Only One Number I'm Interested In This Week

This is the only number I'm interested in this week: where WTI settles at close of business, Friday.

I say that because yesterday, throughout the day CNBC "advertised" a talking head that opined that oil was likely to go under $100 by the end of the week. If CNBC mentioned that this one time yesterday, they mentioned it a dozen times. Finally he was on, and yes, indeed, he said that oil was likely to go below $100 by the end of the week.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Welcome home! You told me all about your wonderful one-week vacation to Florida / Disneyworld / EPCOT Center. You really were impressed! The first thing the younger one said when we picked up the family at the Manchester, NH, airport: "Wow, it really is colder here than it is in Florida."

I remember when we were stationed overseas, eastern Turkey, and we would hear back from our families and/or friends that they were worried about us when they read a headline about some terrorist act in the region in which we lived. Generally, we had no idea what they were talking about. Either it was such a minor "act of terror" we had not even been told of it, or it was so far away from where we were it affected us not.

I was reminded of that yesterday when I told my wife that there was an earthquake yesterday morning in California centered exactly where my brother-in-law and his wife live, where the swallows come back every year. Or is it the Monarch butterflies? Whatever. Capistrano/Huntington Beach: a 3.2 trembler yesterday morning.

So, last night on the drive up to Manchester, my wife calls her brother to ask about the earthquake. Her sister-in-law, Cindy, answers (she does not read my blog so she will not see her name in print). May asks her about the earthquake.

"Flavio, was there an earthquake here today?" she yells across the room to her husband.

"Well, there most certainly way," comes the reply ("and don't interrupt me while I'm watching golf" is his unsaid thought, no doubt).

"I guess there was. I didn't feel it," she tells May.

So, there you have it. A 3-inch, one-column story -- linked at Drudge? Is that where I saw it? -- devoted to this trembler and a) some didn't feel it, even at the epicenter; and, b) those who did, didn't find it newsworthy to tell their spouses.

Maybe we'll feel a bigger one when we visit this summer.