20,000 people all over the place just waiting to plant the huge baby boomer generation.
And those baby boomers dying as fast as they can, means the hedge funders are loving the potential upside for being in the downside. (damn! hard not to write punny, sorry.)
“There is a demographic benefit as the Baby Boom ages and the death rate rises,” said Dana Walker, a portfolio manager at Kalmar Investments Inc., which oversees $3 billion in Greenville, Delaware. “The flow-through, in a top-line and a bottom-line sense, ought to be very generous.”
Yeah, flow through, that’s us boomers. We’re just flowing through!
If you look at the number of deaths that occurred within the U.S. over the last few years, it’s been relatively flat, Ryan, 43, said. When you get out into the Baby Boomer years, you’d begin to expect that volume would increase to the tune of 2 percent a year.
Now that’s interesting, the number of deaths in the U.S. has been “relatively flat.” I don’t think about death much (never) but it sure seems that there would be a change in the death rate – up or down. Either we are getting healthier and living longer, or vice versa. But it just doesn’t compute that the death rate would be flat.
We’re invested in the boomer economy: jails (CXW), replacement knees (ZMH), blood tests (DGX), pet fixers (WOOF), cancer sticks (MO), cancer drugs (NVS), Velveeta (KFT), fake hearts (CTE) and anti-chaffing powder (JNJ).
So we’re kinda betting against dying.
But maybe we should consider that our future lies in death.
The company yesterday offered to buy its largest competitor, Stewart Enterprises Inc., for $11 a share in cash, or about $1.04 billion, based on 94.6 million shares outstanding as of April 30. Stewart rejected a bid of $9.50 a share earlier this month. Together, the companies would control about 20 percent of the market, Ransom estimated.
Cornering the market on the death business isn’t a bad strategy. Both SCI and Stewart are beaten down.
SCI peaked in the mid-$50s in summer 1996 when its stock split 2-for-1. Stewart stock reached the mid-$50s in spring 1998, when it also split 2-for-1. Those party-poopers, the SEC, said both companies would have to restate earnings based on the fact they counted “pre-need” revenue before the need was needed. SCI sells for about nine bucks a share now.
Dumbass stock market. If the companies were worth $50 a share a dozen years ago, why are they now just worth $9? Stock Anal-cysts that’s why.
Bah, Die Boomer Die, doesn’t seem to be a strategy we should pursue. Even the blog is dead.
I’m going to live forever…
On the surface this seemed like a bandwagon I could leap onto like a musical instrument salesman would jump on a librarian.
But during a five minute car ride which I nearly ran over a jogger, a walker, a pokey driver, and a kid on a bike, I decided there already is just the right number of people in the world today in my neighborhood.
Look at our history, you’ve been messing with us since day one. That equals approximately two hundred and fifty thousand years of you being a dick. You’ve starved, dehydrated, frozen, overheated, plagued, diseased, sickened, drowned, and crushed us, to name just a few. Oh, and perhaps the most sinister of all, poisoned us with berries that look very similar, if not more delicious, then the ones that are usually okay to eat.
It’s one of those good ideas that just needs a little tweaking. For example, I would allow death by:
dehydration
freezing
boiling
drowning
crushing
injectables
car wrecks
You have to be really stupid to die from those causes. So let the stupid die.
I’m tempted to add starving to the list to, but some places just can’t grow food because of the sand or the poppies.
I’m saying the foundation over-reached and should have focused on giving death a notice strictly in these areas
While we’re chopping down your favorite guises—infectious and parasitic diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory tract infections and AIDS…
I think this foundation is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates because he hasn’t gotten Microsoft Everlasting Life out of beta.
I bet Google ™ has it.
I found this signature recently, it’s pretty gay, but no since letting it linger in a dark folder.
