I'm baaaack.

Sam: What'll you have Normie?
Norm: Well, I'm in a gambling mood Sammy. I'll take a glass of whatever comes out of that tap.
Sam: Looks like beer, Norm.
Norm: Call me Mister Lucky.

I'm back and I'm bringing all my Flip It, my Revolutionomics, my blood in the streets approach and everything I've been missing with me.

I'm still not sure how I ended up hosting a TV show...a TV show from the Waldorf Astoria's Bull & Bear bar at that.  It was a very cool job, that whole TV host thing I just did.  I met a lot of really famous, rich and/or powerful people, many of whom were very sincere in their work and causes, some of whom were awe-inspiring and a few who gave me the creeps.  Yeah, it was a real rush, but as many a commenter and more than one critic noted, my viewpoints, my look and my approach might not have really fit in too well all the time over at the company.  I suppose I'll just leave it at that.

Anyway, when they canceled Happy Hour, I asked them to let me go even though I still have a lot of friends over at the Dow Jones-owned Fox News and FBN and even at the main Fox network and plan to continue working with them at times.

But I wanted to get out.  Unshackle myself for a while. Call it faith, call it confidence, call it hubris, call it stupidity -- but I figure there's some more beer in my career taps.  Hell, I sorta feel like a free agent (not quite King James, of course), and the last three weeks have been a wild whirlwind.  Some of the things I'm working on and/or looking at range from working with a team to finish up a business plan for a venture I'm working on with Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead (I'll be posting a couple videos of us jamming at his place in coming days on http://TheCodyBlog.com) to fielding some TV ideas that have come my way too.  Yeah, more TV, sigh.  "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"  (You can't ever go wrong quoting The Godfather, you know - just ask Stevie Van zandt):

I'd like to say I'm headed to the movies, but that Chavista-apologist director Oliver Stone wrote me and all of FBN out of Wall Street 2.  Surely that happening had nothing to do with capitalism, right?  I've been spending a lot of time in Hollywood lately...maybe I should make the move!  Ha. I will crank out a book finally and am also joining the speech-giving circuit.

My companies have got a few other Internet-content/media businesses (our latest venture...think App News & Reviews) that I've been working on behind the scenes that are starting to get going (we need some help -- if you're willing to do some high-profile work for free at first to get your foot in the door and prove yourself to us, send your resume to [email protected]).

I've also been working with James Altucher on a new fund/investment vehicle under his Formula Capital umbrella that we're expecting to launch on October 1 (exactly eight years to the day since I last launched a fund).  Investing, running money, finding another Apple or two to ride from $7 to $160 like I did before I took the TV job full-time and closed my old fund is probably what I'm really jonesing about.  It feels like what I'm meant to do in many ways.

At any rate, you can still find me writing as much as ever here on my blogs (http://blogs.marketwatch.com/cody if you want to read only my business/political/investment blogs OR at http://TheCodyBlog.com if you want to read everything I write).  You can also follow me on http://twitter.com/codywillard or find me on facebook.

"What are you trying to prove, what does it prove?"

Homogenizing Celebrities: We Put Our Faith in Blast Hardcheese

Saw a great picture of Lindsay Lohan on the cover of my buddy Chris' People magazine tonight at dinner (Paul and I love to give him a hard time about reading this stuff...):

Upon further inspection, of course, I noticed it was actually one Mariah Carey on the cover there, as maybe Lindsay hit cover fatigue after the recent manipulated media frenzy. At any rate, I'm not saying either one's had any work done because I have no idea and don't really care (okay, I suppose, for the sake of keeping it real, that I'd guess that Mariah's had some work done, but why go there?)... but the fact that both Paul and I mistook Mariah for Lindsay (or, technically, did we mistake Lindsay for Mariah?) underscores the larger issue that that these issues are full of people whose looks, already very similar, homogenize over time.

How crazy is it, when you step back and look at it from say an alien's perspective, that our culture literally chooses to cut away at their skin, bone and muscle to look ever more like others who choose to cut away at their skin, bone and muscle.

It really does feel sometimes that we are living in a science fiction movie. And to get existential about being existential here, are the paparazzi and the media machine they feed the equivalents of Joel Robinson and the bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000?

Then again, we've done it to puppies and newborn boys for centuries already, no?

PS. Does it make me a hypocrite that I plan to someday have my bottom lip fixed since I bite into it at times since it bulges out a bit after having had six stitches in it from a sucker punch back I took from a giant ex-team-mate on the basketball court? Not cosmetic, but functional?...

Did Mother Teresa Have a Good Arm?

Rather than having these politicians grill their former cronies to give Wall Street something to do besides writhe in liquidity-less pain, wouldn't it be great if we could get some citizens up there who have the right to throw stones?

Like the foreman mob dude overseeing the remodeling of a luxury apartment building next to mine.  Well, maybe he's not quite got the same stone throwing credentials as Ghandi.  You know what I mean though.  It's sickening, the hypocrisy that these politicians who created policies that inflated all these bubbles that keep popping around us, thereby creating an environment of giant capital flows to giant corporations feign anger and shock about the compensation of the executives of those giant corporations that control all this capital.

PS.  Ever notice that those who have the "right" to throw stones (let he who is without guilt throw the first stone) are the ones who never would?  Self-evident, really.

Horsing Around HGH

Reading this article from the AP by Joseph White as part of my preparation for tonight's show...I found it interesting that National Thoroughbred Racing Association CEO Alexander Waldrop was brought in to testify to the same panel about steroid use among horses in horse racing as David Stern, Roger Goodell and Gene Upshaw, were to talk about steroid use in human sports.

The article talks about how hard it is to test athletes for HGH.

I assume they mean Human Growth Hormone. But as I just Googled "Horse Growth Hormone".  Are you surprised that it's out there?

And you just know there's a lot of use of that kind of HGH among racehorses. And undetectable.

Forget Clemens and McNamee. Let's subpoena Curlin and his trainers.

A circus is a circus, no?

A Trade In Which Emotions Aren’t the Enemy

I made the joke the other day with some of my colleagues that I'd become emotionally bankrupt. I was exaggerating, but man, I'd hit an emotional low a few weeks ago. I'd also made the joke that I wished I could buy calls on my emotional state, because it was certainly at a sentimental low.

Nothing like catching your breath again, and were I now long those options, I'd probably peel a few of them off now to catch my breath and still keep plenty of exposure to the upside. Wouldn't it be great to trade options on your own emotions? You could roll your emotional call options up when they're close to expiring but you know you've got momentum. And when things in your personal life are going awful, you could either load up on puts if you're the greedy type or at least hedge yourself for the downside.

I'm surprised that in this Web 2.3 bubble (ooh, great new term for this phase of the net...we're not hardly past 2.0 and certainly not at 3.0, but we're moving...) that I've not seen the pitch from some PR firm for some Stanford grad's social network full of options trading, real or paper, on your own emotions yet.

Or at least some pitch from some kid on his couch in his living room with a model and site up in beta.

All of which begs the question if you could then be sued for insider trading, I suppose.

And with that, I'll get my Judge Judy fix and head onto bed.

Full of PR Pitch (Or, Spell Checker for the Subj Line)

I'm considering changing my email address because ever since I started doing this TV gig, about 90% of my email flow to my clwillard address is full of pitch from some PR firm (or some PR dude on his couch at home).

The only upside to receiving all this PR pitching is the humor that comes from their mistakes. When will email programs start spell-checking the subject line? Ooh, good business idea there perhaps.

At any rate, how about this subject line...the missing "y" at least got me to read it, I suppose:

"TV's New Sexist Star Gets Hit With An Overload Of Marriage Proposals"

Anybody wanna guess who the star in question is? Bobby G of Mojo, as I'm sure you knew already.

CW on The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum

I'll be back on The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum again tomorrow at 1:30pm.   Here's a pretty funny pic from last week's appearance.  Sometimes it's all in the context, huh?

You Know What They Say About Assess

I don't want to be too mean, so I won't name names on this one, but I thought I'd share this pretty funny email from a mid-cap tech company's PR firm that arrived in my inbox just now.  When I first saw the subject I thought it'd just been a mistake as they typed that subject line in, and figured -- been there, done that, empathize.  But it's in the "body" of the email too:

Subject:  How Do Employers Asses Their Employees' Performance?

Body:  How do employers asses their employees’ performance? Are they showing results? Is he/she a leader? Did they receive the proper training? Are the employees’ goals aligned with the company’s objective?

...

Anyway, back to work.

The West Coast Blog Mafia

I'm gonna have to do more work on this idea, but is anybody else about as sick of what I call the "West Coast Blog Mafia" as I am?   If you're a blogger, you know what I'm talking about. 

Maybe I'm paranoid, as it's true that I like my independence and I certainly like to strive to rail against whatever I perceive to be "the system" (meaning pretty much any of "the system"s that exclude outsiders, free-thinking, etc).  The West Coast Blog Mafia all link to each other and high-five each other and affirm each other's brilliance, you know?   And, like all mobsters -- you're either in their mafia or you're not.

It's sorta' heartbreaking to see a "system", a "clique" or as I call it here, a "mafia" developing in what's supposed to be a wild west, meritocratic blogosphere.  But it is what it is.  And it's a shame.

A New, Improved MetroCard

For a while when I lived in Harlem, it was a good thing I had a bicycle, because there were a few periods of time when I ran out of money for even a subway until I got my next paycheck.   Since 9/11, I rarely ride the subway.  It seems that when people were running around in panic after the planes hit and I was surrounded these masses, one of my primary fears was to lose control of where I was headed.   Crowds in a panic are scary things, and it terrifies me to picture being underground when the next attack hits NYC (which hopefully will be many years from now, but who knows.)   

But anyway, here's an idea that came to me when I was with my pop going to meet my mom and an ex-girlfriend a while ago.   I suppose I could try to monetize the idea, but what the hell, Andrew Lanyi taught me long ago that pro bono (while cynically never really pro bono) is good thing.

Why don't they print the subway map on the back of each MetroCard?  Even if just the subway map of Manhattan, it'd still be great to have right there on the back of the Metro Card.   It'd fit pretty nicely. 

And on the front?   How about selling advertisement space instead of that stupid yellow MetroCard and MTA logo?   Create more revenues and help lower prices for the taxpayers who get screwed by having to subsidize the MTA and then pay $2 to use the subway or bus.

I think it'd work.  Too bad bureaucrats never try to help the people they purportedly help.