Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- August 1, 2019

Bakken earnings: in light of WLL's earnings report and subsequent fallout this week, the following become incredibly important:

• CLR, reports August 6, EPS forecast of 63 cents
• NOG, reports August 2, EPS forecast of 11 cents

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Market reaction yesterday:

• bizarre
• one and done
• I'm not sure how the Fed chairman could have made "it" any worse
• LOL
• great, great buying opportunity
• easy money continues
• Wall Street traders were poised to hit the send / execute button as soon as the announcement was made and then the algos took over
• [if you say / write "algos" it makes you look like you know what you are talking about]
• hope springs eternal: GS sees one more Fed cut this year

Automatic dividend reinvestment: making America great.

Debates: second night of second debate last night -- Trump, I'm sure, is watching Biden's performance with great interest

Trump tweets: I did not see any this morning. Must be a busy day in the West Wing today.

Business headlines:

• "They should really be ashamed" -- Wall Street blasts Fed for getting what it wanted
• GM earnings crush 2Q19 forecasts
• Verizon earnings beat 2Q19 forecasts
• Yeti earnings top; guidance raised
• Qualcomm stock sings after earnings report was "not complicated, merely awful"
• Impossible Foods' "Whopper" goes nationwide at Burger King

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Updates

Later, 1:08 p.m. CT: wow, see first comment. Apparently I was very, very wrong about Culver's. I've received two notes, now, that suggest I try Culver's. I stepped on some toes with my note below. Sorry. And as long as I'm at it: it turns out that I'm in the minority in my family. Both my wife and our oldest granddaughter do not like Whataburger at all. Wow, am I on the wrong side of this discussion.

Original Post

Burger poll, link here:

• In-N-Out: #1 for third straight year
• Five Guys: #2
• Whataburger: #3 if Culver's not included
• Least favorite:
• Jack in the Box
• Wendy's
• Carl's Jr
• Burger King
• McDonald's (last place on the list of the 14 chains reported)
• Comments:
• In-N-Out over-rated
• Whataburger #4 but Culver's is #3
• "Least favorite" list is 1000% correct
• I've never even seen a Culver's; regional? On google maps, I see three in the DFW area; will have to try; on second thought, absolutely not, sounds like a DQ, mostly known for its "butterburgers" and frozen custard, but also offers cheese curds, chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, fish, and salads. Culver's advertises that it's "all about the butter."
• I do have to admit there's something about the dining experience at Five Guys that beats Whataburger, but Whataburger really has the most choices, most variety, best bang for the buck --

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April, 1921

From pages 202 - 203, Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, c. 2015.

Sylvia Beach had never published so much as a pamphlet. She had no experience marketing or publicizing a new book, no background with distributors or printers, no familiarity with plates or proofs or galleys. She had no capital, and she could only guess about costs and financing. Advertising would have to be base don circularss, charitable press and word of mouth. She knew almost nothing about the legal complications of the publishing industry, in France or anywhere else, to say nothing of the complications facing  a book convicted of obscenity before it was even a book. She knew the "Circe' episode was more offense than anything in The Little Review, and she knew it would get worse.

Despite all of this, she decided that Shakespeare and Company -- a company of one, after all, of a thirty-four-year-old American expatriate who was, until recently, sleeping on a cot in the back room of a diminutive bookshop on a street nobody could find -- would issue the single most difficult book anyone had published in decades. It would be monstrously large, prohibitively expensive and impossible to proofread. It was a book without a home, an Irish novel written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris to be published in France in riddling English by a bookseller from New Jersey. Joyce's readership was scattered. The book was at turns obscure and outrageous, its beauty and pleasure were so coy, its tenderness so hidden by erudition, that when it did not estrange its readers it provoked them. Ulysses was not even finished, and already it had been declared obscene in New York and burned in anger in Paris.

None of this mattered. Sylvia Beach wanted to be closer to Joyce and to the center of contemporary literature. She wanted to be successful and to repay the money her mother had given her. She wanted to give the world something more than pajamas and condensed milk. Beach and Joyce worked through the details themselves. Shakespeare and Company would publish a high-quality private edition of one thousand copies. She would send out announcements and gather orders by mail before publication and pay the printer in installments as the money came in. When the book was ready, she would mail copies by registered post to readers around the world.