Operation Global Media Domination: the confessional

TIAJesus, I hope I spelled that right. I am only genetically Catholic, after all. No doubt The Sister, who rode our Catholicest of the Catholic family name all the way to a very senior job in the Catholic school system (which, of course, neither of us attended although we did go to Baptist day camp), will correct me.

After she asks her secretary how to spell it.

In any case, I have a confession to make. I have taken you for granted. And judging by the hits yesterday, you didn’t seem to mind.

I think acetominophen is antithecal to blogging, or at least on two extra strength tylenol I wasn’t feeling very fresh, so I just didn’t post. Now, this may seem odd, given that what I usually post is just the online equivalent of shoving the newspaper under some handy person’s nose and saying, “check this out!” but nonetheless, one must be in the mood, in the zone, or in the groove, to blog effectively.

I took one look at the stats and said to myself the Britney pervs will keep this thing afloat overnight if I flake out, and so they did, all 1200 of them looking for the elusive porn tape. Guess what, guys? It’s not her. Now you can get on with the rest of your so-called lives.

You’re welcome.

So, I jammed the Axe Gang dance moves up there and went to bed, sulking and wisfully thumbing through all the workouts in Self and Shape that I cannot, in this shape, actually do. Gawd knows what I did to my left ankle right now, but it’s quite clear that I am being singled out for punishment in this life, as we finally have perfectly clear, crisp days that are perfect for rollerblading, and the T-factor has not yet become suffocating, although I did scare a bunch of oblivious Iranians and one tiny Hong Kong realtor wheeling and dealing on a cellphone when I zoomed between them. They’re just lucky I swerved rather than treating them like vertical speed bumps. I did pat the realtor on her shoulder, and she looked quite surprised. Perhaps she thought I was after her jacket?

In unrelated news, I spent the day cooped up and the energy had to go somewhere, somewhere that didn’t involve the feet, so I washed all the mold and lichens off the wall of my patio, revealing the pink stucco that lurks beneath. I also cleaned up most of the crap on the patio and looked wisfully at the iron potbellied stove that Carinthia gave me, but dismissed the idea of starting a fire, for fear my neighbors would smell smoke and become alarmed.

Then my upstairs neighbor threw his trash over the balcony and onto my patio.

The fire is lovely. 

size matters: real estate and roi

McMansionAccording to this veddy interesting article in Slate, the size of a CEO’s house may bear an inverse relationship to the performance of the company’s stock on his watch. If this proves to be true over the entire CEO sector, you can expect hysterical investors to drive Zillow to the top of the web, and Architectural Digest to become a hollow shell of its former self.

And George W. Bush to propose real estate offsets, wherein CEOs in monster McMansions get tax breaks for paying destitute Third Worlders to live eighteen to a room.

In a working paper titled “Where are the Shareholders’ Mansions?David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State wonder whether there is a relationship between CEO home-buying behavior and stock performance. (The title is a riff on the classic 1940 investment book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?.) In doing so, the two academics are invading one of the last preserves of executive privacy, and we should all be very grateful! …

Yermack and Liu insist there’s a solid academic reason to look through the keyholes. They want to figure out if a mansion purchase signals commitment or cashing out. A CEO who buys a 12,000-square-foot mansion could be showing his intent to stay for the long haul and to bust his butt so that he’ll have the cash to pay off the huge mortgage. In which case, you’d expect stocks of the companies where the CEO just bought an obscenely large house to thrive. Buy!

Or the purchase of an absurdly large house could signal entrenchment: The CEO is too comfortable with his position and his personal finances. He has made so much money that he can’t really be bothered with running the company. And the willingness to spend gazillions on a house—not to mention the furnishings, artwork, and baubles to fill it—betokens a general inattentiveness to costs. In which case, you’d expect stocks of the companies where the CEO just bought an obscenely large house to fare poorly. Sell!

Especially if, like me, you know that those CEOs often bought those houses with company-financed and company-guaranteed loans that are contractually obligated to be company-forgiven when the CEO leaves said company for whatever reason including stunning incompetence, mendacity, or criminality.

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