NiggieRant: Nobody's Too Big To Go Blind...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

No apologies for the absence this time - we have had our world turned completely upside down.

You can put me in a detention centre, you can fly me home to Straya (accompanied by FOUR Frog policemen all the way to Bangkok), you can call me names and tell me you don't like my haircut. None of the above will make my nose go all sniffly and tears form in my eyes.

I'm not saying I'm a hard man, mind.

But I'm getting off the point.

My black cat - the Mighty Biggie (otherwise known as Niggie, Nigg-nigg, Nigness-Wigness, Wiggie, Niggie-Piggie and The Black Prince) - is going blind.

He came downstairs over a week ago - to grace us with his Bigness, or so I thought; sometimes he takes a break from his hectic goal-driven sleep schedule to try and raise the spirits of his subjects.

Then I noticed that one of his eyes was dilated to infinity, and fixed. The lens was luxated, and by the next day the lens was cloudy.

Strike One.

Day after day of hourly eyedrops (mis-prescribed, if you ask me - pilocarpine is apparently useless for cats and might actually aggravate the issue, and Xalatan likewise... luckily we found that out ourselves and stopped the pilo and Xalatan and continued with the Fradexam, Timolol and oral Diamox).

Now it seems that his left eye is likewise going.

Strike Two...

You know you've got it bad when you try to explain in bad French (actually, there is no such thing as good French - the language is badly designed [by committee, no less] and needs a market-driven overhaul)... as I was saying, when you try to explain to the baker what is going on, and you find you have to stop for fear of bursting into tears.

Yes, I know... what a poof.

Next stop is the feline ophthamologist - in the hope that the eyes are still capable of vision (i.e., there has not been damage to the retinae or the optic disc); hopefully that's the case and Nigg will have the luxated lenses removed.

And there you have it - proof that there is no God. If there was, Dick "Chicanery" Cheney and his parasitic ilk would all die gruesome deaths from a variant of Ebola that ate you to bits over 20 years with vast amounts of unbearable pain, oozing sores and pus and vomiting.

Instead, the most noble beast - His Very Nigness - will have to go without sight until the advent of visual prostheses. It is just not fair.

That said, I am coming to grips with the situation (as is Niggie - he is massively disoriented at the moment, but getting better each day: braver than I would be), and other things being equal, I plan to resume normal market-based ranting next week.

NonRant: Interesting Times...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Well... a two week hiatus is hardly any time at all. especially not when your last big directional calls were short Platinum on and "Rally.Over." with the All Ords above 5875.

There will be more of this in the small end of the Platinum market over the next week or so. If Platinum doesn't fall 10-15% during that time, you may call me Meyer.

Tuesday, Feb 19th

At that point, the front month was Feb (from memory) was at 2156, the market was in contango, and the April contract was above 2200. The April has not quite dropped 10%, but put it in context - Platinum has been dropping despite strong moves upwards in the rest of the Precious Metals complex.

Bernanke hasn't resigned yet - but even folks like Jim Rogers have joined the chorus calling for his head.

Don't worry, though - Bernanke is on the way out... perhaps a bit later than I had thought, primarily due to HUGE pressure on him to stay around (with an embedded threat that the Rethugs will do a Spitzer on him if he quits before they're done using him to take the heat for their final emptying of the treasury before Shrub's departure).

Other news

There is also the question regarding the rather abrupt disappearance of the MarketAnalytics site.

There are two primary reasons for this:

• I no longer like the name (I want something that sounds like a market superhero, but which also translates well into Froggish); and
• A thing about which I am going to make no comment.

The latter was more important in the short run, but for the moment I'm keeping the main site offline in order to move a lot of the content to Flash (which means that everyone is going to have to have Flash Player 9 installed... but it will be worth it).

I'm reasonably confident that normal OzRant and USRant blatherings will resume on Monday, but I've been wrong before.

And sadly I think I am going to sell Gunther II (the latest RantMobile) because The Lovely simply refuses to drive it.

Oh... and we went to Geneva the otehr day - a day trip to break the French Territorial Hymen in order to be able to feign ignorance if checked... we will pretend we didn't realise that a trip to Switzerland doesn't restart our immigration clock in France.

Next time someone mentions Ypres or the Somme, remind them that at a time when the Frog army was utterly humiliated, young Australians were dying in their thousands in Frogland helping the Frogs to avoid the requirement to teach their children German. Today any Kraut can come to Frogland without any problem, but if they catch an Aussie who has stayed behyond 90 days, they kick them out. 25 years after WWI, the Frogs again capitulated the moment the air got hot. Again the Aussies were among those trying to get Paris back off the Krauts while the Frogs were collaborating. As a proportion of population, Australia and New Zealand lost more men defending France than France did.

I don't blame the Frogs themselves for the lack of intergenerational gratitude - they are a terrific bunch (although they are shit at war... six drunk Germans can take Paris with or without guns). But their politicians have always been shitbags - like little Pharoah Nikki "Mossad" Sarko...