Option Trading

There is a great personal story about what option trading can do to you, especially option selling. I won't tell you what exactly happened to me, but half my meager portfolio is now in someone else's pocket. This is what happens when you think you are smarter than "Mr. Market".

Solar Power!

I have always been interested in different forms of power. I was quite fascinated to find out that every day enough solar power hits the Earth to supply our power needs for 25 years. Of course, that includes all the surface area of the Earth. But still, all we need to do is harness enough for one day at a time!

I found someone who is doing something about solar power. There is a gentleman who lives in Ann Arbor, MI who supplies 80 percent of his needs through solar - even in this cold northern state!

White Chocolate Truffles

As I wrote in my cookbook, I am not a particular fan of desserts. However, sometimes we stuck in the mud, dyed in the wool, old guys have to try something new. I ran across a recipe for White Chocolate Truffles that looked interesting. Seems like just the thing for the holidays.

Grout Removal

I found a great post on removing grout. My experience is that it is an unholy job. It is so easy to screw up, especially if there is some grout in the tile that is still in good shape.

Still in all, I have found that regrouting is preferable to doing a hack job on an old shower. It will be less work in the long run than patching up bad spots with caulk that eventually gets mold underneath it.

Soccer Season is Over

The soccer season is over! At least for the AYSO in our little town of Harbor Beach. I look forward to soccer every year and every year I think it could have continued for another week.

This year was an exception. I volunteered to be a referee instead of a coach. Truthfully, I did not enjoy it as much as coaching. It was not because I didn't like hearing parents criticize my calls. Rather it had to do with the fact that I was not in the thick of the planning and training.

With reffing, it is all spur of the moment. With coaching it is a bit like chess. You train your players in a certain way. You assign positions. You shout commands (mostly unheeded) on the field. You feel involved. As a ref you must be above the fray. I guess I like being a partisan too much to enjoy reffing.

Catholico - Presbyterianism

Now-a-days, it seems to me, people pick and choose their religious ideals from among much of the information that floats out there on the internet. I have to say that I have not been immune from this trend myself. I tend not to be dogmatically committed to one or another particular religion.

I would have to say that I am broadly Christian, if you can call an agnostic a Christian. I have heard disparaging things about agnostics as fence-sitters; however, I think we are all doubters of one form or another. Within this framework I take my personal philosophy largely from a Catholic idea that was borrowed from stoicism, that is the idea of freewill. (I wrote a book on this which I published on line called: Stoicism and Christianity. It is actually a translation of a book by Epictetus with commentary on the passages involved.)

What I find interesting is that, as far as the actual governing of church affairs goes, the Presbyterian model would seem to me to be more in line with the freewill philosophy. The Presbyterian Church is set up so that the members of the church elect a body of Elders who oversee the running of each individual congregation. Strangely enough, the Presbyterian Church has deep theological roots in predestination.

I am sure there are those who would say that this democratization (dare I say republicanization) of church affairs is a kind of compensating cathartic for a restrictive theology. I think this is unlikely and the development of Presbyterian form of governance was more likely due to the familiarity with the people of Scotland with more democratic ideas which had been fostered by the strong clans who had maintained power in the face of the attempted encroachments of a monarchic state. The idea was to keep power at the lowest level possible. Which is always a good thing to do when attempting to make good and efficient decisions.

Thus, we have the strange apparition of a heirarchic church governed by an infallible pope espousing freewill juxtaposed with a freely elected church governed by its membership proclaiming that God has such rigid control over the soul that every act of that person is already predetermined.

Moving to www.mcgelligot.com

Well, I have owned mcgelligot.com for a couple of months. I was never sure what exactly I wanted to do with it. I finally made it into the next iteration of this blog. Now McGelligot on the Spot will be coming to you almost live from its own domain.

I'm not sure if there are any advantages to this. Probably not. But I thought it might be more flexible to write from that location. However, I may come back here and post on ocasion.

McGelligot on the Spot

Shakespeare Sonnet 60

Yes, I am at it again. I have produced another video. This time it is a reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60.

It all started with a visit to my parent's house. They have clocks everywhere. I admit that I am a fan of clocks myself and have them liberally sprinkled around my house as well. But since I had my video camera there I decided that I would demonstrate its ability to take photographs. I chose to attempt to photograph every clock in the house. Well, I did not get them all, but I got quite a few in during the short space of time I had available.

That evening, I sat down to the computer and it came to me that I should make a sort of slideshow from the photos that I had taken, I could set it to music and also narrate something in the background. But what should I narrate? I vaguely remembered that Shakespeare had written something about time passing, so I searched that and found Sonnet 60.

My microphone is very cheap, so the sounds of my narration came out a bit tinny. I am going to work on an upgrade. What I would like to do is get a high quality recording device so that I can get a lot of cool sounds that I can insert into vids whenever necessary.

Dinner Time Cleanup

Well, if you are going to be on the spot. A good place to be is at the dinner table. In a video, I shot my daughter Kate clearing the table after dinner. I put it in fast motion and set it to Vivaldi's Four Seasons...well, not the whole thing only part of it.

Vivaldi often reminds me of a film by the name of The Four Seasons that stars Alan Alda and Carol Burnett. Made in the 80s I believe. I have not seen it since, but at the time I thought it was quite good. I wonder if it holds up. When I first saw Mr. Mom with Teri Garr and Michael Keaton, I thought it was an enjoyable movie. I saw it again about a year ago and thought it was rather flat. I suppose it was a movie playing on the morays and events of the time. At the time I would have thought it would remain perennially funny.

Back to the Four Seasons. I don't think that you can every go wrong putting the stirring strains of Vivaldi's work into a film...appropriately, of course.

Cheesecake Manners.

Yes, I have created a new video for my site on table manners. The only question is whether the video itself is in good taste. It is called Cheesecake Manners. I tried to inject some humor into it in order to create some viral interest in manners. To do this, I had to run a bit counter to good manners. However, I think the video makes the point, however subtle, that what good manners are all about is being kind and considerate to your fellow human beings.

I created a squidoo page on Cheesecake Manners. I also put the full text of the actual cheesecake manners note on my Table Manners website.

I, of course, think that manners are important and that they are not exercised as proficiently as they were years ago. I think manners on the internet, with its ability to be anonymous, has fostered some of this. However, I think the internet is bringing out personalities more with the advent of video and a lot of the social websites that are out there that will make hiding behind an alias more difficult and thus make people a bit more responsible for their actions.

Shovelling Snow and Global Warming

Yes, I have found out the secret of global warming. It is all this snow shovelling. You see moving the snow not causes friction, which melts micro-grains of snow (but imagine all of the thousands of snow shovels moving snow, melting it one little flake at a time). Not only that, but moving the snow exposes darker patches of sidewalk, driveway, and worst of all, blacktop! The snow would normally bounce the sun's rays, but instead the heat of the rays are absorbed into the Earth. We must STOP all this snow shovelling.

More information can be found on this phenomena at: http://www.homehumor.com/shovelling-snow.shtml