Who else is excited that this past Wednesday did not include nation-altering events? Is the curse of the Wednesday over? Or did I just miss the thing?
We’ve been passing our time here with movies, online cribbage, online video chats, and shoveling snow. The first polar vortex of the year arrives tomorrow and it is going to be quite a thing. Several days of not getting over 0° Fahrenheit will be unwelcome, but we were already passing our time here with movies, online games, and so on. So, really, what’s the difference?
The Magpie by Claude Monet
The Consumption
It’s time for another edition of Mistaken Relatives. As you may recall from letter #3, during the pandemic Todd and I have been watching movies together every couple of weeks. When we watch older movies, one of our favorite parts of the experience is seeing actors that we swear must be related to modern actors.
It was late summer when we watched 12 Angry Men. Even though it is more of a play than a movie, we quite enjoyed it and found it surprisingly topical. For fun we spent much of the first half of the movie trying to identify Ed Begley. It was a challenge because we just weren’t seeing Ed Begley, Jr.’s likeness in his face.
There was one actor that we couldn’t stop talking about: Jack Warden. Warden had an incredible career. Yet for someone my age I picture the Jack Warden from Problem Child or While You Were Sleeping. The Jack Warden of 1957 looked remarkably like another actor we had great familiarity with: Enrique Collantane, the father of Veronica Mars.
Uncanny, yeah?
Another little bit of personal trivia is that 12 Angry Men also starred E.G. Marshall in what was probably his biggest career role. (Though his most memorable role is likely from Christmas Vacation.) Marshall was born and raised in the small city I live in today. From the bit of digging I’ve done, he never really cared to remind people of where his story began. In any case, “One of us!”
Finally, from the world of amazing scans, I give you the 10,000,000,000 pixel Girl with the Pearl Earring. Just. Keep. Zooming.
Stonks
For some silly reason I got caught up in the GameStop stock market roller coaster this past 10 days. Generally I am a very boring, three-fund portfolio kind of person. I have only owned two stocks since 2000. One of those was Apple. The other was when I bought a few shares of AvantGo because my brother had just started working there. AvantGo’s IPO was September 28, 2000, so you can imagine how well that went.
In the back of my mind I had always thought I should “play” with a tiny percent of our investment money. Even if that just meant we had some itty bit of investment that was diversified away from the typical bets. A couple months ago I considered cryptocurrency, but I found the details of how to go about purchasing it uninteresting and thus confusing. Of course since that time the cryptocurrencies I was looking at have doubled or tripled in value. Ha!
I purchased some AMC, BB, and NOK stock. (I felt I was already too late for GameStop, which appears to be the truth.) And I have ridden those purchases to mild paper losses. It was like riding one of those really old wooden rollercoasters. You’re not so much frightened by the physics of the loops and turns, but rather the physics of the structure holding you aloft. Will this thing stay standing?
I’m probably going to stick with AMC until post-pandemic. It seems to me that a movie theater stock will rise back to where it used to be. Eventually. That’s good enough for me.
Yep, passing time watching movies and making silly stock bets on movies. Winter!
A postcard by someone