Salmon Teriyaki

Another day, another dollar as the saying goes.  Not sure where that one came into being, and it must have been when the daily wage was around one US dollar.  Today, we can count on having 20-30% of our wages eaten up by Federal, State, FICA, Medicare, Local, Real Estate, Sales, etc. taxes.  Who am I kidding, it’s probably more like 30-40%. 

Anyway, the markets traded their last stocks of the year, and From 8% up to 12% down, the S&P finished 2011 with a change of just 0.003%.  So why has my 401K been treading water or seemingly in an up, down gyration that seems to be almost even at the end of a year even though I am adding 12%.  Guess some were fortunate to buy, sell, trade in between and walk away with some of it.  Occupy what ?!  

If you get bored, take a look to see where your dollar came from….

The website wheresgeorge.com invites its users to enter the serial numbers of their US dollar bills and track them across America and beyond. Why? "For fun and because it had not been done yet", they say. But the dataset accumulated since December 1998 has provided the ideal raw material to test the mathematical laws underlying human travel, and that has important implications for the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Analysis of the trajectories of over half a million dollar bills shows that human dispersal is described by a 'two-parameter continuous-time random walk' model: our travel habits conform to a type of random proliferation known as 'superdiffusion'. And with that much established, it should soon be possible to develop a new class of models to account for the spread of human disease.

Today was family movie day, and we ALL went to go see Sherlock Holmes. Can’t remember the last time all of us agreed to, and made it to a first run movie at the theatre.  Life is good.   It was a good movie, although the consensus is that the first one was better.   I thought it was good enough to watch again when it comes out on Netflix next year.

This day in history “USSR Established”  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history

In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.
In the decades after it was established, the Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the world's most powerful and influential states and eventually encompassed 15 republics--Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse of its communist government.

Believe it or not, the Jenkins clan is at least partially Belorussia as Uncle Steven tells us that the great grandparent came from Belorussia.   As the world gets ready to party, I would like to wish everyone a safe, happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

 

Last pun for 2011…. In America you go to parties, in Soviet Russia, party goes to you !

Photo of the day “Salmon Teriyaki ”