A light-hearted look at DEATH

Death, not a polite topic at nice people’s dinner parties, but why not? It happens to all of us sooner or later and you can’t escape it. Someone once said that you can’t escape taxes either, but as an ex-tax officer (thankfully ex) I can vouch for the fact that this is not strictly true, there are a lot of sneaky, conniving, dishonest, rich bastards out there ripping off you poor, but honest, snivelling, poor, ignorant wretches.

Back to death, it comes as a bit of a surprise to some, although the surprise lasts for only a few nano-seconds, they are the lucky ones. One second they’re happily shagging, gardening, running marathons or playing polo and the next whammo! Hello worms!

For others, it can take days, weeks or years, not so good! Even then, some welcome it with open arms, believing that they are heading off on a one way trip, to their own particular nirvana. Others have to be dragged off kicking and screaming by the grim reaper knowing that they’ve violated every commandment and are destined for the great perpetual toaster in the netherworld.

Personally, I would prefer an instantaneous to quickish one. I do not wish to be put on life-support and there is a slab of VB in my will, for anybody willing to kick the plug out, while nobody is looking.

I’d like to be turned into a little pile of ashes and kept in a sealed designer urn on the mantelpiece, so the family can put me in the centre of the dinner table, along with a nice vase of petunias on special occasions. The reason for sealing the urn is fairly obvious, it would ruin everybody’s day if some drunken sot sprinkled my ashes on the turkey thinking it was pepper.

Unfortunately, my family are, if not deeply religious, at least ankle-deep Catholics and will want to inter me rather than (b)urn me. There is also the fact that everybody is aware that you might be in a nice cedar casket with beautiful brass handles as you trundle along the conveyor belt. As soon as you disappear through the curtain, they whip you out of the casket into a cardboard job (to create a few more ashes) and whoopsy-doo! Stick ‘em in a nice little porcelain job, bought in bulk from Woolworths.

If I do have to be buried, I’d like to go in the new ecologically friendly way. Whack me in a hessian sack or at the very worst a recycled cardboard coffin and stick me vertically in the ground. Instead of a headstone they can plant a tree on top or next to me. A spreading Oak would be nice, but I would settle (literally and metaphorically) for a Ghost Gum, Weeping Willow or best of all a Sequoia (that bugger would last a thousand years, or at least until the illegal loggers snuck in).

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Toxic Debt and Jay Walking

I expect that by now you have all heard of ‘Toxic Debt’ the scourge of the economy in the late ‘Naughties’, i.e 2000 to 2009, all brought about by naughty, cheeky and greedy ‘Financial Planners’ who were too busy lining their own pockets to worry too much about the ‘Real World’. As usual, their pockets got too heavy and they were caught with their pants around their ankles.

As a trained Economist, I know a bit about these things, which paradoxically insinuates that I know a lot about these things, in my case it should be taken literally, because I actually know sod all about them.

This is also true about 99.9% of the rest of the so called financial experts, who are as stupid as the rest of us. There is of course an exception to the rule and in this case it’s a certain gentleman named Warren Buffet (W.B.), he also happens to be the world’s richest dude (W.R.D.), for obvious reasons.

Not being W.B. back in April I predicted that interest rates were going to skyrocket and locked my Mortgage in a fixed interest rate of 8.0% for three years, dumb move! Interest rates are now at their lowest rate since 1666 and the Great Fire of London.

Here in Aus. they are falling down as low as 2% and in the US of A they have gone so low they are in minus figures. What this means is that if you deposit money in a bank, they will charge you brass for holding it for you. By the same token, if you borrow money they will pay you for borrowing it and the more you borrow, the more they will give you. Neat eh?

Now, even Investment Bankers aren’t that silly, so now nobody lends anybody anything, thus resulting in the much feared ‘Credit Crunch’. In these troubled times, I figured out that everyone who had a few shekels to spare would want to hide it in a sock and put it under the mattress, just like the Chinese, right?

With a touch of the W.B.’s I thought I would search the backs of the chairs and couches and invest any capital I discovered in shares in sock-making and mattress-making companies. Luckily for me, my son and heir had already beaten me to it and invested it in grog. As I was perusing the business section of the newspaper, I discovered that the main sock/mattress makers in Aus. are moving offshore to Asia because of massive losses. You don’t have to worry W.B. your position as W.R.D. is under no threat from the Skull.

To get back to ‘Toxic Debt’ my own Mortgagor is laughing his socks off (I hope they’re Aussie made) so my debt isn’t toxic to him, only to me. To make matters worse is the debt/equity problem, as a trained economist I know a bit about this (do you have a sense of deja vu about this?).

Six months ago, my humble Chateau was worth A$450,000, if you convert this to US$ or Sterling, which I won’t, this doesn’t sound very much at all. If however, you convert it to Yen or Lire, it sounds like a hell of a lot. I won’t go into Zimbabwe Dollars, I’m a bit embarrassed about being a multi-trillionaire.

To get back to Aus. Dollars, I have a toxic debt of approx $45,000 so six months ago I had equity of A$405,000 in my Chateau. After the credit crunch and general economic turmoil, my Chateau is worth A$100,000 less. That means I’ve lost A$100,000 equityin six months. Cor! bugger me! and bless my cotton socks! (Aus. made of course) I’ve lost $100,000.

I was about to throw myself off the window ledge outside my office, until I realised that I write this crap in my garage. What to do? This catastrophe needed a dramatic response. I thought about throwing myself off the roof of the Chateau, but realised that, even though it’s a single storey brick veneer in Melbourne’s West, my ladder is knackered.

So, I did what any rational person would have done and took a walk. I decided to throw myself off the pavement into the gutter. As I walked along the pavements of Albion, I suddenly realised that due to the proliferation of motorised wheel-chairs (don’t mess with those suckers, if you value your life? No! none were racing as I walked) all the bits between the path and the road have been squished down, to facilitate access for the geriatric Fangios.

Which brings me back to the title of this blog ‘Jay Walking’, if I wanted to throw myself into a gutter, I had to walk to a place where pedestrians are not supposed to walk, I did this and jumped. You’ll be happy to know that I survived the drop and although a cop car was passing at the time, I scurried off before they caught me.

I shall have to look into the origin of the term Jay Walking, as to the best of my knowledge a Jay is an English bird that chats a lot (don’t they all) but doesn’t walk across roads, surely that’s chickens!

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com