Cleaning Out The In-Box, Part 3 -- October 6, 2018

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What was he thinking? Warren Buffett recently announced he sold off some/much/most/all of his COP. Apparently he found opportunities that looked better than COP. From about a year ago, this is the screenshot of COP shares. A 7% dividend increase was just declared, now at $0.305/share.

Comment: I posted this -- not because of COP per se. This is what caught my attention. This represents the incredible potential of the United States and the opportunities for young investors. Think about this. A year ago one could have bought COP for under $40. Today it is trading at almost $80. In fact, it is going up in a market that, in the past two days, was going down. In addition, one gets a nice dividend, and a dividend that is increasing. But even with all that, Warren Buffeet, said to be the best investor ever in the world, says there are better opportunities out there. He sold some/much/most/all of his COP this past year which suggests to me he thinks there are even better places to put one's money. Wow.

Seque needed? LOL: from Hollywood Reporter -- Camille Paglia. Coincidentally she mentions Gone With The Wind (see this post, posted moments ago).

No American movie in decades has approached the blazing sizzle, conveyed simply by eye contact, of the first encounter of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) on the grand staircase of Gone With the Wind (1939). Electrifying onscreen energy was once generated by stark sexual polarization — old-fashioned gender differences, rooted in biology. Campus gender theory, with its universal androgyny and rigid social constructionism, is box office poison.

Here's a short list of incandescent star couplings whose heat is now rarely duplicated by Hollywood, even in its monotonous remakes: Anthony Quinn and Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand (1941); Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944); John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead (1949); Laurence Harvey and Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960); Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973); and Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987).

To Have and Have Not: incredibly over-rated. And yet, once one watches it for the umpteenth time, one realizes how great it really is. I never tire of watching it, although I don't watch it all the way through. Snippets are fine.

"I'd walk home if it wasn't for all that water." 

One has to remember how young this woman was ... "... it's even better when you help ..."

To Have and To Hold
Dr Ford was no "Slim."

[In the clip above, Lauren was 19; the other person -- I forget his name -- was 44 years old. He was married at the time to Mayo.]
 

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Advertising

In the DFW area, there is a commercial that is pretty much going viral as far as local commercials go. It's a car commercial, a local Cadillac dealer I believe. The premise of the commercial is that their service department is so incredibly wonderful, some folks go there just to have coffee and hang out, even when their car needs no servicing.

Last week, while getting a new gas cap for my wife's Chrysler minivan at the Chrysler dealer about a mile down the road from that other incredible service department, a vehicle with that dealer's emblem on the license plate holder drove into Chrysler for servicing.

Priceless. 

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Mayo

Which reminds me. I carry Gene Simmons" On Power: My Journey Through The Corridors of Power with me in my backpack. All the time. In that book, he has a chapter on the importance of one's name. Important enough to change it. Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske. Getting from Perske to Bacall took two steps.