I've gave up facebook for lent. For some reason I just had to hop on the band wagon. The weird part is that I did give up something last year and in the long run it did improve my life to a certain extent for the positive.

I think that in some respect facebook has gotten a bit too big for me right now. It started when I clicked on some dude I went to high school that was part of the "people you may know" tool. For curiosity sake I just browsed his friends & then saw the brother of an ex girlfriend that really F'd me up in the head. It just came to the point of my mind said to me: "FOR GOD SAKES DON'T DO IT; DON'T CLICK THERE; NO GOOD WILL EVER COME OUT OF IT, ONLY PAIN!!!" A part of me has to say this is part of me squashing the curiosity temptation, although I'm not in any danger of doing so.

Yea, it looks like we're going to go below Dow 7000.

But the market is going to come back, Just as the suckers that are still waiting for NASDAQ 5000 back in March of '00 We're soon to be @ NASDAQ 1000 in a month or two.

Just keep on shorting stocks as right now as tha'ts the only way to make money. When that 12 year support was broken around 7600 from when Bill Clinton was still in office it just opened the floodgates breaking the levy. So all those gains for the last 12 + years are now toast.

Now I ask how many kids are going to be helping out their parents until they die, instead of collecting a nice inheritance & blowing it on a Corvette & Harley with a vacation home somewhere warm to go along with it?

I'm just not too exciting these days. The highlight of my weekend was going over to Canada & hanging out with a guy I worked with 10 years ago. I meet him at the OTB and just passed the time betting horses. The highlights of the evening was when these 2 guys hit really big. The first one was a friend of my former co-worker & he hit for about $700 or so on a trifecta 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Then one Asian guy came looking like he just got out of a restaurant job by the way he was looking, bet what looked like $100 on some race from Penn National & hit $3700 dollars on a "superfecta" ticket meaning that he had in exact order 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Given that Penn National is a cheap racetrack in the sense that the horses are pretty much almost glue factory stock anything can happen. Needless to say he bought the whole place a round of beer.

The other big deal was the Variety Club or as they call it The Variety Kids Telethon on Ch 7. Is it me or could Buffalo be one of the last places to conduct such things? I mean having 24 hours of programing with people singing and doing other crazy acts for pledge money must have been mind blowing in the 50's and 60's but I can't think of another city that I have been in where they still do that kind of thing. Plus it isn't really the same without Irv or some other kick ass old school personality.

I remember watching some OK indie film by Atom Egoyan which has a telethon as one of it's key plot points which made me smile. But yea, Where are you Jerry Lewis? I guess in a way we still have them when Ch 17 begs for money but they're just really selling you some Ken Burns DVD set & a tote bag.

Actually this may beat out Cramer's "THEY KNOW NOTHING..." Rant



Part Two later on in the day, a bit more toned down and more debate from the other side.

I flew out of Buffalo on the day of that doomed flight. It was kind of strange in retrospect as something was odd but I couldn't put my finger on it.

I was checking the Buffalo News website around 10 but it originally sounded like a Cessna plane crash. Then somehow I flipped through cable news and it was kind of messed up watching the news last night regarding the whole thing. What got me was CNN was using mostly Ch2's stuff with that skype camera & some of Ch 4 stuff, so watching it from Florida was kind of weird. Since to me hearing Scott Levin & Kevin O'Connell was too familiar.

What a great interview from Chris Kausner, he hit the moment perfectly. There is nothing more terrifying and horrific than hearing the scream of a mother who just has been informed that her child is dead.

So yea looking back as I flew out of the airport the same day it just seemed like walking past some strange dude & later realizing that he was some basketball star or something else that you didn't realize at the time.

On another note coming back today was also kind of weird. As I was sitting in the Sarasota airport I saw the "26 seconds of terror" video on CNN, not a good was to start a days long journey on a plane. Then flying in to Buffalo, I sat next to some nice rich attractive older blond haired blue eyed woman from Clarence & talked about it briefly. The funny part was that we didn't fly near Clarence as usually it seems to be the normal flight pattern. We actually ended up flying over Niagara Falls/Tonawanda as I could make out Grand Island and the Seneca Niagara Casino. Now I've flown into BUF many times and never remember flying into the airport this way, once I remember flying out this way going west but not coming in this way. When you think about it you don't want to look out and see a crater with an airplane tail sticking out as you approach the runway, as it was still daylight when we landed. The woman next to us was asking about the body of water we flew next to which was Lake Erie, right before she just put her hands over her face as we began our final descent.

Yea it was kind of freaky flying in today, but the way I look at it, the number isn't going to come up again for a while. Buffalo went 50+ years without a crash, the number was due. Plus if you take a look at all the flights that have been added since we have become a secondary market airport to Toronto, we only increased out odds over the last 10+ years or so. Heck on the ride back on the long term shuttle bus, I was the only US residence besides the driver, everyone else was Canadian.