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Fact-Checking William D. Cohan; Or, Paul Is Not Dead

 TV personality, author and commentator William
D. Cohan is grumpy about a lot of things.
 There’s the Duke lacrosse scandal, for one, about
which he’s just publish a “shocking, thought-provoking new book”—according to
the description on his own web page.
 And for another there’s Wall Street, from
whence he came, and about which he’s written plenty of grumpy, conspiracy-minded
books.
 Hence it’s no surprise to find Cohan invited
to speak at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, whose attendees tend to be
wealthy, Wall Street-leery arts supporters from L.A.
 It’s even less surprising that one of the
talks he gave to those same attendees was entitled “Who Has the Real Power Now
on Wall Street?”—actually, less of a talk and more of a very grumpy, very
conspiratorial dish about what he perceives to be the current state of Wall
Street—and that said Wall Street-leery audience was with him from the get-go.
 Kicking off with the quite legitimate
observation that the Dodd-Frank law was not understood by Mr. Dodd or Mr. Frank, Cohan explained that Dodd-Frank did nothing but give more power to the six major banks at the heart of the 2008-9 financial crisis (now five, since Bank of
America rescued Merrill Lynch), although
he failed to explain why (it’s the fact that big banks can spend the big
regulatory bucks while smaller banks have a harder time doing so: hence,
regulation favors the large and hurts the small, yielding consolidation).  
 No matter the reason Dodd-Frank failed its mission, the crowd nodded approval at
Cohan’s dark conclusion and murmured its disapproval of the Big Bad Banks.
 Bolstered by this friendly reception, Cohan
then proclaimed that government regulators don’t help address the weaknesses in
the Dodd-Frank regulations because “the SEC is a tool of Wall Street.”  After all, he pointed out, U.S. Presidents appoint
Wall Street people to the job of overseeing Wall Street.   Since they will eventually go back to Wall Street, they aren’t
going to do anything to kill the golden goose.  
 Thus, he noted, Mary Shapiro left FINRA to run the SEC with a $9 million
bonus from her work at FINRA, at which the crowd gasped and murmured its
disapproval of money-grubbing Mary Shapiro.
 At this point, Cohan could have said anything
he wanted—he could have said Paul McCartney really was dead; John Lennon really had mumbled “I buried Paul” at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever; and the Abbey Road
cover photograph was, in fact, an
allegory of a burial ceremony because Paul was barefoot—and the crowd would
have gasped and nodded and murmured their approval.
 Instead what he said was something far sillier
than “Paul is Dead.”   He said that
thanks to their status as bank holding companies regulated by the Federal
Reserve, “the investment banks are now a cartel.”    
 In fact he said they are even more of a cartel than OPEC, because they split up turf, noting darkly that “Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley don’t compete all that much,” which might be news to some of the traders and bankers we know at those firms.  No matter, the Bank Cartel is alive and well, according to Cohan, because he’s “been assured by bankers on Wall Street”
that they are going to “raise prices on their clients.”
 The crowd tisked and shook their heads and nodded knowingly: I knew
it!
 Now, Mr. Cohan is not just a TV
Personality.   He is an author, and he
has written books about Wall Street, where he did, after all, once work.  
 And being an author, it apparently occurred to
him that he ought to offer some proof for his “cartel” theory besides
unsubstantiated hearsay.
 So he did:  “Wall Street is booming in every way,” he
said, declaring, as if stating an indisputable fact, “Profits have never been higher. ”
 Quote, as they say, unquote.
 Now, having just listened to supposed-cartel-co-conspirator BankAmerica CEO Brian
Moynihan point out that his company has just completed its 15th
consecutive quarter of reducing employment by 3,000 human beings or more, the phrase “booming in every way” wouldn’t necessarily spring to the mind of anyone remotely paying attention to the current environment on Wall Street.
 However it’s the “profits have never been
higher” that seemed flat-out wrong.  Since this was a speech, and there were no fact-checkers around as would be the case if this had been a manuscript for publication, we here at NotMakingThisUp decided to check the facts ourselves to see if Mr. Cohan was, in
fact, not Making That Up.  
 The results, from our trusty Bloomberg, are in the table below, which shows the most recent earnings
data from the five money-centers that remain intact from the crisis days compared to their peak quarterly numbers, almost entirely from the 2006-2007 fat years (Wells
Fargo is not included because it is a substantially different entity thanks to
the Wachovia acquisition):   

 If that is a cartel, it is not doing a very good job of jacking up prices for its clients.
 Return on equity for
the “booming-in-every-way” cartel is down 50% from peak levels; return on assets is down 40% from peak, and earnings (in billions of net after-tax dollars, adjusted for
non-recurring items), are nearly 30% below peak.
 Not even close to “Never been higher.”
 And while we are at it, we should probably also point out that John Lennon
actually said “cranberry sauce,” not  “I buried Paul,” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever;” that
Paul went barefoot during the Abbey Road cover shoot because it was a warm day
outside the EMI studio at St. John’s Wood, not because the cover photograph was an allegory of a burial ceremony; and that Paul is actually still alive and well, and
recently turned 73.
 Just in case Mr. Cohan tells you otherwise.
Jeff Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2015)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



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Sgt. Pepper! Joe Cocker! Jimmy Page! Oh, and Warren and Charlie…

                  The best part of this year’s
Berkshire meeting—except seeing Charlie Munger in good form, which we’ll get to
in a bit—was the movie.
            Not the movie itself, but the end of the movie, when the sing-along tribute to Berkshire’s managers, which always used to be set to the tune of “My
Favorite Things,” turned out to use “Sgt. Pepper” instead.
            That’s some good taste there.
    But, actually, the best part of the
Beatles-themed piece of the movie came as it died out and, miraculously, the “Sgt. Pepper Reprise”—the best two minutes of The
Beatles ever recorded, in your editor’s opinion—began to play during the credits.  
   (Yes, we know—Dear Prudence…Across the
Universe…Revolution…Oh! Darling…Something…Everybody’s Got Something To Hide…The
End—are up there, but it all depends on what mood you’re in,
right?   And the mood we were in was,
“Hey, this is seriously good taste.”)
            But that was before the absolute
best part of the entire meeting actually occurred, which was when the Sgt.
Pepper Reprise died out and the house lights stayed dim and suddenly that
willowy organ introduction—Can they
really be playing this?—to
Joe Cocker’s full-throated ¾-time version of 
“With a Little Help From My Friends” began to coil above the sound of
20,000 or so Berkshire shareholders shifting in their seats waiting for Warren
and Charlie to hit the stage, which they did as The Grease Band came in over the organ with a bang, young Jimmy Page leading the charge on electric guitar…
            It doesn’t get any better than that.
            And it didn’t.

            Not that it wasn’t a good
meeting.   It was a very good
meeting.  It just was kind of all
downhill from there—at least when it comes to the energy of the thing. 
            Substance-wise, Warren and Charlie sat for the usual five-plus hours of thoughtful questions (for the most part)
and thoughtful answers (with a bit of deft tap-dancing on Warren’s part,
particularly when the enormously touchy subject of 3G—the Brazilian takeover
artists whose Berkshire-financed slashing-and-burning at Heinz has turned a
sleepy-but-modestly-profitable ketchup company with declining sales into a
hugely profitable ketchup-and-potentially-mustard company with declining sales—came
up).
            Naturally, Carol Loomis did the
bringing up, because a) Carol is a terrific journalist, and b) Carol has no
fear, while she also knows that Buffett can rationalize anything.
            And rationalize 3G he did, saying “I
don’t think you can ever find a statement that Charlie and I have made…where
we’ve said more people than are needed should be working at our companies.”
            That’s not the point, of course: the
point is that if 3G ran Berkshire it would very likely have substantially fewer
than 300,000+ employees in short order, no matter how often Buffett points to
the 25 FTEs at corporate headquarters as proof that Berkshire doesn’t have any
fat.
            (Buffett later, and ludicrously,
claimed that if Berkshire operated as a normal bloated American company it
would have a huge corporate headquarters staff which 3G would be entitled to
slash if it ran Berkshire—thus ignoring the corporate headquarters functions
scattered throughout all the various Berkshire companies, which naturally have
their own CFOs and Treasurers and controllers and legal et al.)

            But we came to praise Buffett and
Munger, not to criticize them, particularly Charlie, who got in his usual
wonderfully concise, pointed observations after Buffett had frequently wandered around the
metaphorical map on various topics ( and Charlie participated in literally every question asked during the
first half of the session).
For example:
            On why Clayton Homes (criticized in
a recent Seattle Times “expose”) has some customers who default: “If we made
the default rate zero we wouldn’t be lending to people who need it.”
            On what investment formula Buffett and Munger could provide to evaluate companies: “We don’t have a one-size-fits-all
system.”
            On his and Buffett’s
less-than-healthy diets: “The way I look at it, if I die earlier I’ll just
avoid a few months of drooling in the nursing home.”
            On why Van Tuyl has been wildly
successful in the notoriously nepotistic car business: “Van Tuyl has a system
of meritocracy where the right people get the power and the ownership.”
            On why Berkshire changed over time
as it did: “We were always dissatisfied with what we knew…we wanted to learn
more.”
            On how to succeed without a business
degree: “Play the hand you’ve got.”
            And on what he and Buffett look for in
business partners: “The trustworthiness is more important than the brains.”
            And that’s just the first half of
the meeting, because we left at the lunch
break, never to go back.  Readers who
wish can call up Charlie’s bon mots on Twitter and on the “live-blogs” of any
of half a dozen financial news outlets that covered the event, but we’re not
going to pretend to have been when and where we weren’t.
            Why now?
            Maybe it was seeing the NetJets
pilots and attendants, dressed to the nines in their uniforms and walking quietly
and respectfully in a very long oval outside the CenturyLink Center the entire
meeting, so different in seriousness and demeanor from past “Hey look at
us!”-type protests at the Berkshire meeting; maybe it was Buffett’s inability to
admit publicly, “Well, yes, it’s true, the 3G guys are more Mr. Potter than my
George Bailey, but so what?”; maybe it’s the fact that Business Insider—Henry
Blodgett’s quite wonderful online vision of what would happen if People
Magazine covered the business world (with occasional great scoops thrown in the mix)—published a
reporter’s visit to Warren Buffett’s Favorite Steakhouse (here), complete with photos
of the actual type of steak Warren likes to order…
            We don’t know, but after hearing Joe
Cocker (1944-2014, sadly) singing his guts out on the heels of Ringo and The
Boys slamming it, the whole thing just seemed like enough.
            And so, enough.
Jeff Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2015)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
  Mr.
Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold
either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in
the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way
constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an
investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by
Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended
solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
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Messi Announces Retirement, Reporter Asks About Half-Time Score

 Tom Prescott announced his retirement last
night.   You may not have heard of him,
but as CEO of Align Technologies (the inventors of Invisalign “invisible
braces”) Prescott helped turn a $70 million revenue company with 35% gross
margins, negative operating margins and a $127 million market value into a
near-$800 million revenue company with near-80% gross margins and 25% operating
margins.
 Oh, yeah, and a $4.5 billion market value,
last we checked.
 More than that, Tom Prescott helped Invisalign
develop from a niche product not much liked by the orthodontists who were
supposed to use it (it’s far more expensive to them than the old-fashioned
wires and brackets, plus, in the early days, before Prescott, the Invisalign
treatment was far more limited in what it could do, teeth-moving-around-wise) into a near-standard of care in orthodontics around the world.
 And he did it the old-fashioned way: by
spending on R&D to improve the product (a quarter billion in the last six
years alone), marketing like crazy, and proselytizing every chance he had.
 Along the way, Prescott had to
contend with a near-fatal copycat product (fought and won in courts of law),
short-selling attacks (fought and won the best way possible: just running the
business well) and big-company patent suits (smartly settled).
 If there ever exists a CEO Hall of Fame, Tom
Prescott should get in on the first ballot.
 Thus it was quite a surprise to see the
headline come across the tape after last night’s close that he would retire in
June, with an outside-the-company successor to take his place.  No mention of such plans had ever passed his lips to anyone outside Align, and being the ripe young age of 59, nobody had ever bothered to ask him.
 Nevertheless, as the ensuing conference call
made clear, the decision was voluntary, had been in the works for a year and a
half, and had produced a successor who looks eminently worthy of filling some
big shoes.
 Now you would think the first question on the
call would be about the decision itself, with perhaps a follow-up on the
successor and whatever plans he might have for the company.   
 But you would be wrong.  
 The first question was about what it’s always
about for some of Wall Street’s Finest…near-term earnings:
 “Thanks.  
Good afternoon.  Tom or David
[White, the CFO], could you just elaborate on sort of the preliminary 1Q
outlook in terms of revenues and EPS…?”
 It was as if Leo Messi suddenly announced his
retirement from Barcelona during half-time, and the first question out of the
reporters’ mouths was about who’s going to win the match.
 You could almost hear Prescott and his team restraining their incredulity, but, class acts that they are, restrain they did.
 Still, if there ever exists a Hall of Fame of Silly
Analyst Questions, that one will get in on the first ballot.
Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2015)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
  Mr.
Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold
either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in
the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way
constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an
investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by
Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended
solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
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Charlie Named Name


Ned Isakoff: “You got me
blacklisted from Hop Sing’s?”
Delivery Man:  “She named name!”
—Seinfeld,
“The Race” 
 Like Elaine Benes in that Seinfeld episode,
Charlie Munger named name.
 Two names, in fact: Greg Abel and Ajit Jain.
 Unlike Elaine Benes’s name-naming, however, the two
named by Munger have nothing to do with Communist agitation and the destruction
of capitalism as we know it—far from it.  
 Rather, they have everything to do with
Capitalist orthodoxy in its purest, most meritocratic form: who might succeed
Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway under the scenario, as Munger puts
it, “Buffett left tomorrow.”
 Here’s the direct quote from Munger’s comments
written for the 2014 Chairman’s Letter that hit Berkshire Hathaway’s web site
this morning (2015 being the 50th anniversary of Buffett’s takeover
of the company, both men wrote individual retrospectives on the last 50 years
and what the next 50 years might bring):
 But, under this Buffett-soon-leaves
assumption, his successors would not be “of only moderate ability.”  For instance, Ajit Jain and Greg Abel are
proven performers who would probably be under-described as “world-class.”   “World-leading” would be the description I
would choose.  In some important ways,
each is a better business executive than Buffett…
 While Munger’s naming of names does not carry
the same penalty as in the Seinfeld episode—neither man will be banned from
ordering takeout at Hop Sing’s—it does carry far greater ramifications, because
the moment Munger’s comments appeared on Berkshire Hathaway’s web site this
morning, both men’s lives changed forever, for obvious reasons that we won’t
enumerate, since everybody else will be doing that starting, oh, now.
 Instead, we encourage a careful reading of the
full Berkshire letter—including both Buffett and Munger’s insightful commentary
on what made Berkshire what it has become and where it might go—here.
 Fortunately, our book on the topic of Munger’s
name-naming—“Warren Buffett’s Successor: Who it Is and Why it Matters,” (eBookson Investing, 2013)—was published well before Munger actually chose to name names, but
we don’t have to change a word of it.
Jeff
Matthews

Author “Warren
Buffett’s Successor: Who it Is and Why it Matters””
(eBooks
on Investing, 2014)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
  Mr.
Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold
either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in
the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way
constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an
investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by
Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended
solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
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From Cleaning Harbors to Feeding Roughnecks: “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

 The Canadian tar sands have been very good to
Clean Harbors, a perennial Wall Street favorite that evolved from a disaster
cleanup business (for which the company’s web pages still carry a plug at the
bottom: “For 24-Hour Emergency Response, call 800.OIL.TANK”) into a
diversified industrial service company through 35-plus acquisitions costing
about $2 billion over 25 years.
 The tar sands business came with the 2009
acquisition of Eveready, and so swiftly did CLH expand deeper into so-called
unconventional energy (everything from feeding and housing roughnecks in lodges
to hauling out drilling waste) that oil and gas exploration and production services
went from 0% of the company’s total business in 2008 to 27% in 2012, before the
$1.25 billion acquisition of Safety-Kleen got them into the lube oil re-refining
business, diluting the oil and gas piece to something closer to 15%.
 Now, I have a friend who refers to any company
repeatedly flogged by Wall Street analysts while never quite seeming to meet
their lofty expectations as a “Next Year in Jerusalem” story, after the phrase concluding
the Passover Seder.  No matter what
happens in the business, and how it varies from their expectations, the
analysts, metaphorically speaking, say “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
 Granted, CLH deserved some free passes after beating
analyst expectations for eight straight quarters from mid-2010 to mid-2012, but
the streak ran out some time around the aforementioned Safety-Kleen
acquisition—which seemed like a good idea at the time to the cheerleaders (fee-generating
transactions generally do that!)—and the company failed to match expectations in 6
of the next 10 quarters, at least according to Bloomberg.
 But don’t take our word for it: the
transformation of CLH’s from “beat and raise” to “hit or miss” is told in the
headlines from various so-called analyst reports along the way:
5/11:    “Premier Mid-Cap Growth Story”
2/12:    “Momentum Strong Enough to Raise 2012
Outlook, but Still Conservative”
5/12:    “Slight 1Q12 Upside; Reiterates Guidance;
Growth Story Intact”
8/12:    “2Q Transition/Seasonality or
Structural?  We Believe LT Story
Unchanged”
10/12:  “Upgrading to Strong Buy on Highly Accretive
Safety-Kleen Acquisition”
2/13:    “Q412 Results A Bit Light; No Change to 2013
Guidance; Reiterate Buy”
5/13:    “Q1 Revenue Light with Targets Back End
Loaded; Segment Results Mixed”
7/13:    “Inflection Unlikely for 2Q but More Likely
in 2H”
8/13:    “2Q More Painful Than Expected, but Upside
Narrative into 2014 Unchanged”
8/13:    “Q2 Weak/Guidance Cut; Technical Services
Needs to Lead Charge”
9/13:    “Investor Day Enables Sentiment Shift; 2014
Appears Conservative”
9/13:    “A Very Bullish Investor Day; Reiterate Buy”
11/13:
 “2013 Outlook Cut; Choppy Segment
Results Don’t Help”
11/13:  “2014 Can’t Come Fast Enough”
2/14:    “Another weak quarter and outlook”
2/14:    “Oil & Gas/Re-refinery Drive Forecast
Lower; Shares Finally Washed Out?”
2/14:   “CLH has not delivered a beat & raise
quarter since 4Q11.”
3/14:    “From Land of the Lost toward the Path to
Enlightenment”
5/14:    “Finally, a Good Quarter; Cost Reductions in
Focus and Upside May be Returning”
6/14:    “Takeaways from Investor Meetings…businesses
appear to be stabilizing/improving…”
8/14:    “Solid 2Q Driven by the Key Tech Service
Franchise; Estimates Raised”
11/14:  “Estimates Cut on Energy Trends; Hopefully a
Refocus on ‘Core’ Franchises
 Along the way, one large “activist” investor
accumulated a 9% stake in the company, but months later announced it was
shutting down its fund…and CLH began a strategic review, presumably with one eye
on the “activist” investor…but then oil prices collapsed (in the truest
sense of the word), putting a sudden damper on high-cost oil development in places
like the Canadian tar sands and the U.S. shale areas where CLH had been
planting its flag up until recently…so much so that shortly before year-end a “comp” to the company’s lodging
services business—called Civeo, which had been spun out of Oil States
International just last summer in order to “enhance shareholder value” at the
behest of the same kind of “activist” investor that had accumulated 9% of
CLH—shocked its own cheerleaders, saying thusly:
            “The acceleration in November of the decline in global
crude oil prices and forecasts for a potentially protracted period of lower
prices have resulted in major oil companies reducing their 2015 capital
budgets…reducing the near-term allocation of capital to development or
expansion projects in the oil sands, which is a major driver of demand for the
company’s services in Canada.  It has
also increased the difficulty of reliably estimating 2015 occupancy levels for
the company’s facilities…”
 It wasn’t long ago—that 2013 “very bullish
analyst day,” in fact—that the company’s cheerleaders were congratulating CLH
for the lodging business being one of its highest return businesses.
 Now, Warren Buffett likes to say that when a
management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a
reputation for bad economics, “it is the reputation of the business that
remains intact.”   But in the case of
Clean Harbors, the analysts like to say, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2014)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
  Mr.
Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold
either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in
the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way
constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an
investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by
Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended
solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
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The NotMakingThisUp Book Review: The Best Least Looked-Forward-To Book I Have Ever Received, John Cleese’s “So, Anyway…”


 I received for Christmas the least
looked-forward-to book I have ever received: John Cleese’s “So, Anyway…”.  
 Cleese, of course, is a founder of Monty
Python, the wildly successful British comedy group that took male
teenagers by storm in the early 1970s and was considered inheritor to The
Beatles’ mantle as conquerors of America by none other than George Harrison (according to his friend Eric Idle, another Python).  Cleese is also co-creator, co-writer,
producer and star of what has been called the best TV sitcom ever created,
Fawlty Towers. 
 Thus, for a certain generation—i.e. male
baby-boomers who came of age when Monty Python was laying waste to all previous
notions of what was funny—a book, any book, by John Cleese would be a no-brainer for Christmas, or
Hanukkah, or even New Year’s Eve.
 But despite having grown up on the original
Python series aired on PBS, and despite having seen the group live at City Center in
1976, and despite having seriously considered traveling to London to see the
group’s final reunion at the O2 Center last summer, I had no interest in this
book, the reason being an especially scathing review in the Wall Street Journal
by one Wesley Stace, a British author who also performs as a singer-songwriter
by the name of John Wesley Harding, the title of an old Bob Dylan album (go
figure).
 In his review, John Wesley Harding/Wesley Stace
wrote pretty much what you might expect of a book by Cleese, whose intensely
intellectual approach to comedy, and the well-known years he spent in
psycho-therapy, tends to make him appear to be the John Lennon of the Pythons—Lennon
being the ex-Beatle who had the nerve to dismiss his achievements as a Fab Four
by saying, “We were just a band that made it very very big, that’s all.”
 And that’s the tone of the Wesley Stace/Wesley
Harding review in a nutshell:
 The title “So, Anyway . . .” implies a cavalcade of convivial anecdotes
and lengthy digressions. This is a grave misrepresentation, partly because of
an occasional reluctance on Mr. Cleese’s part (“actually telling you about [the
Footlights does] not fill me with excitement”) and partly because promising
stories are derailed by the decision to narrate them in the voice of Mr. Cleese
playing a crashing bore at a party in a Python sketch…
It’s a difficult book to enjoy and “The Last Laugh” would perhaps have
been better a title, so often does Mr. Cleese give himself the punch-line in
age-old disputes. He rehearses every perceived slight. The “undeserved insult”
of being overlooked for a position of authority at school left a life long
scar: “I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world.” His ill
feeling towards his dead mother is likewise undimmed by time…
 But receive the book for Christmas I did, and
am glad I opened it and began reading it.
 Because if, as I suspect he did not, Hardy
Wesley/Stace Wesley had in fact read the entire book, as I have, he would have
discovered that [We interrupt here to
explain that book reviewers frequently do not read the actual book before
reviewing it; many reviewers, in fact, rely on summaries provided by the book
publisher for scheduling and cost reasons, as we learned during the publication
of “Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” when a reviewer took issue with a
blog post the author had written, mistaking it for the book—Ed.] what John
Cleese has done is write a tight, funny, comprehensive-but-compact biography
that zeros in on the whys and wherefores of how he, and, indirectly, the
Pythons, got to be what they became.
 He starts at the beginning, when and where he
was born, and while the stuff about his father and mother (and grandparents,
too) may seem irrelevant and mean-spirited to Stacely/Hardley, it’s all part of
explaining how he developed the sense of humor he did.
 The fact that Cleese had a tough time with his mother
explains a lot, while the fact that he really liked and admired his father
seems jarring at first, considering his recurring role as the demented
authoritarian figure in Python sketches, but that role is explained by his
memories of being bullied at school, followed by this insight:
“Peter
Cook [Another revolutionary British
comedian—Ed.] always said that he quite deliberately staved off bullying by
being funny.   I think in my case it was
less a conscious activity—more ‘Oh, that felt nice.’ And, as I realized, I became funnier, of
course, because the spark is always there. 
So the bullying faded away, and I started, for the first time, to make
friends.”
 Hardly ‘rehearsing every perceived slight,’ as
the Stacy/Hardy review put it.  
 In fact, the entire book is supremely well written in
the Cleese manner—there is no “as told to” laziness here—and while the
anecdotes are not, as the reviewer would seem to prefer, “convivial,” they all
serve to tell a point: the point being, “here’s where it came from.”
 Along the way, we learn where the germ of certain bits
were developed (e.g. Sybil Fawtly’s description of her paranoid mother—“And she’s always
on about men following her; I don’t know what she thinks they’re going to do to
her, vomit on her, Basil says”—came
directly from Cleese’s phobic mother); why he and Graham Chapman worked so well as a
writing team (“When you begin to write comedy, the biggest worry is simply: is
this funny?  Writing with a partner ensures you get
priceless feedback, and Graham and I worked together well: we found each other
funny and when we did laugh, we really laughed); and how the path to Python let
through unknown (in America, at least) radio and TV shows like “I’m Sorry, I’ll
Read That Again,”  “At Last The 1948
Show” and  “The Frost Report.”
 To be sure, Cleese aims zingers at old archaic
conventions and the occasional petty personality who offended his sense of
justice, but those asides are overwhelmed by the surprisingly affectionate portraits of writers, producers and directors who helped him along the way (including David Frost, despite the fact that Eric Idle gave a merciless portrayal of Frost as “Timmy Williams” in the Python series).  All in all, it is hardly the cranky kind of stuff Wembley/Stadium would have
readers believe, and even the occasional gibes all serve the main point of explaining where all this great
stuff came from.
 As, for example, when Cleese reprints parts of several old sketches from various pre-Python shows, including a couple that later made it
into Python sketches, either on film or on records, as well as some
laugh-out-loud bits that did not.
 And for anyone interested in
creativity—especially of the breakthough, Python kind—this is invaluable, and
pleasurable reading.
 Wembley Stadium notwithstanding.
Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2014)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2014
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients
advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities
of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’
recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and
should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this
blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be
ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the
reader, and the author.
Categories
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Shazam! From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not to Mention Jessica & Nick, and Taylor Swift

2014 Editor’s Note:
 Well, Michael Bublé’s computer is still
releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this year’s holiday
music survey.  The best we can say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s
hard-driving, live version of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without
computer-aided
Bublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction.  
 Meanwhile, one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow.
 As for our
usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves
right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is
when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our
local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick
Fleetwood’s “Play On.”
 Fleetwood is
one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the
beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people
do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful
and compelling even for those—including your editor—who were never big
Fleetwood Mac fans.
 Currently
priced at $30.79 at Barnes & Noble for the hard copy version, or $21.00 on
Amazon, I’ll wait until spring and pick it up for $5.99—sorry Mick, but that’s
the business we’re in.
 Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM,
December 19, 2014
2013
Editor’s Note:  The most unnerving aspect to this
year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence
of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s
already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,”
which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written
(no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and
over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security
forces and let them do their worst.  
 The
perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor
Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little
to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with.
 But,
as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses.
 On
the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of
excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray
Davies’ is the most interesting.
 The
centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot
by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he
manages to tell much of the story of his career.  
 If
you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why
couldn’t that be a Christmas song?   It’s as much about the
holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say
later on), this is your book.
 Neil
Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better
than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood
strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in
some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with
Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only
stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no
wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young,
he says what he means and means what he says.  
 And
if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s
book is the place to begin.  
 Would
that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young
himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than
a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift.
 Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM,
December 7, 2013
2012
Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to
bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good
cheer…  
 Amazon.com: Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook: Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store
 2011
Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep
this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your
breath.  Here goes.
 Our
annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way
comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM
all-holiday-music channel.
 Actually,
there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio
monopolists at SiriusXM.  There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing
Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other
human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s
another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent
sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this
year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless
frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber.
 Enough
said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the
presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene.
 Our
beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which
requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly
on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on
the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels),
or a common target audience demographic.
 Among
the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is
essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer
euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the
WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else.
 And
there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies
channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And
nothing else.
 Then
there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.”  It
plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein.
 And
nothing else.
 Certainly
there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between
genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score).  But, in the main, each
SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined
demographic…sometimes scarily so.
 
Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely
defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic
guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style
guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes.
 
You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic
methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be
listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you.
 
 If
Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel.
 Unfortunately,
no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be
(there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various
Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound
like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em.
 Listening
to the “60’s at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single
like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive
“MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from
1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962.
 The
listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the
bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don’t just give each artist its own
channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra.
 Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough,
no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all
head-scratchers, no Beatles channel.
 In
fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative
to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age.
 After
all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling
Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere
near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic
Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on
6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other
three thousand channels here.
 You
quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on
SiriusXM as “Revolution.”
 So
why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called
“Margaritaville,” of course)?
 Having
gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday
channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are
widely played everywhere else.
 Furthermore,
we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs
for this review.  The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be
getting to shortly.  Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,”
which sounds like he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is
right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in
any crowd of non-favorites.
 Easier,
then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It
NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue
about the remaining 9.
 It
is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.”
 This
so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant
English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and
used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable
humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way.
 It
isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply
move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely
different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous,
and, therefore, well worth a mention here.
 We’re
talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover
of  “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas
album, “Christmas in the Heart.”  (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas
album.)
 The
music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost
indistinguishable from Tom Waits.  (The truly bizarre music video is not
to be missed, watch it here.)  After you get over the initial
shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall
being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy.
 Another
glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or
humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM
random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more
worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not.
 The
song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top
Ten.
 If
hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good
Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you
in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will.
 
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM,
December 4, 2011 
 2010
Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by
popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on
it.
 For
starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,”
which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean
“Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.”
 It
is a great book, period.
 The
story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging
across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for
example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard;
but the full story is much better than that).
 Yet
there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar
sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat
trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare
themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand
could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man
who watched him write “Brown Sugar”).
 And
that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff.
 The
sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his
unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person
help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and
body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who
write of their own experiences with the band.
 Okay,
you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant
to our annual review of holiday songs?
 Well,
while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the
local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime
around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical
legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background,
and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have
done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling
Stones probably top the list.
 What
with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on
top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along
these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one
of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.)
 Now,
for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat
You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the
1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi
catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.)
 Starting
out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially
dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in
on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style
vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for
Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded.
 It is a
delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this
season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for
the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of
Christmas Classics.
 A
1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a
somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open
the car door even at high speeds to get away:
Last
Christmas, I gave you my heart

But the
very next day you gave it away

This year

To save
me from tears,

I gave it
to someone special
 Considering
the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to
repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives
way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask
yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d
he give it to last year? The mailman?”


 “Last
Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in
UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the
single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to
creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do
They Know It’s Christmas?”


 “Do
They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive
an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting
timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and
even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as
prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz
pianist Vince Guaraldi.


 How
a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon
characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast
Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden
Gate Bridge.
 One
thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations
will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every
year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers:
Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack,
however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.)
 One
second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain,
er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is
You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed
misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below).


 And
we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal
pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,”
for example) unbearable, at least to our ears.
 In
this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in
fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants
for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously
noted, you get our drift.
 Finally,
and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book
this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly
harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer
not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man
worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed.
 Which,
we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season.

And so,
we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM,
December 13, 2010



2009
Editor’s Note: 
Back by popular demand, what follows is our
year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station
near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday
season.
 For
starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey
singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most
grateful.
 Indeed,
if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government
Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider
ourselves a positive force for society.
 On
the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in
the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the
classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.”
 For
the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas.
And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and
the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later.
 But
Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try.

 Instead, Barry and his back-up
group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter
in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well
as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line
on the last chorus.
 Sharp-eared
readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I
Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?”


 We
can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the
enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists.
 Don’t
get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world
what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and
recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.”
 It’s
the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy
about.  So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the
definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold
Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this
one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’).
 As
an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and
anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas.”
 Of
all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the
best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended
spirit of this disarmingly titled song.
 After
all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little
Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of
sight,” but with this:


 “Have
yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be
living in the past.”


 No,
we are not making that up.  The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow
from be covering it any time soon.


JM—December
19, 2009



Wednesday,
December 24, 2008


Shazam!
From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not
to Mention Jessica & Nick
 Like
everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our
local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it
feels like.
 And
while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music
programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once
seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth.
 What
we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat
King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an
insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White
Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas
Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over
and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers
played non-stop for months on end.
 Does
anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here
Comes Santa Claus”? 

It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of
Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does
get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds.
 Along
with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original
Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang
Syne.”
 You’ve
heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse,
they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a
waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain.
 So
how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song?
 Then
there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an
annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when
John Lennon wasn’t around.

 (After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s
banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just
seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with
the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby
turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.)
 But
Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney
actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years
ago, before Lennon was shot.
 It
rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time
programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own
downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as
frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.”
 Who
but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And
what have you done…”?  Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a
Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?”
 If
anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t
heard it.
 Now,
we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the
aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a
few others, we’d be clueless.
 But
thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly
found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable
female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy
Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all.
 The
technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received
the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since
cameras on cell phones first came out.
 For
readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a
breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards
any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or
even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing.
 Shazam
does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then
displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band
biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone.
 Now,
you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song
playing in a bar?
 And
unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still
not sure.
 But
we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch
of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen
radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the
iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one
(a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a
hitch.
 And,
as a result, we can now report the following:
 1)
It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them
not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam;


 2)
All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as
if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam
to distinguish one from the other;


 3)
Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,”
which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season;
 4)
None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song
thing, anyway.


 Now,
why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone
who can’t actually sing?
 Well,
her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it
really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of
vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the
singer’s five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one
particular song, but within each measure of the song.
 In
fact Mariah’s voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio
is tickling her while she’s singing.
 More
sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The
Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on
next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather
than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”),
so innocuous and manufactured it sounds.
 Johnny
Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you
the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s
Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t
think about it for long.
 Now,
without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that
song.
 On
the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators
of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica
Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.”


 “Singing”
is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises
above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does
manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of
electronics.
 Thus
the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly
anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this
blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran
across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly
to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies.
 Fortunately,
the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s
“The Christmas Song” comes on next.
 Thanks
to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version
Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best
version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three
best Christmas songs out there, period.
 The
second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time
Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas
mood like no other recording ever creates.
 (Unfortunately,
the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually
seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most
popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once
saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that
he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common
misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news
flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later
broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely
destroying the mood for the rest of the set.)
 Like
that long-ago performance by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation
left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male
singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of
Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra.
 Who
is this guy, we wonder?
 Shazam
tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight
became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics,
because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when
John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on.
 It’s
a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to
write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The
fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps.
 Unfortunately,
his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when
Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned
out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.)
 The
other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to
relate.
Sinatra,
of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale
Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony
Bennett.
 Then
there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he
wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One
wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he
was recording this, if you get our drift.
 Oh,
and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs
the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard;
Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely
terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that
New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with
that same roller-coaster vocal gargling.
 Gene
Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable
except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in
which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O
Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and
Mariah-type warbling to boot.
 Hall
& Oates’s “Jingle Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other
versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while
Martina McBride manages to sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda
Ronstadt singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
 Winding
things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we
need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces
it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin
surges.
 Fortunately,
we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one
of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even
better than Nat, depending on your mood.
 It’s
Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”…
live.
 Yes,
this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the
thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you.
 Now,
as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a
single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came
with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be
the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway
stuff.)
 Fortunately
nobody threw this one away.
 Springsteen
begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells;
then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly
through the verse and chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into
high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a
different realm altogether.
 Feeding
off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times.
Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus,
sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes.
 This
is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with
no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either.
 Try
doing that some time, Jessica and Nick.
 Actually,
come to think of it, please don’t.
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all.
Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2014)    Available now at Amazon.com
© 2014
NotMakingThisUp, LLC



The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients
advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities
of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’
recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and
should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this
blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be
ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the
reader, and the author.
Categories
Uncategorized

Activist Targets IBM: “Bring Out the Belgian Waffle!”



IBM trades to highs on
activist related speculation  (161.85 +0.95)
—Briefing.com,
November 23, 2014
  IBM Chief Counsel: “Ginni?  Fred here.”
  IBM CEO Ginni Rometty:  “What’s wrong?”
  Chief Counsel: “Activists are circling.”
  Rometty: “Oh geez.”
  Chief Counsel: “Yeah.  I’ve got the biggest shark of all on hold.  He wants to talk.”
  Rometty: “Carl Icahn??”
  Chief Counsel: 
“No.   Icahn watches Netflix and
uses an iPhone.  He thinks we’re ‘old
economy.’  Worse than Icahn.”
  Rometty: “Donald Trump?”
  Chief Counsel: 
“No.   Even worse.”
  Rometty: 
“Worse than Donald Trump?  How is
that possible?”
  Chief Counsel: 
“It’s possible.  It’s those guys
from 3G.”
  Rometty: “Yikes. 
The Brazilians?   The ones who
took over Burger King and slashed and burned?”
  Chief Counsel: “Yeah.  And they bought Heinz with Warren
Buffett—your pal.”
  Rometty: “Well, he’s not my pal after we had to
reset the ‘earnings roadmap’ and the stock tanked.   Stupid roadmap.   How did Palmisano ever come up with that
idea?”
  Chief Counsel: 
“It worked, didn’t it?”
  Rometty: 
“Only long enough for Sam to exercise his stock options.   Not me.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“Well your options may be in the money soon enough, if these 3G guys go
ahead.  You want to talk to them?”
  Rometty: 
“Put ‘em on.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“Right now?”
  Rometty: 
“It’s better than watching these Fast Money yahoos trash talk me on
CNBC.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“Hold on… Okay, here we go.   Oscar?   You there?”
  Oscar:  “Yes.  I have seven minutes before I have to fire 37
people and figure out how to convince young males to buy hamburgers made with
wood shavings.   Let’s get going.”
  Rometty: 
“What do have in mind?”
  Oscar: 
“We at 3G would like to buy IBM—”
  Rometty: 
“Outright?   That’s not activism,
that’s a hostile takeover!”
  Oscar: 
“Call it what you like.   We see
great opportunity to run IBM more efficiently.”
  Rometty: 
“Oh yeah?   Starting where?”
  Oscar: 
“Layoffs.   IBM has too many
employees.”
  Rometty: 
“Says who?”
  Oscar: 
“You have over 400,000 employees!”
  Rometty: 
“That number is so last week.”
  Oscar: 
“You’ve had layoffs in the last
week?  Well then, I must congratulate
you.”
  Chief Counsel: “Careful, we haven’t publicly
disclosed anything.”
  Rometty: “Okay.  
So what else does 3G think we need to change?”
  Oscar:  “Well,
according to our internal due diligence you have a very inefficient field staff
reporting structure.  At Burger King we
have 14,000 field staff reporting to seventy-five MBAs who all work out of their cars.”
  Rometty: 
“That’s nothing.  At IBM our entire
field staff of 80,000 reports to three college grads and a transfer student.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“Ginni, that’s never been disclosed—”
Rometty: 
“Relax, Fred.  The transfer
student doesn’t even speak English.”
  Oscar:  “Somehow
our due diligence did not discover that.  
Well played.”
  Rometty:  “Thank
you.  What else you got?”
  Oscar:  “Well,
corporate overhead.   At Burger King we
eliminated all corporate jets except mine, and everyone takes a Greyhound bus
when they travel more than 300 miles.”
  Rometty:  “What
do they do under 300 miles?”
  Oscar: “They hitch-hike.”
  Rometty: 
“That’s nothing.  All travel
requests at IBM have to get approved by a cardboard cut-out of Dilbert.”
  Oscar: “Brilliant!”
  Rometty:  “It’s
called returning value to shareholders, not employees.”
  Oscar:  “And we admire that.  But your headquarters staff appears bloated to us—”
  Rometty:  “That’s because it doesn’t
exist.”
  Oscar: 
“Doesn’t exist?”
  Rometty:  
“No.  It was outsourced to India
years ago.”
  Oscar: 
“Then why do our satellite images of the IBM headquarters parking lot show so many cars?”
  Rometty: 
“That’s my security detail.   And
my lawn service.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“Ginni, I really think this is inappropriate—”
  Rometty: 
“Not at all.  If this guy thinks
he can tell me how to run IBM even less
for employees and customers than we already do, he’s got another thing coming.  He’s a piker.”
  Oscar: 
“Well let’s discuss your taxes. 
We at 3G know how to operate tax-efficiently across all multi-national
jurisdictions—”
  Rometty: “Our tax rate was 15.6% last year.  How do you beat that?”
  Oscar: 
“We think applying a ‘Dutch Sandwich’ could move billions in pre-tax income to a lower tax rate nation without any change in your corporate headquarters—”
  Rometty: 
“Been there, done that.”
  Oscar:  “Well, a ‘Double Irish’ would reduce taxes on
intellectual property by shifting—”
  Rometty: 
“You’re five years too late pal. 
Next?”
  Oscar:  “A
‘French Cuff’?”
  Rometty: 
“So ’90s.”
  Oscar: 
“The ‘Jamaican Bobsled’?”
  Rometty: 
“Who do you think invented the
‘Jamaican Bobsled’?”
  Oscar:  “What about a ‘Hong Kong Stir-Fry’…a ‘Singapore
Sling’…a ‘Portuguese Man-O-War’?”
  Rometty: 
“Is this the ’80s calling now?  Puh-leeze.”
  Oscar: 
“Well, I must say, your tax avoidance strategies seem quite advanced.   I’ve run out of options.”
  Rometty: 
“You didn’t ask about the ‘Belgian Waffle.’”
  Oscar: 
“Fala sério!  We heard the rumors about it, but believed it to be a myth, like Bigfoot.  You mean there is such a thing?”
  Rometty:  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Oscar:  “Please?  I beg of you.”

  Rometty:  “If you guys drop this takeover idea, I might—.”
  Oscar:  “Consider it dropped.”
  Rometty:  “Alright.  But first, make sure your door is closed, your auditor is nowhere nearby, and listen carefully…  Now just imagine you found a way to merge with an entire country, whose citizens could be made to unwittingly pay your taxes for you—.”
  Chief Counsel: 
“This conversation is finished!   Ms.
Rometty has nothing further to add!”

  Oscar: 
“El Diablo!”
  
###
Jeff Matthews
Author “Secrets in Plain
Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks on Investing,
2014)    Available now at Amazon.com
©
2014 NotMakingThisUp, LLC
                                                                                            

The
content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr.
Matthews.   Mr. Matthews also acts as an
advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short
positions in securities of various companies discussed in the blog based upon
Mr. Matthews’ recommendations.  This
commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied
on in making an investment decision, ever. 
Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all
inquiries will be ignored.  The content
herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
Categories
Uncategorized

Now That’s An Idea That Would Never Fly



 Former BB&T* CEO John Allison has written a book about, well, about his time at BB&T, during which it grew from $275 million in assets to $152 billion (profitably) and some lessons learned along the way.
 American Banker, one of the publications Warren Buffett reads every day, is publishing excerpts from the book, covering everything from how BB&T got into the subprime auto lending business to how it looks for acquisitions (100 and counting during Allison’s 35 years at the bank).
 And while Warren Buffett has long lambasted American CEOs for not providing shareholders with honest post-mortems about acquisitions where big things were promised but not delivered, Allison makes Buffett look like a piker when it comes to the notion that deals ought to be scrutinized in hindsight.
 Here’s what Allison says, and it’s so logical you wonder why everybody doesn’t do it.  Well, actually, you understand why they do not…


 Of course, the economics had to work from our shareholders’ perspective…In this regard, the board members were told that for 10 years after an acquisition was effected, they would be provided with a report on how well the acquisition performed relative to our projections. It is tough to remind your board for 10 years that you made a significant mistake, so this discipline encouraged rational, objective analysis.




JM
11/17/14


 *Your editor has an interest in BB&T, just for the record, but we would have published this even if we didn’t.

Categories
Uncategorized

Don’t Blame IBM. Blame Wall Street

 Well the biggest stock-market levitation act since HP under Mark Hurd is going the way of all levitation acts: IBM is throwing in the towel on its $20 EPS “roadmap” (reportedly mocked as “roadkill” in some internal IBM quarters) and admitting what anybody with a calculator and the IBM 10Ks before them has understood for some time–it is exceedingly difficult to grow earnings regularly, not to mention with to-the-penny precision, when your sales are falling, hard, nearly everywhere, quarter after quarter…no matter how many people you lay off, how many “one-time” charges you take, how many lagging businesses you sell at fire-sale prices, how many shares you buy back at whatever price, or how often you try to direct the gaze of Wall Street’s Finest to shiny new objects like your years-too-late efforts in “the cloud,” which happens to be the very thing that is causing your revenues to fall in the first place.
 But shareholders–in particular the small investors who have clung to IBM’s earnings “roadmap”even when the potholes were there for any professional to see–should not direct their ire at IBM management.  
 After all, IBM’s low-quality earnings were apparent and easily dissected, as you can read here, here and especially here if you like.   Most companies (not all–Berkshire Hathaway is a notable exception, as are some others we could mention) report earnings in their best light possible, and IBM executives were simply doing what most of Wall Street’s Finest (not all–there were some skeptics) allowed them to, no questions asked.

JM