Notes From All Over, Part 2 -- August 6, 2019

That which does not kill us: except for investors, and maybe the 300 folks laid off, I'm not entirely convinced the surprising -- very, very surprising -- announcement that instead of earning 30 cents / share in 2Q19; Whiting lost 28 cents / share was really all that bad. A wake-up all. I am convinced that of the plays and opportunities Whiting has, their best bet is the Bakken. Everything else is secondary.

Best tweet of the week, supports one of the themes of this blog and the Bakken shale revolution -- weekly rig counts don't matter (don't take that out of context). To wit:

Later, a similar tweet popped up ...

Diesel:

Best Greek restaurant in the DFW area. Cafe Medi. 420 Grapevine Hwy #101AHurst, Texas 76054. Ambience? Old school. I thought I was in Greece. And yes, I've been to Greece so I can say that. I was also stationed in eastern Turkey for two years so I have a few benchmarks. I love the B.Y.O.B. concept. I have a surprise for my wife this Friday when we return.

Cool job: one of the coolest jobs I had during my high school days -- I spent one summer with the local public health department identifying mosquito populations. I would take a dozen or so test tubes with a cotton ball at the bottom bathed in ether and go into some local swamp, riparian biome, or grass field. I would stand motionless in short-sleeved shirts until a mosquito alighted on my arm. I would then calmly and carefully invert one of the ether-filled test tubes over the mosquito. One could not damage the mosquito because identification depended on an undamaged specimen. I don't recall everything about identifying a mosquito but I seem to recall bands or stripes on their legs as one of their main identifying features.

Interestingly enough, I do not recall any problem with bites or itches or equine encephalitis though I sustained dozens of bites. I don't recall West Nile virus as a problem back then. Well, duh. From a quick google search --

West Nile virus was first identified in 1937 in Uganda in eastern Africa. It was first discovered in the United States in the summer of 1999 in New York. Since then, the virus has spread throughout the US. Researchers believe West Nile virus is spread when a mosquito bites an infected bird and then bites a person.

One of the individuals in the photo below could have been me fifty (?) years ago.