We are predicting that The Big Mac will soon be taking on a expanded role in Global Finance as an alternative candidate to the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Not a week goes by now without another Global financial indicator being tied to the Big Mac.

You will recall that this all began with the Economist’s Big Mac Index, which is a proxy for PPP (F2U Rio Linda, PPP is the acronym for Purchasing Power Parity).

The lastest tabulation is now is from UBS which converts the number of hours worked around the world into Big Mac Units, as reported by The Economist.

That a major global financial institution like UBS would spend their time and resources collecting this kind of data confirms they are either completely out of touch, or know something we mere mortals are missing.

Who In Their Right Mind Collects This Data?

On the other hand, I’m happy to verify that USB maintains their integrity these days thru their recent settlement with the IRS regarding hidden Swiss bank accounts.

UBS AG and the Swiss and U.S. governments have finalized a settlement in a tax-evasion investigation that will allow UBS clients to appeal to a Swiss tribunal before their account information is handed to U.S. tax collectors, according to a person familiar with the situation.

In any case the Chinese are on the case, witness their recent call for an alternative to the US Dollar in Central Bank currency reserves.

BEIJING — China’s central bank reiterated its call for the creation of a new international currency that could replace currencies such as the dollar in countries’ official reserves.

In its annual report on financial stability … the People’s Bank of China said the country will push reform of the international currency system to make it more diversified and reasonable. While it didn’t specifically target the U.S. currency, it said it aims to reduce over-reliance on the current reserve currencies, of which the dollar is the biggest.

Although Beijing didn’t spell out what candidates they would support as an alternative reserve currenty, our guess is that the UK staple of Fish and Chips will not suffice given Sterling’s recent (greasy) slide against the Dollar and Euro.

Should we proceed down the Big Mac road there is food for thought:

• Go Long McDonald’s Stock – MCD
• Like gold there are a finite amount of Big Macs.
• Unlike “Blood Diamonds”, there is  no such thing as “Blood Big Macs”.
• They can be ‘mined’ in underdeveloped countries, like ‘micro-loans’.
• And while you can’t take your money with you when you die, you can eat any surplus.

Flash to all you day traders: instead of betting on hedges in Commodities, the world is changing, it’s time to consider Condiment futures.

Just One Word

I have just one word: Ketchup.

I never heard of the Collyer Brothers until recently. A regrettable gap in my knowledge-base.

Turns out that Disposophobia or ‘Collyer brothers syndrome’, is a fear of throwing anything away. Imagine, being nutty enough to have something named after you.

Inside The Collyer Brownstone: OK, I'll Clean Up Next Week

And these brothers certainly achieved nutty enough. They over-achieved actually.

They were found dead in their New York City browstone in 1947. It took workers weeks to actually locate the bodies, after being forced to remove 103 tons of stuff from the house.

On April 8, 1947, workman … found the body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers had covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.

It’s one of those stories that makes you pause and reflect. In a way we are doing the same thing with bits and bytes.

The number of pictures I have of my ancestors? Less than 50, from all sides of the family as far back as you can go, we are talking Ellis Island and the Old Country. The number of (digital) pictures of our current family…thousands, Gigabytes. If you add the video there will someday be Terrabytes. Same story with documents.

So in a way we are the modern Virtual Disposophobia, and with the web nothing will be thrown away ever again. But at least the Virtual Stuff is neat.

Let’s finish with a teaching moment:

• You can never be too thin or too rich.
• You can never have too much computer memory.
• You can never have too much storage space (sic).
• Turns out you really CAN save too much stuff.
• You really should NOT set booby traps.

It’s only a matter of time before Google figures out how to move real stuff into the cloud.

Now that will be good.

Sorry, this post was moved, please click here.

Here’s a painting by Rene Maggritte which we’ve used to illustrate simplicity.

The more complete explanation of the work is:

It’s Not A Pipe, It’s A Painting Of A Pipe.

And now a painting by Matthew with Maggritte as inspiration. What he’s drawn is a half-pipe used by snow boarders (and skate boarders)  in competition.

I would amend the full explanation of the new work to:

It’s Not A Pipe, It’s A Painting Of A Half-Pipe.

And since Mattew did the painting, a final shameless plug for his website, TreasuredFinds.com, your home for Sterling Jewelry and Gifts.

If you’ve read our blog before then you may notice a new look. We’ve put on a new theme, which is much easier than changing your clothes in a phone booth.

Our blog is published/hosted on WordPress.com. They do all the heavy lifting in the back room, making sure the site works, so that we can concentrate on just creating content. Well, that’s what we call it.

Some Seriously Heavy Lifting

WordPress provide a variety of ‘Themes‘ from which to choose; these create the look and feel of your blog. The Theme we have just adopted is called INove and was made available last week. It has a bunch of geeky features in addition to the new look.

I like it, and since this is my blog I get to pick.

But I’d be interested to know what you think; please comment away if you wish.

Since this wasn’t much of an informational post, let me suggest you hit the “FAV” tag on the right side of the page (in the Tag Cloud)  to view my Favorite posts. If you want to know how I decide what’s a FAV here’s your link.

This post really isn’t about Bette Davis, but I like the song.

On the other hand, it is about eyes, so it’s not a total stretch.

Time To Get Up

I’ve always been a “morning person” and usually get up around sunrise. Except in the winter when I get up earlier.

Anyway, there is a time when the sunlight changes in such a way that (to me) it “feels” like it’s time to get up. And this morning I realized what was going on.

At night we don’t see color, only black and white. The more sensitive ‘rods’ in our eyes that give us our ‘night vision’ don’t detect color. The ‘cones’ which are the cells in our eyes which allow us to see colors don’t work at night.

Since the ‘cones’ are concentrated in our fovea at the center of our eye, our night vision is mostly peripherial. So often if you need to see an object better at night you don’t look directly at it.

Blah, blah, blah…

What I realized this morning is that it “feels like it’s time to get up” when my color vision returns as the sunlight gets slowly brighter.

Try observing for yourself.

Or it could just be me.

Turns out I’m glad I didn’t buy an iPhone.

Because if I had, Nuvi and Tilt would never have been reunited.

Those are funny names for a Sister and Brother combo, but in the world of electronics it’s not at all that freakish.

You see, Nuvi (on the left)  is the GPS device I purchased a few weeks ago, and Tilt (on the right) is the smartphone that I’ve owned for about a year.

Side-by-side there’s no mistaking the family resemblance.

Oh So Common DNA

Well, I have to admit that I didn’t immediately get their common DNA, but when I charged Nuvi for the first time the light came on (so to speak)!

Because Nuvi and Tilt

Share the same charger!

Long-time readers of this blog will know the significance of this. One of our first posts was a shout-out to Martha Stewart for taking on the powers that be in the electronics industry for making us carry around 10 tons of electrical bricks and connections for our ‘portable’ devices.

So imagine my joy when I realized I only needed one cord for both devices.

Common connector, common voltage, common amps. Somewhere out there is an electrical engineer who fathered these twins, but then lost them in a paternity battle to an evil marketing department.

But now it’s been put right.

I even got a tear in my eye when I turned on bluetooth pairing and both of their blue lights pulsed in unison.

Family time.

One lesson I’ve learned over the years is to ask the right question.

Which is not what’s happening these days as politicians wring their hands over the huge pay packages being granted by financial firms that have been bailed out by the government.

They’ve even appointed a Pay Czar. Give me a break.

The right question to ask is,

Is anyone paying taxes on these bonuses?

Because if they are, then we taxpayers are getting about 50% as payback.

On the other hand, depending on how things are structured, they might be playing  Creative in the Caymans, instead of paying income tax.

Cayman (Island) tax laws also help American fund managers legally defer domestic taxes on their personal profits by channeling them offshore through their funds.

Now we don’t know that this is the case with our current crop of Bonus Babies, and I would never imply that such a thing is happening.

It's Just A Question Of "Follow The Money"

But wouldn’t it make sense to ask where that money is going?

The whole thing reminds me of a nice honest game of Three Card Monte.

A reliable source has told me that my last few posts have been too convoluted.

He said to get simple. OK, here we go.

The question burning in your mind is whether a bird can outrun bird-shot?

And the answer would be,

No.

But some do better than others. Here is your chart from The Economist.

Better To Take Your Chances With A Jet Engine

You have to admire the graphic artists at The Economist.

They do have a way with words birds.

This post is part of an occasional series on the facets of ODD or Our Digital Daze.

Trust me, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. That bromide was originally a PR stunt promoted by Big Cereal back when Postum was sold as perhaps the world’s first Nutraceutical. In my opinion anyway.

But I’m wandering. For most modern families relative importance isn’t the point. Today’s reality is that breakfast is really looking lots different from what it used to be…and this is how we are just starting our day.

As the scene opens we flash to the NY Times where Brad Stone describes today’s ODD substitute for family breakfast with a modern Nuclear Family.

• Instead of reading the Wheaties box while they slurp their ceral, our kids are checking their Facebook page and texting friends.
• Let’s not give their parents a pass though, they were up early to check their work e-mails and Twitter accounts.
• And the family uses phone texting as an in-house inter-com.

Talking to each other? Not.

BF = Before Facebook

There sure is a lot of activity, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is having much fun; even the kids. So what’s up? Well, remember that line about how the internet was better than TV because it was interactive.

Turns out this is what interactivity feels like; there’s just no such thing as a free breakfast.

On the other hand, at one time there was a free lunch!

The phrase free lunch, in U. S. literature from about 1870 to 1920, refers to a tradition once common in saloons in many places in the United States. These establishments included a “free” lunch, varying from rudimentary to quite elaborate, with the purchase of at least one drink. These free lunches were typically worth far more than the price of a single drink. The saloon-keeper relied on the expectation that most customers would buy more than one drink, and that the practice would build patronage for other times of day.

But I’ve wandered again.

Charlie Chaplin had it right almost 75 years ago in Modern Times. Take a look at this breakfast table. Multi-talking? Now THIS is multi-tasking before they invented a word for it.  (And yes, I said Chaplin made this 75 years ago; we will be discussing Modern Times again in a future post.)

Charlie Chaplin Foresees An ODD Breakfast in 1936

Don’t look now but ODD is playing at a theater very near to you.

I’m coining a new phrase, and remember YHIHF.

ODD Is The New ADD

It’s the digital equivalent of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and I’m calling it Our Digital Daze or ODD for short. The “O” for Our in ODD is meant to signal that this is a societal condition. ODD has a kind  negative connotation because it is (largely) out of our control.

To balance ODD I’m going to create another term, which I’ll call Our Digital Lives or ODL. The “L” for Lives says that there is also a positive side to the digital world, and that’s captured in ODL. ODL has a kind of positive connotation because it is (largely) within our control

Ying / Yang, whatever.

Because ODD / ODL is so rich in possibility, there will be a number of acronyms that go along with it:

• MDD /MDL  and “M” signifies My as in My Digital Daze.
• GDD / GDL  and “G” signifies Get, as in Get A Digital Life.
• YDD / YDL and “Y” signifies Your, as in Your Digital Daze.

You get the idea, feel free to make up your own and add to the list.

My plan is an occasional series of posts examining facets of ODD.

I know this wasn’t a particularily entertaining post, but you have to start somewhere. It’s like President Obama’s talk about Health Care Reform.

Stay tuned, digitally that is.