Two figures from my weekend reading (via the Economist and FT, respectively) that show the skewed world of fuel subsidies worldwide:

Here is a sneak peak at some links from my weekly reading column over at TheStreet.com.

• A top trader (and good friend) blogs from the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas (Blogspot)
• What I've learned: J.R. Simplot on money and markets (Esquire)
• Michael Lewis on hiking and Russian restrooms (Bloomberg)
• Oil crisis triggers fevered scramble for the world's seabed (Telegraph)
• Marketocracy has the best fund manager in North America that you can't invest with (Forbes.com)
• Accuracy in oil supply estimates (EIA)

And two extras:

• Pace of shipbuilding finally slowing after boffo 2007 (Lloyd's List)
• More than 100 ships delayed by collapse of crane in Chinese shipyard (Lloyd's List)

Venture capital, as an institutional asset class, is pretty much dead. Sure, you can get returns from some smaller and more aggressive funds, but any supposed institutional financial asset class that a) can provably thrive only with teensy amounts of cash, and b) whose entire annual returns are bound up in fewer funds than there were graduates in my small-town high school class (18, if you must know), isn't really much of a financial asset class at all.

Matter of fact, given the tireless penchant of government and LPs for the field, it increasingly reminds me an attractive nuisance, to use the term of legal art. Hey, maybe like with neighborhood pools, or collapsing buildings, we need a metaphorical fence to protect childish would-be venture LPs from jumping in and hurting themselves.

Lots of chatter today about the arrival of free, realtime stock quotes on major websites. For example, Google, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC have all added realtime quotes to their services.

That's nice. Given that world operates in realtime, it's nice to see that more of the online financial world is too. Other than that, however, realtime quotes are mostly harmless. The days of most sane investors thinking they can do anything meaningful with realtime quotes are blessedly past.

Apparently Adobe (nee Macromedia) is having a Y2J problem. Check the following from its site:

During the month of June 2008, certain product trials that are launched for the first time (regardless of when they were installed) will function for only one day instead of 30 days, due to an error in a line of code that counts down the remaining days in a trial.

As a result, the company has pulled all product trials and won't be offering them again until next month. Bizarre.

The shipping industry may be slowing a little, but it's still been boom times for five years now in that business. Ships are making a $100,000 a day in profits, and oil rigs are being leased out for $600,000 a day, and more. See the following quote from today's FT:

“You cannot retire in a market like we experience today,” [John Frederickson] says, in the sing-song accent of his native Norway. “This is the best time since the Vikings.”

Being "off the grid" is under-rated.  I got to thinking about this while sick recently -- yes, my absence here was a result of a nasty virus and resulting series of opportunistic infections -- and not missing the grid much.

I was reminded of it again over the weekend while reading a piece in the LA Times about the Post Ranch Inn, one of my favorite resorts on the planet. Best thought of as having rustic elegance, it is an unobtrusive place perched on a cliff top in Big Sur, California, and it is wondrous, combining simplicity and nature and luxury in an otherworldly way.

What caught me, in particular, in reading the piece was how the Post Ranch Inn is going solar and "off the grid", and how that was presented as a good thing, not just something you might do as a nutter in rural Montana. It seems being "off the grid" has crossed over from being something done at the fringes to something laudable and desirable.

Here is Google Trends data for "off the grid" since 2005. Other than a bubble in 2006, it is showing a steady trend up and to the right.

Judging by a self-penned essay in Portfolio, corporate ambulance-chaser Bill Lerach meant no harm. Here he is in one of the loopier passages explaining why he plead guilty:

So why did I plead guilty? If you haven’t been a defendant in a federal criminal prosecution, let me tell you, it is not a fair fight. Prosecutors have virtually unlimited discretion to determine which charges to pursue. They structure indictments with multiple counts and money-laundering claims to threaten a defendant with huge financial penalties and the possibility of a long prison sentence. This creates draconian pressure to plead guilty.

The prosecutors hold all the cards. The judge holds the gavel, and from the defendant’s perspective, it might as well be a bazooka. The judge is free to ignore sentencing guidelines and impose an even harsher sentence. And because prosecutors and the judges both work for the government, there is a disturbing synergy in the entire process. Like a nonconformist during China’s Cultural Revolution, a defendant in a federal criminal case is forced to bow and humbly express guilt, regret, a nd contrition. You speak only to affirm your guilt and sorrow. If I hadn’t pleaded guilty, the judge could have sentenced me to seven years instead of the 24 months I now face.

I don’t cite these facts to dispute that prosecutors proved I committed a crime.

Ooooh, now I get it.

With it having been German solar uber alles for some time now, it is hard not to wonder if the cuts to solar subsidies won't make it Germany "unter alles" for a while now. According to Bloomberg, big cuts are coming, and Germany's market presence is fairly daunting:

Spending a lot of timely lately mulling some issues related to catastrophe finance and spurious correlations. Anyone find interesting patterns in these two photos of burned homes from last October's wildfires in San Diego County? How would you apply risk models in these two cases to capture salient differences? Could you?

Case 1:

Case 2:

[via RMS]

Don't miss the fireworks today as hedge fund manager George Soros testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee. He apparently will say that oil is a bubble, and that commodities are not a legitimate institutional asset class.

Right, but are commodities an attractive nuisance, like venture capital? That's what we really want to know.

A developer here in southern California is getting lots of attention for a 2-for-1 deal wherein you buy a $1.6m house near Escondido and you get a $400,000 rowhouse for "free". While nothing is for free, and people haven't exactly been knocking them down with offers, I was intrigued to notice the location of the development: In the area burned in last October's catastrophic wildfires.

See the following figure. The development is right near the tip of the Witch Creek pop up.

Further to my post earlier this week explaining why venture capital is an attractive nuisance, we have more evidence today. We now have the fine city of New York launching a New York City Venture Fund.

New York City Mayor Michael P. Bloomberg announced the debut of NYC Seed, a venture firm for early-stage technology companies in the city, CNET News.com reported.

Unveiled on Monday evening as part of New York’s Internet Week, NYC Seed will provide up to $200,000 of investment into New York-based technology start-ups.

It is a public-private partnership between the New York City Economic Development Corp. the New York City Investment Fund, the Partnership for New York City’s economic development arm, Polytechnic University, the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation and the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corp.

At Monday’s event, Mr. Bloomberg hailed the diversity of New York and its possibilities as a hub for technology in addition to fashion, entertainment, finance, and media. “We accept each other in ways that I don’t think happens anyplace else,” he said.

Color me awe-struck that the financially savvy mayor of New York is buying his own illogic.

[via NYT]

Turns out kindergarten-ers get socked by the business cycle too:

This study examines the impact of the business cycle on the timing of enrollment. I find that during economic downturns kindergarten enrollment increases. To explore a potential mechanism through which this effect may arise, I propose an instrumental variables approach to identify the causal effect of fluctuations in household resources due to the business cycle on the timing of kindergarten enrollment.

[via SSRN]

I'm glad the courtroom kids in Canada are having a nice time ruling on the BCE private equity buyout. But I'm still puzzled. Ruling that the deal should go ahead strikes me as ruling that gravity should be different: You're not going to change Wall Street's unwillingness to fund it today on yesterday's terms.

Dan Primack makes a similar point here.

Crude oil prices are off 2.7% percent today, touching $124.30. There has been a more or less straight line crude oil decline for two weeks now, dating back to May 21st, with prices down 7.5% in the period.

Hmm, May 21st. Now what could have been special about that day? I wonder, I wonder. Oh, now I remember: That was the day the Senate Judiciary committee hauled in some oil executives so they could do a little election-year posturing.

Nothing like the Senate "tell" for marking a market top.

The July issue of Vanity Fair contains a fascinating oral history of the Internet and the web. It tells how the former came to be, how it begat the latter, how the web boom played out, and it takes us all the way to today. While I could carp about a few voices missing from the cavalcade of people interviewed who were there at the time, you're better off just reading the whole damn thing. It's a glorious oral fugue.

Bob Kahn: They said, We want a network. This would be like a bid for a rocket to the moon—you know, handle a thousand pounds of payload, launch from a vertical liftoff in Florida, bring back something safely.

Larry Roberts: There were two competing bids that were particularly close, BBN and Raytheon. And I chose between them based on the team structure and the people. I just felt that the BBN team was less structured. There wouldn’t be as many middle managers and so on.

Bob Kahn: Larry Roberts was an engineer. In fact, Larry probably could have built the Arpanet himself, would be my guess, except there would have been nobody at arpa to run the program who was capable. When Larry contracted with us at BBN to do it, you know, in some sense he kept his fingers in the pie right through that whole period.

On an eight-month deadline, the BBN team delivered their prototype I.M.P. to U.C.L.A. on August 30, 1969.

Leonard Kleinrock: September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or a written record of that event. I mean, who noticed? Nobody did. Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.

Read the whole thing. To get so many of the main voices in one long piece makes this unmissable stuff.

Some quick links on a day that has me preoccupied with phone calls, tradespeople, and an untimely flat tire.

• Traders within 50 miles of New York outperform those further away (SSRN)
• Long memory and super-fat tails in financial markets (SSRN)
• Ed McMahon facing foreclosure (Bloomberg)

Here is an amusing and glib bit (including yours truly) on the TheStreet.com TV about the 2-for-1 real estate deal in San Diego that has gotten so much press.

Two SEC events, one past and one upcoming, worth watching:

• Chairman Chris Coxe hangs with six former SEC chairs (link)
• Roundtable on interactive data (link)

Various and sundry links that I have hanging around:

• Richard Rainwater temporarily bearish on oil (Time)
• Nice primer on latest developments in solid-state storage (TBS)
• Google and the new headquarters indicator (GotAds)
• Any ex VCs/angels looking for a new gig? (NASVF)
• Dubious video of an i-banker going bonkers in office (Bubblare)

Buried today, and heading off for quick trip to San Francisco. Back tomorrow. Be nice to one another.

Fenwick & West has out its First Quarter Bay Area Venture Capital Survey. Some highlights:

• Continued increase in Silicon Valley/Bay Area valuations, but rate of increase declines
• Up rounds exceed down rounds for 17th consecutive quarter - by 72% to 19%
• Fenwick & West Barometer up 49%
• Survey analyzed 107 technology and life science companies headquartered in the greater San Francisco Bay Are

There is something about the conjunctival redness of this market heat chart (via Finviz) today that is overwhelming:

An important implicit question in the great interview with Goldman Sachs oil analyst Arjun Murti in Barron's this weekend. What oil price will make U.S. consumers change their behavior enduringly, versus simply adjust temporarily and then return to status quo?

Let's talk about the possibility of crude hitting $200 a barrel. If we get there, how does it play out?

Our view has been that the price will keep going up to the level where it meaningfully reduces demand. This is Economics 101; we need more supply or less demand. And because there are various political and geologic constraints on growing supply, we're left with looking for the price at which demand is reduced. We've never thought we knew what that exact number is. But we've tried to look at the 1970s, notably the economic impact of gasoline prices that ultimately led to a reduction in demand.

How does the current situation compare with the 1970s?

In the 1970s, you had a traditional supply shock. You took a bunch of oil off the market, and the price rose very quickly in a short period of time. That led to lower demand that proved sustainable, because the market worried that the supply wouldn't come back. It has been, up until the last three or four months, a much more gradual increase -- and therefore, people have generally been able to get used to the price. And it's allowed demand to be more resilient than even we thought it would be.

But if crude does hit $200 a barrel, what kind of prices will we see at the pump?

Oil at $150 to $200 a barrel would imply between $4 and $5.75 a gallon.

At which point you probably see a falloff in demand, right?

We are already starting to see a drop in demand in the U.S., but they are still having demand growth in the non-OECD countries, including China, the Middle East and Asia. The OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries are mainly the U.S., Europe and Japan. The real question: At what point do the non-OECD economies slow down? The other thing about U.S. demand is, at what point do you have sustainable change in consumer behavior? So if the price temporarily goes to $4 [a gallon], but immediately falls back to $3, it's likely that people will keep driving cars with poor gasoline mileage. But if people believe the increase in oil prices is more sustainable, they might shift to taking mass transportation, if available, driving hybrids or taking the other kind of actions that are necessary to reduce demand on a sustained basis.

Do you see a sustained drop in demand at $200 a barrel?

That is the big question. We have always assumed that, at some point, you get a sustained drop in demand. Our long-term oil forecast looking out 20 years is [for crude] to fall back to $75 a barrel, or some lower number. The questions are: How long do prices stay high? How sharply do they rise? And do people truly change their behavior or are they just temporarily driving less? It's an unknown at this point.

An eye-opening figure in a weekend LA Times piece about the downward spiral in fortunes for the Hummer:

Here is sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com:

On-point Reuters piece this weekend talking about the above-the-ground issues curtailing oil supplies. The gist: resource nationalism -- countries nationalizing and controlling their domestic oil industries -- is changing the way global oil markets respond to higher prices. After all, when you can revenue acceleration from a finite resource without increasing supply, why bother pumping more?

Conventional wisdom in past years has been that when oil prices rise high enough, oil companies will have the profit motive to spend the billions of dollars needed to bring new supply sources online.

But resource nationalism has turned such wisdom on its head, investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a recent report.

Resource nationalism "imposes significant policy constraints on the free flow of capital, labor and technology that are substantially limiting supply growth," Goldman Sachs said in its report, which also called for benchmark U.S. oil prices to average $141 a barrel in the second half of 2008.

Such constraints have reduced oil supply growth by 1 percent per year, even while the global economy grows at nearly 4 percent, the bank said.

The best iPhone prediction of what is likely to come out of Apple's WWDC event this morning comes via Engadget:

In a surprise move, Steve Jobs says 'But wait: There's more!' instead of his signature 'Just one more thing,' then proceeds to throw in a Shamwow and two Infinity Razors if you order in the next 30 minutes."

A few quick links as I get ready for a morning of meetings:

• Using the iPhone and Sense Networks to mine data for fun and profit (GigaOm)
• The income-adjusted impact of gasoline prices across the U.S. (NYT)
• The only place you can still get mortgages with no money down? The government (Washington Post)
• Trust and and reputation in the financial blogosphere (Johns Hopkins)
• I'm trying out the FirstRain markets monitoring service, courtesy of the fine folks there, and so far I highly recommend it (FirstRain)

As a semi-related aside, I am so tired of the Lehman and MSFT/YHOO stories that I can barely stand typing these ticker letters. I want both stories to just go away.

Some places with live Apple WWDC coverage this morning. Festivities are already underway with people posting pictures of one another standing in line. Really.

• MacRumorsLive
• Tech Trader Daily
• Engadget
• Crunchgear
• TUAW (and a post-event wrap-up too using CoveritLive)

If you have others you're following, feel free to add them to this post.

[Update] Watching the coverage intermittently, and am crushingly bored. No wonder the market is selling AAPL with a vengeance today.

[Update2] Okay, I do like the 3G iPhone though. Nice features. Crazy-good claimed battery life. GPS. Slimmer. I want one now.

Nice chart from NPD survey research of how consumers are self-reportedly changing their behavior in response to higher gas prices.

A cynic, which I am not (ahem), would point out that the top four changes aren't really much of changes at all (unless they happened more than once); the fifth is a toss-up; the next five items could all be code words for being unemployed; and the final item is one that undeniably has to do with changing because of higher prices.

[via NPD]

In case anyone's in the vicinity of their television tomorrow or Friday, I am on CNBC tomorrow at 10:20 pst talking tech for a short segment. And then I'm on again for an hour on Friday morning, from 8am to 9am pst, guest hosting on The Call.

I have nothing to add to the "Is Steve Jobs sick?" meme -- other than pointing out his gaunt appearance even made Drudge today -- but I'm puzzled at the football field worth of distance between him and Jim Goldman during a CNBC interview today. The resulting camera effect is akin to the sort of trick that turned actor John Rhys-Davies into Gimli the dwarf in the film version of The Lord of the Rings.

[Update] Apparently Jobs is sick -- which may explain the chasm between Goldman and Jobs in the interview. According to a strangely-sourced story in the WSJ, Jobs has been taking antibiotics and is getting better.

According to an early take on the bill-of-materials cost for the new iPhone 3G, its actual cost could be close to half that of the original Apple iPhone. Granted, this won't entirely support margins in the face of price cuts, but it means margins would be better than many think.

Here's Portelligent's take on the topic:

Carey of Portelligent said several factors make the iPhone 3G potentially much cheaper to build than the original iPhone.

"I'd suspect the collective volume, learning and engineering changes to the display would mean that the whole touch screen assembly might be about half the $60 or so we estimated for Gen1 a year ago," Carey said. "In addition, the 8 Gbytes of MLC NAND is today around $20 compared to the $50 that might have been the case in June 2007," he added. Carey estimated Apple may have shaved another $25 off the bill of materials costs based on changes he observed in a teardown of the iPod Touch.

Those changes are only slightly offset by new costs for the iPhone 3G. Carey said the additional cost of an HSDPA chip set are only about $15 plus another $5 for the GPS chip. He also noted that the $100 price increase for a model with 16 Gbytes flash adds to the profit margin because the additional memory chips probably cost Apple only about $20.

Netting out all the changes Apple may have had a gross profit based solely on cost of hardware for the original iPhone of $229 and profits of just $99 for the iPhone 3G. "It's always important to point out that hardware BOM costs do not capture many other important facets of product cost such as development costs, software costs, licenses and marketing," he said.

[via EETimes]

The overnight 7.0% tumble (!) in the Shanghai Composite brings the losses since January in that formerly soaring index to 43.5%. Staggering stuff.

A bunch of quick links that I have hanging around:

• Dana White of UFC on it going public: "I don't need any of the geeks on Wall Street telling me what to do" (YouTube/CNBC)
• Airlines are at a pricing/cost tipping point (Rick Seaney)
• Most expensive hospitality package at this year's U.S. Open in San Diego is $575,000 (!) (SportBusinessJournal)
• Confusion reigns in digital TV transition, with 30% of respondents to a recent GAO survey saying they're preparing, despite already having digital TVs (WashPost)
• Sustaining economic growth is the biggest question for the 21st century (FT/Amazon)
• Wordcount is too much fun: Who would have though that "conquistador" was so unpopular, or that "fuck" was so far behind "shit"? (Wordcount)
• Controversy grows over new Speedo swimsuit that has been behind 37 new world records (Bloomberg)
• World markets need medication for their massive mood swings (Bloomberg/Baum)

Here's a thought: Are too many countries playing a kind of economic chicken? Their refusal to control stimulative policies, despite increasing inflation and runaway oil prices, has them in a highly risky position.

Many countries are already experiencing double-digit inflation -- Russia, Turkey, South Africa, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines -- despite recent interest rate increases.

"These guys are falling behind the curve," says Edwin Gutierrez, an emerging-market bond portfolio manager at Aberdeen Asset Management in London, in the hopes that the surge in food and energy prices will prove short-lived. "It's a very dangerous game," says Mr. Gutierrez.

One of the few exceptions? Brazil:

...There, the central bank moved quickly to raise interest rates despite comparatively mild price pressures. The country suffered enormous inflation in the late 1980s and early 1990s before getting the problem under control. "Brazil knows better than anyone what happens with hyperinflation," says Terrence Gray, who manages $3 billion in emerging-market stocks at DWS Scudder, an arm of Deutsche Bank.

[via WSJ]

Missed this earlier today, but the editorial in today's FT by BP CEO Tony Hayward is worth reading in its entirety. He beats up on three myths, as he calls them, largely having to do with the role of speculators in the current price run-up; the idea that we are close to running out of hydrocarbons; and that we can switch quickly to a low-carbon economy.

For my money he is less convincing on points two and three, but he makes sense on point one. Resource nationalism is a big issue, as is under-investment -- even if I loathe the line of rhetoric that says our problems are above the ground, not below -- and that needs to change speedily. Trouble is, with countries seeing massive revenue increases from increased price, and thus not needing to invest and produce more, there is little incentive to spend, even at these high price levels. Strangely enough, it means there is little incentive to invest when prices are high, as above, and there is little incentive to invest when prices are low, for obvious reasons. Welcome to the strange and messed-up global oil market.

Here he is on the market's fundamentals:

Yet energy supply has struggled to respond. Production by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries fell by 350,000 barrels of oil a day last year. The production situation is even more challenging in the market-oriented nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where many existing basins are maturing fast. In Britain, for instance, North Sea gas production recorded the world’s lar-gest decline for the second year in a row, falling by 10 per cent in 2007. UK oil output rose very slightly, but this is a one-off, based on a single big new field. Production remains on a downward trend.

The last time oil prices surged to this kind of level, 30 years ago, new production from the North Sea helped bring prices down. This time, new OECD production will have to come from frontier provinces such as the Canadian oil sands, the Arctic and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another big impact on supply is Russia, where production has begun to decline. It is a little-known fact that, until now, the growing demand for oil from China and India in recent years has been met almost barrel for barrel by rising supply from Russia.

As an aside, Hayward says the new BP Statistical Review of World Energy is out, but I only see last year's edition.

I'm on record saying that Yahoo and Microsoft would both be better off if their respective CEOs found non-company-related things to do with their time, but I was still interested to see this chart from the new Glassdoor.com service. It essentially drives corporate transparency, allowing you to glean salaries, managerial quality, etc., all via people who work there. 

It's a nice idea -- call it a PG and more quantitative version of FuckedCompany.com -- and I'm at least intrigued. While waiting to see how Glassdoor progresses, here is one piece of data the company has extracted to demonstrate its efficacy: A comparison of employee ratings of Yahoo's Yang and Microsoft's Ballmer.

My conclusion: Both companies' employees are delusional. 

Nattering about Steve Jobs' health, as well as a WSJ story this morning about the cult of personality that grew up around Broadcom's Henry Nicholas, got me thinking about personality premiums at public companies. What U.S. public companies have the largest share price premiums attached to their current CEOs? In other words, which companies would see the largest share price declines were their CEOs to be incapacitated, hit by a bus, abducted by someone from Betelgeuse, etc.?

Some candidates:

• Steve Jobs. Apple's CEO is the heart and soul of the story at Apple. That company has to be near the top of the list of PP (Personality Premium) stocks.
• Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway's main man likely doesn't have the premium he did a few years ago, but it's still outsized. A transition is coming, and has been long-discussed, but the stock could easily decline on a change.

Anyone have suggestions for other CEOs with positive premiums? Let's leave aside the CEOs with negative premiums for now. We can beat up on them later.

Nice of the fine folks at Pensions & Investments magazine to give my site a Silver Medal in their search for the best financial blog. If I have to lose to anyone, I suppose I can tolerate losing to my friend Barry -- even if he is a loud bastard.

More here and here.

Turns out that the Panama canal has been misbehaving in recent weeks, which likely hasn't been helping U.S. oil inventories. Transit times for the canal had ballooned to 10 days, and only now are they down to a more typical 36 to 48 hours. Similarly, the backlog of ships has fallen to 36 from a whopping 130.

Why the Panama problem? No-one is really sure. The Panama Canal Authority says it was lock repair, plus heavy arrivals, and a labor dispute, but shipping agents aren't convinced, with one saying that it was the worst he had seen in his lifetime.

By way of background, the Canal handles 600,000 bbl/d of crude oil, and such shipments represent about 15% of canal traffic.

[via Lloyd's List]

I've been messing with the latest data from BP's 2008 Statistical Review of Energy Markets. If I get a moment I'll do more, but here is an animated look (via Google chart widgets) at oil consumption and growth therein across U.S., Asia and Europe from 1965 until today.

Ugh. For some reason it's not remembering to resize the bubbles based on market size, but works properly in the spreadsheet. Will try to fix later, if I have time. For now you can pick the dimension via which you'd like to size the respetive markets from the drop-down on the chart.

I haven't been mentioning books here as often as I used to, so I'll try to get back on track. I'm just finishing up Rick Perlstein's fast-paced Nixonland, and I highly recommend it. It is either a fascinating  look at the rise of paranoia politics in America during the 1960s and early 1970s, or it's an entertainingly-written screed by yet another Nixon-hater.

Where do I come down? I think it's the former, but you can read it and make up your own mind.

If you, like me, watch in gob-smacked amazement at the continuing impressive ratings pulled by the fantasy-land real estate shows on TV, then read a piece in today's NY Times. Among other things, it contains this keeper of an unintentionally comedic quote from one producer:

“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”

So you're saying .... oh, never mind.

[via