On waking

It's spooky quiet, dark and cold at 4:30 in the morning. Now awake, there is nothing to do but think. Too early to get out from under the warm covers and too late to go back to sleep. Whatever dreams that were playing out are now forgotten and its clear I am back from those travels. Of all the fresh thoughts rushing by, one stands out: I have made it to another day of life.

There will come a morning when new days like this will not come. There will be no more. So while there is still time and life ahead, maybe its best to look at what still awaits. It may or may not end with a rainbow, but no matter what, it will end without regrets. That is my promise to myself.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
And there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
That don't get lost.
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you.

Late September, 2002. I'm sitting on a wooden stairway that leads down to the beach at Kiawah. Off to the south, I can see the dimming edge of the sunset reflected off of the water. I don't remember why I was there or what thoughts were swirling around inside, but I do remember the sound of the surf against the sand and the smell of the ocean carried by the wind. A block away, my two young daughters sit doing homework, or by now, watching TV and a small white dog named Clare waits patiently, eagerly, lovingly, for my return. At that place and time, I didn't know this flawless moment would come back a decade later on a cold January morning in the desert. I didn't know the speed of life. I didn't understand timeless perfection.

There is a certain beauty to life, a magical journey through time. We share those moments with loved ones and each one of us looks back in longing affection at those simpler times. It's now 5:00am and the first light of a new day is streaming across the sky. Laying here alone, I love you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true.

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

A rare sports blog

I didn't watch the game between the Ravens and the Patriots. It was the consolation game, the contest for the expansion league's "championship." But I did watch the real NFL championship game, the 49ers vs. the Giants. The game they call the Super Bowl is just a bunch of clever commercials, interspersed with a game between the AFC and NFL.

Note, I said "NFL" as there is and has always been just one professional football league. Buffalo. Cincinnati. Jacksonville. Who are they kidding? So this is what we got Sunday: San Francisco went deep into the 4th quarter without a converting a single 3rd down. The Giants made the playoffs with a 9-7 record, meaning in the regular season,they lost almost as many games as they won. In a virtual tie game for all of the 4th quarter and into overtime, neither offense could score. Only a fumble, make that two fumbles, on punt returns allowed the winning team to barely win the game.

Oh, the worst of it is now we have two weeks of New York and Boston coverage by the sports media. By the day of the contest, a game between an expansion league team and a mediocre 9-7 team will be heralded as the game of the century. Its all about selling commercial time and media hype. Its not football, its cheesy business. Hey, who was the college national champion? Had to think about it, didn't you?

That's enough bellyaching for me. The Wings and Blues are on in a few minutes. The St. Louis Blues, another expansion team. Will it never end?

The Best Stock Advice In The World

At the beginning of the high tech bubble in 1997 you could have bought Apple Computer at $5.00 a share. It went to $37 at the high-tech peak in early 2000 then dropped back to $10 at the 2002 market bottom. By 2008 it was over $200. At the market lows of early 2009, back under $100. Three years later, as I write these words, Apple Computer is trading at $420 a share. Let's throw out the riff-raff, in 15 years AAPL went from $5 to $420.

I bring this to your attention to illustrate just how much wealth is available for the taking in the stock market. Real estate? You bought a house for $100K in 1985 and sold it for $500K in 2000. That's a 400% return in 15 years. Donald Trump is calling. When Apple rose from $5 to just $25 you had that same 400% return. Sorry, Donald, I can't come to the phone right now.

Knowing that there are opportunities to make money, big money, in stocks is a starting point. Few people understand the very basic tenant of investing. The illustration above of Apple is an outlier, an extreme example of good investment fortune. Or is it?

You can look at Apple as one huge 15 year long-trend. But, AAPL got cut in half in 2008-2009. Who has the grit to stay with a stock that has a 50% haircut in the midst of a scary bear market? Or asked another way, who can forecast the future direction of Apple or for that matter, any stock price?

Take another look at the chart above and note that there are red and blue bars. The red bars are when my trend algorithm said to get out of AAPL, it was going down. The blue bars represent those times when my trend algorithm said to hold AAPL LONG, it was in an uptrend. The algorithm wasn't perfect. It was late a bar or two every time the trend changed. But it did catch 95% of the movement of the stock, both up and down.

The best stock advice in the world is to buy stocks that go up and sell stocks that go down. It used to be a Will Rogers joke:

"Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it."

Rogers had the right idea, Harris has the right algorithm. Buy stocks that go up and sell stocks that go down. Listen to the math, its the best stock advice in the world.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Israel Ka'ano'i Kamakawiwo'ole was born at Kuakini Hospital in Honolulu The son of Evangeline Leinani Kamakawiwo'ole (aka Keale) and Henry Kalei'aloha Naniwa (aka Tiny). He lived the first 10 years of his life in Palolo Valley on O'ahu. Then the family moved to Makaha.Young Israel was surrounded by music, his uncle was Moe Keale, a well-known musician, and his parents worked at a Waikiki bar where many of the legends of Hawaiian music performed.

At age six, Israel learned to play the ukelele after watching and listening to his mother, his older brother, and his uncle. His first performed publicly at around age eleven when he and Skippy, his older brother, were called up to the stage by bands that played regularly for tourists at their parents' workplace.

On 1990 Israel Kamakawiwo'ole decided to start recording on his own. His first record,Ka 'Ano'i, became the most popular Hawaiian album of 1990, His second solo album, Facing Future, was released in 1993, and in 1995 the album E Ala E featured a duet with Skippy (using special studio effects). His next album N Dis Life(1996) continued to sell very well.

Throughout his last years, Iz suffered from severe obesity, at one point carried 769 pounds (350 kg). Israel died of weight-related respiratory illness on June 26th, 1997. Over 10,000 people attended his funeral on July 10th 1997, The wooden coffin lay at the Capitol building in Honolulu. He was the third person in Hawaiian history to be accorded this honor (the other two were Senator Spark Matsunaga and Governor John A. Burns). His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at M'kua Beach on July 12, 1997.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

Laura Marling

I did not intend to write another piece so soon after putting up Song for the Holidays. But then I heard Laura Marling. She is a 21 year-old singer-songwriter from Hampshire, England. The music I post at AllAllan is filled with intense, deeply personal songs. Until I heard Laura Marling I thought they didn't write songs like that anymore. I was wrong.

Song for the Holidays

And now the holiday season is upon us. In my family's home on Roselawn in Detroit, it was sometime in the 50's and everyone was still alive. We lighted a candle for each of the eight nights of Chanukah. I was a seven-year-old boy whose only dreams were of a Davy Crocket toy rifle or a new bike. The real dreams, the ones that weren't about things, were still to come. One night it was gelt. Silver and gold wrapped chocolate that we devoured as our parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents looked on, proud of the job they had done making the children happy. Learned by their example, inherited from their genes, over the years and through the loss of them all, one by one, we that are left are left still making our children happy, making ourselves proud.

In 1966 I was in High School and we got two weeks off for the holidays. I sat in my room listening to folk music on the local public radio station or playing the music of a strange-named duo, eloquent, piercing, inspiring and personal. Simon and Garfunkel had just released Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I embraced the poetry and feelings that I thought only I had known. Who were these guys?

In the 1990's the holidays were spent on the beach in South Carolina. Even with the summer people coming back to the island with their families, the beach was still nearly empty. We rode our bikes and drove into town to see the lights at James Island Park. My kids were given Chanukah just the way I had learned it and my little one was in charge of counting the nights, making sure a gift and new candle were part of each of the eight nights. My mother would have been proud. She passed way too soon, but she would have been proud.

How things have changed. I am so far away from those times, those aunts and uncles and parents and cousins and grandparents. I am so far from my kids, in geography and time and regrets. The holiday now is filled not with celebration, or faith, but sports on TV. We no longer have a single home. We have our own homes, with each one of the four of us caught up in the holidays of others, relying instead on phone calls and text messages.

The holidays have changed too. now they are about colored days that refer to special sales of the things that people buy. The ads are draped over our lives, filled with cars in bows and expensive jewelry that generate guilt and insufficiency. How can you love her if you don't buy her this and that? How can I love her? How can I love her? How can I love her?

Someone I didn't know died today. I read about it on The Drudge Report. He was born in 1949, the same year as me. He never made it to this year's holidays, this year's gifts, this year's guilt and this year's sports on TV.

Silence like a cancer grows.


A

Guest Editorial - Gerald Celente on MF Global

NNVC - maturity knocking

In 2009 I forecast that NNVC could be a triple digit stock (over $100/share) by 2014. That forecast was based on their game-changing anti-viral technology that has the potential to eradicate the most heinous viral diseases known to civilization. No hyperbole, just facts.

It takes time and money to go from here ($0.70/share currently) to there. They have the money now and we have the time.

NanoViricides, Inc. Announces That It Has Submitted a Pre-IND Meeting Request to the US FDA For Its Anti-Influenza Clinical Drug Candidate, FluCide™
Submission Represents a Major Advance for the Company


WEST HAVEN, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- NanoViricides, Inc. (OTC BB: NNVC) (the “Company”) announced today that it has submitted a pre-IND Meeting Request to the US FDA. The Company has requested an initial meeting with the US FDA to review the Company’s proposed strategy and plan for conducting safety/toxicology studies and human clinical trials required for approval of its anti-influenza clinical drug candidate, FluCide™ (i.e. NV-INF-1).

“This submission is a major milestone in the Company’s program to obtain US FDA approval for FluCide™,” said Eugene Seymour, MD, MPH, CEO, adding, “FluCide has demonstrated excellent efficacy and safety when treating influenza infections in our animal studies. We anticipate similar strong results in humans when the drug becomes available for human use.”

The Company has submitted required introductory documentation with the meeting request letter in consultation with the Company’s regulatory matters consultants, viz. the Biologics Consulting Group. The Company plans to submit additional briefing documents at least thirty days before the FDA meeting, in compliance with the FDA guidelines.

This pre-IND meeting request submission follows the Company’s recent announcement that it has chosen a clinical candidate, NV-INF-1, in its anti-influenza drug program (FluCide™) to develop for regulatory submissions both domestically and internationally. It is estimated that there are about 50 million cases of influenza annually in the USA alone, and about 250,000 patients are hospitalized for influenza. The Company believes that a single course of therapy that can be easily administered by a medical office is likely to be feasible for out-patients, with no additional follow-on treatment necessary. This expectation is based on the following results from its animal studies: (1) the extremely high treatment effectiveness in inhibiting the cycle of infection, virus expansion and spread of infection and, (2) the significantly long lasting effects of the drug treatment after the drug is discontinued. In addition to out-patients, the Company also plans to develop an indication for hospitalized severe cases of influenza.

The Company has recently announced that it is working on developing cGMP (“current Good Manufacturing Practices”) manufacturing capability for the production of its drug candidates. cGMP manufactured materials will be required when the Company is ready to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the US FDA.

JFK

JFK
May 29, 1917 - Nov 22, 1963
RIP

Hampton Junior High School
Detroit, Michigan
Ninth Grade English
Last class of the day
Principal walked somberly into room
Whispered to teacher
Turns to class
The President is dead.
School dismissed
Go home.

Four friends walking home
Stunned silence
Frozen in time
Filled with fear
and apprehension

Vietnam War
3,000,000 Vietnamese, dead
52,000 friends walking home, dead

Number one song, 11_22_63
Dale & Grace: "I'm leaving it up to you."

Memories of Life

The world would be a better place without leaf blowers. There used to be rakes. They were used to silently sweep leaves into small piles which could be picked up and placed in trash bags. When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, my father, bother and I would get out there on Thanksgiving morning and the three of us would rake up a big pile of leaves and place it just off of the curb at the end of the driveway. In the years before they made burning leaves illegal, my Dad would light a fire and burn the pile off into the crisp autumn air. I can still smell the smoldering mound. Then we would all go inside and watch the Lions game.

Memories of life. Popping up here on my blog from time to time, so that some day my daughters will have a piece of their father to remember and maybe show to their children, who maybe will ask about a photograph on a table or discovered in an old album.

There are some things that are felt but never said. Some questions that get asked, for which are no answers.

Why didn't this one work?

"Your head just inches from my own, your toes cradled beneath mine. Your breathing slow and measured. You lay beside me, safe, content and deeply asleep. Ever so gently your hand slips into mine. Loosely, then tight, then loose again. You are drifting, immersed in some far away dream. Quiet lovers, in soft cadence, intertwined. I could have stayed forever."

These moments I write about; No finer gifts could ever touch my life.

But stories always end,
And if you read between the lines,
You'd know that I'm just tryin' to understand
The feelin's that you lack.
I never thought I could feel this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it.
I don't know where we went wrong,
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back