Some historic perspectives.

I have been doing some research into the 1920's London Roaring 20's scene... (think “Brideshead Revisited”) for a piece I am working on… Besides Waugh, there was Mitford, and other writers who captured the antics of the rich and crazy world

of the British flinging themselves into the nonstop world of bespoke elegance and legal debauchery in the aftermath of World War I.

Our silly experiment with Prohibition which actually exacerbated binge drinking rather than curbing it never hit the shores of England… They partied hearty through most of the decade.

What finally stopped the music? In a word, gold.

Yes, Astaire and Rogers notwithstanding, the dancing stopped once the Depression hit. It stopped literally on the morning of Monday, Sept. 21, 1931, when the British government took the pound off the gold standard.

As many of you know, back then wrestling over the gold standard was a cause of passionate debate much like what we heard this past week concerning Spain and Italy.. The significance for the average British citizen who had, up to this time known solid Edwardian prosperity was in for a nasty change of fortune. Alec Waugh, Evelyn's brother said: "For me, and I suppose for most Britons born before 1910, the announcement that Monday morning was the biggest shock we had known or were to know."

Given what's going on in Europe today, the gridlocked status of the debt ceiling, and the gloomy media coverage of it all, I thought the parallels were a bit interesting.

And look what gold did this week.

Don't know about you but, taking a page from the Brits, the sound of a tango and the sip of a sidecar sound awfully nice right about now.

Cheers, Thimble Long GDX, GDXJ, GG, EXK, and DGP.

 

Mrs. Buttons

To choose elegance over luxury.

 

Honesty over its illusion.

 

To know there is no honor in struggle, there is only struggle
and to pursue excellence instead.

 

To seek refinement over the superficial.

 

Solitude over friction.

 

To accept that my history becomes me.

 

To remind myself scar tissue eventually heals, especially the ones over memory.

 

To ignore what angers me and embrace what thrills me.

 

Celebrate a small triumph more than a bigger mistake.

 

To be more appreciative than worthy. 

 

To study harder and think less.

 

To act more and talk less.

 

 

To be more comfortable in the spaces between then and now.

 

To listen to the smallest things around me

 

To look for the moon every night and to watch the birds everyday

 

To smile when it is the hardest thing to do.

 

To be brave when I feel the coldest.

 

To do nothing in a hurry.

 

To be more patient with the world, but not expect too much.

 

To soften the rough animal in me.

 

To choose the feast over the hunger.

 

To keep the music playing always.

 

To be silly more. And love those that encourage it.

 

To never forget the voices that said the important stuff to me.

 

And to let the unfettered child my father loved run wherever she wants.

wealthmiser

Stanley’s Elves

The year was 1958. And while  everybody else was tapping their feet to The Little Drummer Boy, and The Christmas Song by Alvin and the Chipmunks, and  humming along with Johnny Mathis singing Winter Wonderland, my father was  kicking and screaming his way thru this most joyous of seasons. You see, he was a wholesale florist, and it was the busiest worst time of the year for him. He owned the largest warehouse in Buffalo and was expected to decorate the city every December. Banks, department stores, schools all used his wreaths on their doors, windows, offices, and hallways. And in order to fill all the orders, he had to hire extra help at holiday time.

His warehouse was located in a black neighborhood on Sycamore Street, and was not safe during the day or at night. It took up one square block and was basically an unheated space where trucks would drop off bales of cedar, rhododendron, scotch pine, white pine, eucalyptus, and holly. In Buffalo an unheated space with the outside temperatures at 20 degrees was a refrigerator. My poor father only had a small space heater in his office to keep himself from getting frostbite. So in order to make 500 wreaths in two weeks and get them on the doors of all those stores and banks and schools, he turned our basement at home into a cottage industry of wreath makers. My mother hired about fifteen women from around Buffalo to come and make wreaths in our basement by placing an ad in the Courier Express. Our phone rang off the hook as hundreds of women answered the ad. Money was always tight but at holiday time, it was particularly tough to come by. Men were always laid off at holiday time if they worked at Bethlehem Steel or Ford or GM, the main employers in Buffalo at the time. And it was an excuse to get out of the house for few hours and do something different and get paid to boot.

 

We lived on Lafayette Avenue at the time in a big two story two family frame and brick built during the 1920‘s. My grandparents who owned the house lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. The basement was where we did the laundry, hang the clothes to dry during the winter, make preserves, (we had a huge old porcelain stove down there), and it was where my sisters and I practiced our tap dancing since it had a nice cement floor. It was very dusty down there due to the old coal bins and the two huge furnaces that they used to shovel the coal into.  But it was also the warmest place in the house. So my mother set up several long tables and chairs in a friendly style assembly line so the women could sit while they made the wreaths. I was put to work by making sure they had enough baling wire, and metal hoops around which they would wrap the evergreens around and secure them with the wire. They all had to wear gloves as the pitch from the evergreens would stain their hands black after handling it for awhile. But the place smelled glorious! It was easy work, and after the first day, they all became very chatty, talking mostly about their kids and their husbands and their holiday plans. It amazes me to this day, how you can take fifteen women, put them in a room together, and in the space of an hour, they are talking up a storm, and act like they have known each other all their lives. It was fun to have this wreath making party in our house and I enjoyed their company. We would make pots of Eight O-Clock coffee for them on our big old percolator. They worked a full day and my Mom paid those cash. Every night we would collect the wreaths and load them into my father’s station wagon and he would put on the final decorations such as bows and pine cones and deliver them the next day.

 

Every year our family made our trek to downtown Buffalo to see the famous Victorian Christmas windows in AM&A’s, sit on Santa’s lap at Sattler’s,  and then go to see the Christmas decorations along Elm and Main Street. Then we’d go to the Quaker Bonnet on Elmwood Avenue for hot chocolate and elephant ears.

 

But what I liked most was the incredible pride I felt knowing that just about every wreath I saw on the M&T Bank building, the windows of Berger’s, Kleinhan’s Music Hall, the Park Lane Hotel, Hens & Kelly’s, and the Franklin Building all came from  our little basement on Lafayette. Even my father had to smile.

wealthmiser

I never believed for one minute the sons weren't in on the scheme - they just weren't as smart as they thought they were -or-  the people they swindled weren't as dumb as they thought... did they actually think these people who lost fortunes weren't going to go after them with all they had? I say you don't buy a house in Nantucket no less for 60 million cash and still get to call yourself a boy scout. That he off’ed himself on the anniversary of his father's sentence tells you he was delivering a message to papa. Shakespeare could not have written a more appropriate ending... not wait... Tolstoy might have been a better fit—  Mark Madoff as an Ivan Illyich for the ages. Only Tolstoy, in order to underscore the theme of the meaninglessness of a life lived chasing all the wrong stuff,  would have had him drive to North Carolina in a blizzard, walk over to the facility his father was in, locate himself outside of Mr. Madoff’s window and blow his brains out. I am sure someone is writing the teleplay for the Lifetime Channel now.

Shoveling Off to Buffalo

As a little Buffalonian who didn’t own a shovel, I used to dream of days like this. I would wake up all excited and run into the kitchen to catch Clint Buehlman on the old Zenith radio that sat atop the refrigerator. He would deliver the school closings that morning. My mother was already dressed in her signature red insulated underwear all cold and miserable from moving the car to the other side of the street. We had alternate street parking, and in Buffalo, your car would get plowed along with the white stuff if it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You don’t mess with Mother Nature when she decides to blow in off Lake Erie. When Clint finally got to my school, School 19, I would shriek with joy and my mother would recoil thinking what she would do with me and my two sisters for a WHOLE day at home. Needless to say, our first order of business was to get in our snow gear and run outside to make snow angels. I refused to wear leggings because they were made of wool and to this day I still hate the stuff. My mother finally made me a pair out of corduroy after losing the battle to get this forty pounds of skinny strong willed fashion savvy to do otherwise. Besides, wool was “pinchy”. My sisters and I would be weighed down with so many layers of scarves, coats, boots, and hats, our snow angels always ended up looking like big snow blobs! And of course having a good rousing snow ball fight was always an excuse to let loose a little pent up sister rivalry. We knew it was time to come in when we heard my mother knocking on the kitchen window.
But it was all in fun, the sheer amount of snow was always dramatic, and it was Buffalo as we remember it now. Buffalo does winter like much of Upstate New York, which meant the maximum snow days allotted by the state were always met. It kind of made us feel special! It meant hot chocolate with marshmallows and hot buttered toast when we came inside. It meant reading our favorite books or drawing or playing the piano in the middle of the day as the snow continued to fall, and as evening approached, were fed big bowls of homemade hot chicken soup filled with pastina, carrots, onions, celery and chunks of plump chicken. We monitored the snow outside our upstairs windows and by the time we crawled into bed all toasty warm and in our flannel pajamas and heavy socks, we, along with our usual prayers, sent out a special request that  the snow did not let up so we could repeat another snow day tomorrow. Oh to be in Buffalo when winter hits. There’s nothing more wonderful. And yes. It does helps to be 8 years old.

Homemade Chicken Soup

This would be cooking on the stove when we came inside - the smell was intoxicating. It was reheated for dinner.

It was served with a salad and homemade bread for dipping of course!  The first one to get a bowl was our poodle who ate everything but the carrots. He neatly would pick all the carrots out of his bowl and make a circle of carrots around the bowl before he ate his portion. He loved the chicken and we made sure there were no bones in his bowl.

We had ours with a fresh green salad and some of grandma's homemade bread that she would send up from her kitchen downstairs. If we came in from outside when the bread came out of the oven, she would slice a hot piece of bread and dip it in oil and a little salt and give us a preview of the coming meal.

Ingredients

1 cut up fryer                                                    

2 each carrots            

2 each celery stalks    

2 medium turnip          

1 large onion 

8 cups water

1/3 teaspoon salt        

¼ teaspoon black pepper                       

¼ teaspoon poultry seasoning                 

1/8 teaspoon thyme    

1 cup pastina

Directions
Put the chicken in a large sauce pan or Dutch oven.
Layer the carrots, celery, turnips and onion over the chicken.
Add water, salt, pepper, poultry seasoning and thyme.
Cook, covered over medium heat until mixture boils.
Reduce heat and simmer for about 45 minutes or until the
vegetables and chicken are both fork tender.
Remove chicken; cool.
Remove the chicken meat from the bones; discard the bones.
Cut chicken into bite-sized pieces.
Heat mixture to boiling; stir in the noodles.
Cook, uncovered, for 5 to 7 minutes or until the noodles are done.
Stir the chicken back into the soup -
Simmer for two minutes, and serve with homemade bread.

 

Wealthmiser

Forget Football. Shopping is the sporting event of Thanksgiving…Get those running shoes on and hit the mall. Work off that tryptophan and fourteen pounds of breast and thigh you ate last night! Work out that plastic til it breaks a sweat..Trample anyone who gets in your way!!

Pump those Ipads. Crunch those Kindles. Zen out on Lulu. Carbo load on Keurig.

Have at it America, I got a lot riding on your ability to debt your way into oblivion this Christmas.

Please don’t let me down. Spend your college money. Spend your mortgage money you don‘t pay your mortgage with anymore. Spend your parent’s money. But above all spend the money you don’t have!

Okay so this isn’t the parking lot of  the Mall of America.

For the record, this is a picture of the annual Turkey Trot where thousands of spunky (translation ;drunk) silly Buffalonians do a run down Delaware Avenue every Thanksgiving.

http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article265206.ece

Don’t even ask. You’d have to be from Buffalo to understand. Home of Genny Cream Ale and Lake Erie fish whose main diet consists of chewing on old buried World War 2 radioactive isotopes. Talk about eating leftovers!

So Happy holidays, ye fellow shoppers.

And remember -the last one out of Walmart gets to kiss the old geezer greeter goodnight!

Mrs. Buttons

 

Mrs. Buttons

It’s all about retail.

Remember when you spent the week prior to the big day helping your mother make the cranberry sauce and the pumpkin pie, and spent Thanksgiving Day making sure your relatives didn’t get drunk, or start arguing over the game, before your father stood at the head of the bedecked table with the fresh evergreen centerpiece and sliced that first steaming morsel of succulent white breast meat? Or how you as a child were allowed to wear that special pink taffeta apron stored in the Lane cedar chest in the dining room that was carefully unfolded for this one day? And then was summoned into the kitchen to stuff the turkey because you had the smallest hand in the house and could get into the deep recess of the carcass? Or watched your dear father mashed the creamy white Idahoes’ as he stood in the kitchen for that one day of the year to share his special secret to great spuds with you? (Hint…heat the milk before adding it to the mixture)

Well welcome to Thanksgiving 2010. Where the memories of past Thanksgivings are best left to old 1940’s Jane Wyman movies and old dog-eared photographs of Thanksgivings past.

Tomorrow, if you’re lucky, you can grab a nice sliced pre-cooked turkey sandwich at Panera bread in between the lines at Macy’s and Best Buy. Where you will drive around the resurgent suburban mall looking for a decent parking space and hope you don’t get robbed or downloaded on camera from store security for hogging a space and a half?

Who has the time to cook when there are iPads to fight over and Kindles to fondle at checkout? Just check off one more holiday tradition gone the way of  retail. Yep. We sure have our priorities these days. I was in Walmart last week and no one was shopping the holiday food aisles. They were all in electronics fighting over those other “apples.“

Just think of all the lucky kids who will get to look back on Thanksgiving 2010 and recall getting sneezed on and yelled at while in line at Target dropping that turkey sandwich onto the floor. And then getting the transaction rejected by the credit card company Daddy was remiss in paying on time due to a tiny glitch in his employment status.

Thanksgiving is now Black Thursday. Seems appropriate. Those that live by the plastic die by the plastic. Just as well, Thanksgiving 2010 will be a forgettable memory come Friday morning.

More’s the better. A for me I will stay out of stores and cook like it was 1952.

Wealthmiser

No Dissing Allowed.

So we dipped our jeweled toe into the Socialist bath, yelled ouch and drained it pronto sending the likes of Pelosi, and Emmanuel down the drain with it.

 We’re back. And ‘badder’ than ever.

Our work has just begun. Obama was neither contrite nor humbled by the political beating he took. Being the typical narcissist he is, he blamed everybody else including Bush and didn’t address the fact that he has thrown us further into debt, governs over more unemployed people than Bush, and has completely been thrown to the wolves by every businessman in America.

You can throw in the farmers too -our new capitalist anti heroes. A colder wetter winter is forecast by the changes in barometric pressure according to the weather people. SO with oil hitting 86 dollars and on its way to 100, be prepared to eat the high cost of  home heating with that cold duck  aspic and pinot noir. Your mother’s Blackglama can come out of the closet now that the PETA types have crawled back under their cheap overleveraged condos. Revenge will indeed be served cold in the months ahead.

But there is a 14k lining out there - every naysayer so far has been dead wrong. Double dip recession is coming! Wrong. Famine in the third world because we ran out of wheat! Wrong. Stock market crash in Sept-October! Wrong. Your dollar is worthless! Hoard gold! Wrong. The only thing the world doesn’t seem to be running out of is fear. Fear and more fear. Apparently it doesn’t need any expensive potash or nitrogen as it grows like a weed. And they all farm it and sell  it for profit.

From CNBC to the President to Glenn Beck: Fear sells. Look at the top ten best sellers. Look at the top rated news shows. Your choice is whether or not you’ll buy it. So far it’s been all sizzle and no steak. If you sat out the market you were wrong. If you bought  physical gold you’re down as I write this. If you walked away from your mortgage, your credit rating will never recover. If you only hold cash you’re losing every day. And all the fear aimed at the tea party is coming from the naysayers that have the most to lose if this party ever takes off.

I think the difference is those that stuck their heads in the sand and are unaware as they say enough is enough and those that have been following this crazy time we are in and still say no, I chose not to cave in to the fear card. The latter are the ones that get it. So far they have been in the drivers’ seat. And I don’t mean one of those stupid little electric things - I am talking serious Euro gas guzzler. The bigger the better. The winners have been the ones that said the sun will come out tomorrow and I want to greet it from this mountain view 4000 sq ft house I just stole out from under Mr. Overleveraged - and I looked like a hero doing it! Before inflation rears its ugly head - and believe me it will, now is the time to use that useless cash  to buy what you need now.

The only thing to fear now is not finding that Cartier ruby at your local pawnshop.

Mrs. Buttons

Tea parties all around

The markets are up today as investors view a big GOP win as a net positive for stocks.  So oil and retail stocks should do well, if the Bush tax cuts are extended. As you know, the GOP loves fossil fuels,  so buy that big old Mercedes and dump all things solar. IF you want to flaunt your wealth do so with wild abandon. Flash those diamonds. Dust off the furs. It’s okay now. Normal people can come out now. Obama has lost the entirety of the country save the two pathetic coasts. The South belongs to us. It shall rise again. The Yuppies have prevailed. Old money trumps new money. Trust fund kiddies are clicking their topsiders tonight. All is well. Ahhhhhh…what a relief!
 

Mrs. Buttons

When Sundays smelled of pancake batter and percolating Eight o’Clock Coffee.

My father’s shiny Sunday scrubbed face with a generous dose of Burma Shave. My Grandma’s Chanel number five. I’d sit cross legged on the floor, Archie, Veronica, and Betty  at my feet, I would balance the plate of pancakes and make sure I didn’t drip the Canadian maple syrup all over Prince Valiant which I would lick off for fear the pages would stick when my older sister came downstairs to honor us with her presence. She would rip the paper out from under me. She was mean. She was what you would call a real party pooper.

And today I sit here with my bialy oozing with butter that I lick off my fingers mixed with the newsprint off the Sunday New York Times. The paper cruelly reminds me of who is running the country right now with headlines that make me want to crawl back under the covers. I find nothing funny in the paper today. A man who is ripping my future right out from under me suddenly casts a pall over a sunny day. And suddenly I am back at that moment when my sister poops on my pancake party.

Hmm. What can I do? What can one person do to reclaim what is missing. What I have been robbed of. And I think about joining the tea party. I want to reclaim the sanctity of Sunday's past. I want it to be like it was. I don’t like “now”.  Hell, I want it the way our forefathers said it should be. And that’s what the tea party is all about. These are not crackpot crazies the media would have us believe. They are not anti-intellectual or town hall loonies wearing those scary snake pins – Nor are they holdovers from the 1985 Lyndon LaRouche’s. The media has painted them with a broad stroke that is biased. I am not saying all the reporters should come from Provo Utah but I am saying that their attempts at making the tea party look like a bunch of loonie hacks will explode in their faces on election day. Statistically, the Tea party people are the most educated,  wealthiest, and anecdotally the nicest political group ever assembled. The tea party actually started long before Rick Santelli uttered those immortal words from the CBOT floor that morning. 

The tea party started during Bush’s tenure. That’s right. They were assembling against the Republican shenanigans. Grass roots citizens that saw the runaway spending of a free wheeling government as the death sentence to the future of this country. (So much for painting them as racist against a Black president!) They are simply put, Libertarian in nature. Small government is better than big. Debt is bad. Don’t mess with our social security. Don’t force feed us a healthcare plan. And before anybody signs it, read it first!

That’s why they showed up at all those town hall meetings. They wanted to confront their elected brethren as to what was in the bill they all signed. When they found out NO ONE read the bill, the Tea Party got very serious. And the numbers grew through the outrage at this irresponsibility of BOTH parties. Radical extremists they are not. Like any populist movement they want to reclaim America just as I want to one day wake up on a Sunday of pancakes and laughter, not full of nasty surprises. Not full of fear for my future.  And so far the Tea Party has successfully affected the outcomes in NJ and Massachusetts without hysteria or bloodshed. From the likes of those results, I’d say they’re on a roll.

I am tired of the monolithic reaction from our present day cartoon characters like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz. The Democrats will be in a world of rejection come November and they know it. And if we’re lucky well be back on the road we never should have left. I pulled out my grandmother’s old percolator the other day and put it on the counter. It looked very cool. I gave myself a healthy spritz of Chanel.  And I hear Thomas Jefferson was crazy for pancakes, too.

Buckwheat Pancakes…
An egg yolk, 2/3 cup vanilla, low-fat yogurt, ¼ cup flour, ¾ cup buckwheat flour,  1 cup low-fat milk, 2 tbsp sugar and 1 tsp salt.

Beat egg yolk and yogurt until creamy. Add flours and milk, beat smooth. Mix in the remaining ingredients. Beat egg whites until white and foamy, stir in. Let stand 5 minutes. Heat a fry-pan over medium heat and drop spoonfuls of batter in. Cook about 3 minutes per pancake, flipping half-way through cooking.

Wealthmiser

Soon eating Cheetos in a crappy cotton T-shirt will be the provenance of the rich.

Think white trash extraordinaire Bill Clinton when Hillary is out of town. Donald Trump when nobody is looking... Think Neiman Marcus catalogue items. That’s right. The price of cotton has exploded. The price of corn skyrocketed.  And where corn goes, so goes beef. The 21 club has a 24 dollar hamburger. You think a 26 dollar corn dog is far behind? Hey, why doesn’t Orient Express International just buy up all the Seven -11’s and make them all reservations only restaurants?

This is likely the end of cheap clothes as you know them. The Party is over. Suck in your gutt and suck up to the likes of speculators run amok in the cotton pits and a bunch of Chinese newly minted middle classes who won’t sew for 3 cents an hour anymore. I hear Turnbull & Asser is talking to Walmart as soon as they figure out how to put French cuffs on a t-shirt.

I can’t decide if this picture is prettier than the dress. www.express.co.uk/posts/view/

Instant Weight Loss Craze - The Poverty Diet
Look at the plus side you plus sizers’ - soon you’ll be able to see your feet.* This is also the end of cheap food or in this case cheaper food. I bet that the about to be disenfranchised middle class will miss that can of spam when they fight kitty for the Fancy Feast on the road to hyperinflation. The cat ran away when you downscaled to that mobile home anyway.

While agriculture is forecast by Goldman to be the only commodity group to drop over 12 months, the bank raised its three-month forecasts for corn, cotton, Arabica and raw sugar. *Someone please alert the Barefoot Contessa that perhaps she will in her lifetime actually get to see hers too!

Merde! Goldman in bed with the pigs?
Goldman increased its three-month corn estimate to $4.65 a bushel from $4.15 and said the market will have a “further tightening” because of demand for ethanol and animal feed. Wheat prices, which as much as doubled since June, may decline in the “medium term,” Goldman said, crying wee-wee-wee all the way back to Wall Street. Time to retire the feedbag, couch potatoes. Your days are numbered.

Cup of Joe about to blow…
The bank also raised its Arabica-coffee forecast to $1.80 a pound from $1.55 and raw-sugar to 20 cents a pound from 15 cents. The cotton estimate increased to 90 cents a pound from 85 cents. The cocoa forecast declined to $2,700 a metric ton from $3,100. Goldman raised its live-cattle forecast to 105 cents a pound from 93 cents.

C’est tourjours le meme chose, baby.
The irony is that, while there has been a modest widening of the income gap in recent decades, inequality has remained mostly unchanged since the early 1990s – regardless of which party is in power. Obama and his preoccupation with inequality is actively harmful because it leads to economic policies that inhibit growth. He is punishing business and the wealthy, and this has produced anemic growth. But worse, it is also punishing the poor and middle class. Obama claims that everyone pays his "fair share," but so far this agenda is producing more poverty. In his obsession he is ensuring only one thing - that there will be less wealth for everyone to spread around.

Speaking of spread… anyone have a tape measure? Or a side loader? Perhaps there is an inverse proportion to our shrinking GDP and her ass. Anybody want to plot a chart?

Michelle must be doing overtime in her taste ktichen making sure her chef gets all that flavor to savor and let them eat cat food.

Wealthmiser

Mrs. Buttons