Gold Bar Espresso (Tempe, AZ)

Something has to be said about listening to disco while reading about eastern philosophy. It just feels right. Disco is definitely very Taoist. The music exudes an undeniable "life is sweet and best served chilled" quality. If Lao-Tzu was around today, he would spin deep house and trip-hop on his phat decks during his many house parties. None of this CD nonsense, you know he'd be a record man; bobbing his head and smiling along to the beat. He'd probably have furry furniture too.

Buddha would probably dig on Linkin Park, Staind and System of a Down whine sessions. With the "my suburban life sucks and my momma won't up my allowance" following that rap metal and new metal has, he'd fit right in as the fat poet kid who gets picked by the jocks. Where else would he get his "life is suffering, but I'll acheive a higher consciousness" philosophy? Hours of telling himself that "one day, they'll all regret not seeing how brilliant I am." That's where. He'd probably the type of kid that sings along to Jimmy Eat World between poetry slams and trips to the local Hot Topic. A decade earlier and he would be a skater punk headbanging to Nirvana. In more ways than one.

Ganesh would be a glowstick ninja. Not to that happy "I'm a Barbie girl" anthem bullshit, he'd be a thrasher to the harsher, mind-fucking goa trance. This isn't a matter of ethnicity. Think of it this way: Where could he just enjoy his fucking music in public? Answer: amid a bunch of acid freaks who wouldn't notice that he has an elephant head and four arms. Plus, think about how awesome glowsticking would look with that many limbs.

I think it'd be hilarious if Jesus didn't listen to Creed. He would probably drive His friends around listening to Janet and Coldplay. Obviously, He'd have a soft spot for Norah Jones and maybe have a Celine Dion disc lost in the collection somewhere. He'd enjoy just about every Michelle Branch equivalent popular at the time, but His staple would definitely be Matchbox 20, a bit of the Counting Crows and some Shakira and J. Lo sheepishly thrown into the mix (to which he'd shrug and reply "what can I say? Jesus loves the bootie.") The catch is that the mp3 player on the desk at home has nothing but Tool and Marilyn Manson on it just because you know the Son of God's got a Supreme sense of irony that the people who hang around him are bound to misunderstand.

Some of our readers may remember that awhile ago, our tagline was "Your Mac is incompatible with our site." It's true, blinkingtwelve looks atrociously ugly on a mac. Hideous. I mean like "hit by the ugly bus and dragged down ugly boulevard" ugly. We were proud of this. We were proud to offend the sensibilities of our nonexistent mac user constituency. It made us feel big in a very small way.

Unfortunately, I made "the switch" last month. For those who are unfamilar with the recent mac ads, this "switch" doesn't have anything to do with my sexuality. I bought myself an ibook for christmas. (I got my brother a deck of cards which incidentally was his deck to begin with. The rest of the family got to share a DVD rental.) Since then, I have been just boggled by the sheer ugliness of the site and in my typical plodding way, have been slowly tamping down the ugly to a more tolerable level. The coding tends to come in short bursts between long bouts of sleeping, watching TV and ass-picking, but finally, there has been enough progress for me to put my attention elsewhere. Like writing. So, there will be more of that soon. I think. Thanks for your continued patience.

blockbuster video has this deal where you pay $20 a month and get as many dvd's / videos as you want for a month (the only catch is you can only have two at a time.) this deal was obviously created without people like me in mind. I went through as many as I could without feeling like a complete waste of space. given that I still managed to get out of the house a bit, I'd say I did pretty well with 27. here are quick reviews of all of them.

a simple plan - very well done. I get a kick out of movies where decisions anyone would make cause things to go horribly wrong. I was also pleasantly surprised by billy bob thorton's performance. I took him for a tool for the longest time.

spy game - a way to spend two hours in front of the idiot box. not a terrible way, but definitely not a great way.

death to smoochy - great black comedy. surprisingly violent, but in a good way. (?) the colors of the movie annoyed the piss out of me, but the movie itself made up for it. robin williams isn't too annoying, jon stewart's hilarious. ed norton is good as always. I liked the children's song entitled "stepdad's not really mean, he's just adjusting."

heist - a bit too cool for it's own good. mamet (the writer) occasionally seems a bit infatuated with his own creativity. gets in the way of things at times. other times it's just cool:

j [referring to money]: makes the world go round.
b: what's that?
j: gold.
b: some people say love.
j: well, they're right too. it is love. love of gold.

osmosis jones - I got a kick out of it because of the "city as an analogy for the body" thing. outside of that, it's annoyingly reminiscent of a non-musical fern gully.

manhunter - first version of "red dragon". no question why they had to try again... this one sucks. a few friends said it best when they described it as "a bit too miami vice."

the man who wasn't there - fucking great film noir by the coen brothers. another good performance by billy bob.

kung pow - I'm embarrassed to have this be part of the list. I should've been trashed off my ass. at least then, I'd have an excuse. it's a lot like MST3K; gets old after about 5 minutes. annoying after 10. like an idiot, I kept watching it, thinking that it would get funny.

ocean's 11 - very cool. I like how it looks and feels cool. whether or not the plot makes any damn sense at all, whether or not the movie's actually good, I don't really care. the whole movie just has an aura of cool to it. my mom has a crush on brad pitt. that weirds me out.

brotherhood of the wolf - silly french action flick. decent hong kong style fighting / editing, but there is a ton of idiocy to wade through.

godfather part ii - incredible. surprisingly enough, this is the first time I saw it. don't feel like watching the third just because I've heard such bad things about it and I have such good feelings about the series right now. that probably didn't make any sense, but whatever. who reads this drivel anyway?

the scorpion king - I was tired. this was just the right amount of stupid for my mood at the time. I am in love with Kelly Hu.

waking life - hard to describe. a loose collection of conversations / monologues on various topics concerning life, meaning, dreams, hope, etc. even if you think the conversations are idiotic, the movie's interesting to watch.

training day - great movie. partway through the movie, you start wanting to beat the bloody hell out of denzel washington. that's awesome.

people vs. larry flynt - very good. yay first amendment. got me to thinking that maybe I should get into smut-peddling. seems lucrative enough and it's not like I'm up to anything at the moment. surprisingly, I was very impressed by courtney love's performance.

novacaine - unexpected in a good way. could've been done better but I suppose I've seen much much worse.

this is spinal tap - by the same people who did best in show. fucking great. I got an enormous kick out of it. others might not. I'll have to see it a couple more times when I'm more awake.
"it's such a fine line between clever and stupid."

van wilder - yay. another teen party movie. it's what high school kids think college is. hell, it might even be what college is; I'm not saying that I didn't go to a socially dysfunctional university.

sexy beast - I just wasn't in the mood to see this. I like ben kingsley and everything (been a fan since sneakers), but I was horribly irritated by everything about this movie and shut it off after about 30 minutes.

spiderman - this was fun.

the sum of all fears - someone else rented this while I was away. I watched it because it was in the house. I hate affleck and I hate the fact that this movie was rented under my name. this movie was a waste of time. I mean, more of a waste of time than movies typically are.

blackhawk down - excellent. good lord. fantastic. stupendous. ridley scott is awesome. I felt extremely patriotic. then I went to sleep.

along came a spider - let's have another "morgan freeman plays a world-weary, seen-it-all detective" movie. cool. thank you.

the powerpuff girls - I'm not explaining this to people who aren't already infatuated with the series. people who are know why I rented this. people who aren't won't understand.

italian for beginners - shot with a handy cam by Danish idiots about Danish idiots. complete fucking waste of time. I felt ripped off even with the blockbuster deal.

kiss the girls - the same movie as along came a spider. like the exact same movie.

the mothman prophesies - damn this was creepy. supposedly based on real events. made it even more creepy to me. that and watching it by myself in the dark. I guess it depends on how much you buy into it. p.s. I hate Richard Gere.

This is the first part of a paper originally submitted to my computer science professor to fulfill a graduation requirement. It's probably a bit dry for many of our readers, but it offers a long-winded reply to the faq "so, what the hell have you been up to lately?" Lately, I've been spending a part of my copious free time re-examining the topics I researched in this paper in hopes of coding the theories into some sort of usable application.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."
--Kay from Men in Black

I began my research by looking into Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) specifically to examine whether or not the ideas behind it could be coded into a useful program. I found that the basic tenets of portfolio theory, as put forth by the two books Modern Portfolio Theory and A Random Walk Down Wall Street provide a more than adequate basis for a tool that could assist moderately experienced investors. Specifically, MPT readily translates into a tool or tools which can: a/ analyze a single stock's "risk" in relation to the overall market b/ select a particular set of stocks and analyze the overall riskiness of the portfolio, and possibly (but less likely), c/ select a stock in order to diversify an existing portfolio and thereby reduce that portfolio's risk.

As such however, MPT unfortunately provides few, if any, starting points for novice investors with no preferences for particular companies. Both books emphasize the seeming futility of attempting to analyze individual stocks. They outline a great many studies displaying that stock prices move in a random or near-random manner and preach that examining past performance cannot lead to useful predictions about future performance.

I feel that despite all this, more consideration must be paid to the selection of individual stocks. Perhaps, there is no perfect system for predicting which stocks will result in the highest returns, but there must be ways to weed out those with little to no hope of doing well in the future. By narrowing the pool of stocks to choose from, novice investors may have an easier time selecting stocks and are thereby more likely to benefit from the contributions of MPT.

I also feel that the two books are limited in the fact that they do not appear take into consideration very recent developments in online trading and information dispersal. I will continue with a more in depth description of ways to extend an MPT tool after a brief overview of the basic tenets.

Modern Portfolio Theory

The foundations of MPT lie in the belief that central criterion for investors to consider is risk. In simple terms, risk can be understood to be the probability for disappointment-- the probability that future returns will deviate from expected returns. "Investment risk... is the chance that expected security returns will not materialize an, in particular, that the securities you hold will fall in price." (Malkiel 201) This is more tangibly understood as a measure of the variability of returns.

One technique for quantifying risk is to examine the historic data of a particular stock, determine the set of monthly returns for the time period, and then calculate the standard deviation of this set. For instance, the S 500-Stock Index was found to have an average return of about 1 percent per month or about 11 percent per year with a standard deviation of about 4.5 percent per month (Malkiel 204). Given an extensive history of closing prices, which may be found at finance.yahoo.com, www.bigcharts.com and other financial websites, a script or program could easily compute the average monthly returns and the corresponding risks of individual companies.

MPT further states that by diversifying a portfolio, an investor can reduce his or her overall risk as long as the companies that comprise the portfolio do not move completely in tandem with each other. "As long as there is some lack of parallelism in the fortunes of the individual companies in the economy, diversification will always reduce risk." (Malkiel 209) Correlation coefficients can be calculated by examining the extent that companies hit their peaks and valleys at the same time. As I understand it, the mathematics are reasonably complex, but the upshot is that not even negative covariance is necessary to reduce the risks of a portfolio, "anything less that a perfect positive correlation can potentially reduce risk." (Malkiel 211) The more extensive a portfolio, the less variability in returns up to about ten stocks. At that point, adding more stocks to a portfolio does not appear to reduce risk further. The catch, however, is that there is no way to completely eliminate risk so that an investment will yield guaranteed outcomes.

It's an obvious assertion, but the reasoning behind this is that there are two types of risk associated with stocks. One is "systematic" risk, or the risks associated with the general market fluctuations. These risks stemmed from basic unpredictability of the economic movements as a whole and "the tendency for all stocks to go along with the general market, at least to some extent." (Malkiel 221) The other type of risk is called "unsystematic" risk and refers to the risks coming from the particular company being considered. Expected and unexpected contracts, new discoveries and shifts in management all contribute to a stock's unsystematic risk.

Diversification reduces the unsystematic risks particular to each of the companies but obviously reduce the risk of entering the market as a whole. Systematic risks are quantified with a measure called beta. Beta is very basically a comparison between the fluctuations of a particular stock and the fluctuations of a broad market index.

The calculation begins by assigning a beta of 1 to a broad market index, such as the S & P 500. If a stock has a beta of 2, then on average it swings twice as far as the market. If the market goes up 10 percent, the stock tends to rise 20 percent. If a stock has a beta of 0.5, it tends to be more stable than the market (it will go up or down 5 percent when the market rises or declines 10 percent). Professionals often call high-beta stocks aggressive investments and level low-beta stocks as defensive. (Malkiel 222)

What follows is that portfolios with betas equal 1 should close resemble the S & P 500 in its risks and expected returns. Investors who can stomach more volatility for greater expected returns have a method of systematically increasing the risks they take.

part 2

Part two will cover the limitations of beta as well as possible ways to extend MPT.

"...That summer, I saved my wages from the Wienerschnitzel and in the fall I studied the Wal-Mart circulars. As I looked at the clothes, I asked myself if the popular kids would wear those socks, shirts, that athletic supporter and back brace. I went out and blew my money, and for the first time, I felt really cool. I had the jackets, pants and Sketchers like they did. I spent hours in front of the mirror in my bedroom, admiring myself for finally figuring out how to get in with the in-crowd and have sex with girls. By the first day of school, I was pretty God damn sure I'd be humping a cheerleader by lunchtime, and not in the geometry classroom. Maybe the physics lab."

"Sadly, I learned what every unpopular kid with a few bucks to spend eventually learns (except the ones who later became screenwriters): that as long as I slavishly tried to imitate the cool kids, I would be a loser. Sure I had the same clothes and I aped the attitude of the popular kids, but for some reason they didn't hang from my 6'5", 153-pound frame as naturally as they did for the others. I reeked of desperation. I also reeked of body odor, but you know, that's one of those things you don't know yourself until a loved one has the courage to mention it."

from the Filthy Critic's review of XXX