Buying Gold is for Idiots

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I can’t stand all of those commercials on TV telling people to buy up precious metals like gold and silver.

And it’s not necessarily because of any investment strategy, per se – in all truth, I have no idea how stuff like that actually performs against traditional stocks and bonds and whatnot.

No, in reality I think I just hate these commercials because they pitch gold as the thing to buy, as if the world is on the brink of collapse and in the new world, gold will be the only thing that has any value … not those false idol greenbacks you’ve got stuffed in your wallet or worse yet, some mysterious bank balance that a corporation “claims” that they’re holding for you!!!

It’s always the same shot – some guy wearing a flannel shirt is putting another stack of gold coins into his safe … there’s typically a shotgun mounted on the wall with a dead animal of some sort right next to it … and he knows where his money will be when the world market collapses.

You know the commercials – they run on FOX News in between ads for Liberty Mutual and the one about getting dia-beet-us supplies through the mail.

I guess the core reason that they bug me is pretty simple. You know what the only thing that has any value will be if our economy collapses and civilization is thrust back in time 200 years???

It’s FOOD.

You can’t eat gold bullion, and nobody is going to care about trading your worthless rocks for chickens and fish!

Maybe you can make bullets out of it or something, but something tells me you’ve already got a whole separate stockpile of those anyways…

That’s all I’m saying. If you want to buy gold for actual investment purposes, then be my guest, but if it’s simply because you think you’re obtaining a more tangible form of currency that will outlast coins and paper money, you might try re-focusing your efforts on corn just the same.  😕

BBQ Awesomeness

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Tonight my wife requested my assistance in helping her pull some BBQ chicken for us to have for meals over the next couple of days.

When I was done, it was put back in this pot to simmer.

I’m probably supposed to leave it alone, but frankly I’m not sure if that’s going to be possible.

It’s 11:00pm and the sweet, succulent scents of barbecue are wafting into my office from across the house.

Forever taunting me, teasing my taste buds with its delectable odors.

I’ll try to hold out as long as I can, though I am but a man…

8-Bit Art/Music

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Here’s a fun, little video from PBS that talks a bit about the resurgence of the 8-bit graphics and music that we remember from all of those classic Nintendo games of the 80s and 90s. I’ve always been a big fan of 8-bit-styled art, like the DoctorOctoroc version of Dr. Horrible or even that old Code Monkeys show from G4 that was fun to watch for the graphics, even though the script was absolutely terrible, and I’ve already talked in the past about my resurfacing passion for 8-bit music, thanks to the likes of Penny Arcade: The Series and its numerous musical contributors.

It made me wish the entire thing was about two or three times as long as it ended up being, but at least it served to drop a few names of some 8=bit artists who I haven’t heard before!  😀

Places I’ve been, and so on and so forth…

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http://www.scottsevener.com/about/places-ive-been/

This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but just never sat down to actually put together. It’s kind of fun to not only speculate about the places that you’d like to visit in the future, but also review your favorites from places that you’ve already been.

Admittedly, I do kind of feel like I need some more on my to do list, especially from an international perspective, but for now I just put the ones that immediately came to mind – Australia, Japan, France, Egypt. I’m sure I’m missing lots of cool islands and places of vast cultural significance, but I think this is a good enough start to consider it a work in progress… 😉

Matt Mullenweg on Blogging, Open Source, and BBQ…

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It’s taking me a little while to get through because it’s 2 hours long, but I’ve really been enjoying this interview that PandoDaily did last month with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. He talks about all sorts of topics including the “corporate culture” at Automattic, why he believes in the open source ecosystem, and even a little about his own passion for BBQ…

Some really intriguing points, and I especially loved to hear him talk about how the right directions to take with WordPress as a whole have not always been the ones that would simply make the most for investors in the near future. I love that when you listen to Matt talk about the future of blogging, he talks about a marketplace dominated by open source software and not just his own … it really shows that he cares about giving back to the online community, and I say this not simply because I’ve been able to use his software for free to drive my own publishing interests over the last five years! 😉

Thin Post : A Snack is ONE!!!

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So I’ve been trying to get myself back into the swing of things to get my weight loss back on track, and it seems like my biggest obstacle as of late has been snacking.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve blogged about it before – I have a real hard time with snacking because much like the commercials have conditioned us, once I pop I just can’t stop! And I’m not even talking potato chips because sadly, I know that I dare not bother keeping them in the house anymore. Instead, we’ve been trying to keep more single-serving snacks around the house – a lot of these Atkins snack bars (we’re not specifically following the program, but just trying a lower carb diet) … and they’re actually not too bad, but the problem is – they’re REALLY SMALL and I end up eating several of them at a time!!!

I’ve had a couple of really good exercise nights already this week that I basically ruined afterwards because I’d end up plowing through a whole pile of these things before I knew it, pretty much negating any possible benefit from 2 hours of walking and WiiFit’ing and pushing up. It’s enough to make me wonder if maybe I need to just focus more on not snacking at all because as hard as it is to avoid snacking altogether, it seems even more difficult for me to just have a little something and stop after one serving instead of plowing through the entire box in 10 minutes time.

And those things aren’t cheap, either! At something like $5-6 a box, they’re easily 3-4 times what regular granola bars would run you, and whether or not they’re actually any healthier for you is anybody’s guess! I’m sure they’re probably ok for you at their recommended serving size, but I don’t see how they could be the way I’ve been eating them lately…  😳