I'm at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco later this week. Am on-stage moderating a money panel on Friday afternoon. if you're there, come by and say hello.

Yesterday morning on CNBC's Squawk on the Street:

Erin Burnett: The price of pot has really gone up over the last six months.

Guest: [Long confused pause] Uh, how would you know?

Erin: Just look at the ticker.

Guest: Ohhhhh.

I'm such a sucker for accidental drug humor. (For those of you not getting this right away, Erin was referring to the ticker for Potash Corp., which is POT on the NYSE. The guest thought she was talking about, you know, something else.)

I owe people an update on a somewhat personal post here of mine from a month ago. I was reminded of that this morning in reading a post from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, who has sparked an interesting discussion about hitting the personal reset button.

Apropos of nothing other than being on the run to a meeting and having it pop into my head, here is the Big Lebowski quote of the day:

LEBOWSKI
Bunny Lebowski. . . She is the light 
of my life.  Are you surprised at my 
tears, sir?

DUDE
Fuckin' A.

A few key quarterly metrics for Apple's earnings later today:

Sales: $6.96B

Earnings: $1.07 EPS

iPhones: 1.8m

Feel free to fill in others.

This is striking stuff from courier company's UPS's earnings conference call:

Chief Executive Scott Davis:

UPS's first quarter results illustrate the dramatic slowing  in the U.S. economy. At our investor conference on March 12th, we told you that volume growth in January had been up 3%. But in the six weeks prior to the conference, it had been negative. We also said if these trends persisted through March, we would not achieve the earnings guidance we had provided for the quarter. [The] trends did continue. Many have become sharply more negative in the last two months. ... The great unknowns are the severity and the duration of the current economic slowdown. Many of our customers have tightened their belts resulting in a shift away from our premium air products to ground shipments. [Emphasis added]

Move along folks. No recession here.

[via Calculated Risk]

Good piece in the NYT about another chunk of high-end discretionary spending being "cut", so to speak: Lasik.

Although more than 800,000 Americans got Lasik surgery in 2007, a slight increase from 2006, the numbers started slumping along with the economy in the second half of last year. And industry analysts are now seeing a Lasik recession.

“We’re forecasting a 17 percent drop for 2008,” said David Harmon, president of Market Scope, an eye surgery market research house.

Not even Apple can deliver unalloyed good results these days. The company beat on revenues, and did well as on Mac units, as well as more or less matching on iPhone units, earnings are a little light, at least versus Apple's usual stomping of the Street. The preceding said, Apple is guiding toward softness in the June quarter. It is saying $1.00 in the quarter, versus a $1.10 consensus. Ouch.

Stock is currently off 3.8% afterhours, and I am hanging on conference call to see if Steve kicks any analyst ass. More later.

if anything interesting comes out of conference call, I'll post it here. Unlikely, but possible.

------------------

- Apple just said on the call that iPhone 2.0 is due in late June. I had it in my head that it was coming at Apple's WWDC in early June. Was that my confusion, or something else?

- Check preceding comment. I see on iPhone 2.0 announcement slide that date was tipped all along as "late June". My mistake.

- Apple is blaming unlocking for the Apple store inventory problems for iPhone. They call the issue "significant", albeit a proxy for demand.

- Analysts are really obsessing about decline in Apple's gross and operating margins. Maybe that better explains the PA Semi purchase: Margin enhancement.

This is the best thing I have read in ages. It is a quote from Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne speaking on the Fox Business Channel to Liz Claiman:

I think that there’s been an unhealthy collusion developed between certain short sellers and certain journalists. They center around your competitor, CNBC. I happen to know for a fact that there’s a fax machine in the CNBC offices where hedge funds send instructions and journalists sit around and take instructions.

What? No-one is supposed to know about the CNBC Fax Machine and the daily instructions to on-air journalists from nefarious hedge fund managers. I only learned  about the Fax Machine because I held a restroom scrap paper over a toaster and a cryptic message to Joe Kernan emerged slowly from lemon juice.

Must. Push. FSLR ... Must. Skewer. SBUX ... Hate. Environmentalists ... Await further instructions.

[via Herb]

Not to econo-geek out or anything, but I'm pumped about the Milken Global Conference in L.A. the first part of next week. Sure, I'm on a panel with Felix and others on Monday, which will be good fun, but this is one of the rare conferences where I'm actually struggling trying to fit in all the sessions that I'd like to see -- as well as all the people I want to talk to.