Friday’s Crowd in the Casino – Eyeing the Damn Calendar

What are all these people doing here? In the Big Casino of Life, anyway?

It’s an odd perspective to launch from, but increasingly, the facts look odd, too, so why not?

New Games in the Markets

Over at the OHLC Machine:

That’s the digital-ready version of the “Open, High, Low, Close” that Japanese candlestick traders love to view.  At the Thursday close, it was pointing higher.  Not into “burning the candle at both ends,” are you?

All three indices – Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ – produced very similar candles: small green bodies (close slightly above open) with short upper shadows and much longer lower shadows.

• Dow: Open 48,557.82 | High 48,683.45 | Low 48,337.38 | Close 48,578.72
  >>Tiny green body (~21 points), upper wick ~105 points, lower wick ~220 points (more than twice the upper wick).
• S&P 500: Open 7,037.78 | High 7,051.23 | Low 7,008.52 | Close 7,041.28
  >>Tiny green body (~3.5 points), upper wick ~10 points, lower wick ~29 points.
• NASDAQ: Open 24,062.45 | High 24,156.18 | Low 23,894.91 | Close 24,102.70
  >>Small green body (~40 points), upper wick ~53 points, lower wick ~168 points.

This shape is the opposite of a shooting star — it’s closer to a hammer (or sometimes called a “hanging man” depending on the prior trend). It’s generally considered a bullish signal, especially if it appears after a pullback: the market sold off during the day but buyers stepped in and pushed prices back up to finish near the highs. So…

Not surprisingly, the futures were all modestly up today. To celebrate, we considered a good Japanese tea for breakfast in lieu of the Britly (Bullish Bob approved) Yorkshire Gold. Or, the bowl-roaster’s favorite: lapsang souchong — that smoky tea that smells like a campfire. Magically blurring the harsh smoke-tea boundary with…wait!  I digressed!

Over at the War Machine

This machine is smoking, too: Trump says Iran war should end ‘soon’, says Hezbollah should support truce, However, Savior or not, Trump isn’t leading Hezbollah, or so it seems to back woods us. No telling what the three-letter money has been buying, though. Accounting? What’;s that, right?

Which gets us to wondering if this, too, is smoke:  Iran to Hand Over Its Uranium, Trump Claims – Novinite.com.

There is always a huge crowd around The War Machine. Maybe it’s because people want to just live their lives and just quietly go about the business of trying to figure out what the point of this “turn on the Rock” is all about.

No telling for sure and certain, but now the crowd is edging over toward: US Iran news live: MEA says India invited by UK, France to join Hormuz transit plan; Iran rejects temporary ceasefire.

Oh, and that guy on the right wheel on the machine? Free spins!  Yep: if it looks like the wheels won’t land right, he posts a tweet and the wheel does more “Free Spins.” Some claim re-spins lasting several months.

Then There’s the Time Machine

Always fun to play, this one will appear again in just under two weeks.  Before it disappeared into the aether between meetings, I snapped a shot of the Payoff Table and it looks like a tough call.

Now, just between us, we’ve always seen the parallel between the Wall Street Journal and the more robust The Daily Racing Form.  Except in the one, it’s all about riders on their nags while in the other it’s about nagging on the riders.

A small nit, but sometimes worthwhile.

Meantime, there’s a whole cottage industry of tipsters who have evolved around The Time Machine Game.  Our research traced it back to the CME Group’s Fed Tool – and you know the Fed is full of banking tools, right?

If you want to click that tip sheet (here: FedWatch – CME Group) you’ll find that the smart money is on “No Change.”  However, that assumes the pari-mutuels (commodities – see the totalizer here Futures – doesn’t get too far out of whack.

The Networked Games Disclosure: Take a step back. On the surface, all three of these machines seem to be free-running and independent.  But no, they’re not. The “300 Families” operate the network and it’s based on the research of Machiavelli et al. who .spawned the “Keep ’em all stirred up” school of managment.  This lets the Families accomplish load-balancing with their interests on one side, and we – the small-fry in the Big Casino of Life – all Mesmerized on the other.

Have a nice day, come again.  Tip the valet.

What REALLY Matters?

From Triple A Thursday:  The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline decreased 7 cents over the past week to $4.09. After last week’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, the price for a barrel of crude oil… (see today’s futures prices).

You still look like a suspicious person to “your” government: House Votes to Extend Expiring FISA Surveillance Law for 10 Days. What was once a problem is now a corporate cash cow.  Yessir, this is progress.

And if you’re looking for permanent fame? Scientists Name New Colombian Spider Species After Pink Floyd.  Speaking of which, where did Trump Vodka go? Just when he’s driving us to drink, too…

Around the Ranch: That Damn Calendar

Thursday was a high-output day for an old man with power tools.  The whole yard was mowed. Not a postage stamp – yard here is a couple of acres.  With my blade-killing lust unfilled, it was then onto a bigger power tool – a real tractor with a brush hog – and a couple of hours of “land trimming.”

By the end of it, the place was looking less like “Wild, Outback tree farm” and nearly good enough to pass – in a small area – as a state park.

Then it hit me.  “Why bother?”

Moods like this come and go, out here.  More when you’ve got a few years on and you feel enough aches and pains from land work that you no longer jump down off the tractor to pee. You step to the edge of the floorboard and unload from on-high.

Aging is like that – you start doing things because they “just make sense.” There is a shocking amount of human activity that doesn’t make sense, and it was here the busy mind of George (BMG) began to ruminate on the calendar.  I want a day off.

The Worst Holiday-Free Part of the Year

Kidneys depressurized – the land now looking park-like, I realized we are still a month—though it will seem like more—away, for that next four-day workweek.

Clusters like Memorial Day to Juneteenth to the Fourth of July (observed on July 3 in 2026 – a kind of government’s OK with sacrilege here lately) create a chain of short waits that keep spirits buoyed.

See, normally, you’d feel the rhythm of the year humming along, with long weekends and three-day breaks arriving often enough to break the monotony of ordinary weeks. These periods turn the grind into something bearable, even anticipatory, as each holiday offers a brief reset—time for barbecues, travel, or simply sleeping in without guilt.

But right now?  We’re in the worst of it.  Long, arid spells between holidays, the kind we’re slogging through right now.  No matter how many plants you put in, no matter how closely to trim the yards – it’s still going to require a total rework before Memorial Day.  That’s when “The 500” refers more to yard hours than auto sports.

There’s a distinct Mark Twain vibe to these dry patches—an echo of that wry, world-weary humor about life’s slower, more tedious passages, where time feels both endless and somehow wasted.

In an urban setting like Dallas up the road, it manifests as endless commutes on the tollway, packed happy hours that blur together, and weekends spent chasing small distractions amid concrete and traffic. People up in Tyler compensate with rose festivals, but employers don’t cut any slack.

The calendar’s long hauls test patience like a slow riverboat journey up the Mississippi, full of sameness and the quiet ache for the next landmark on the horizon. Boat’s moving the same speed, but you don’t seem to be getting anywhere fast.  Yet even these spells have their quiet charm: they make the good clusters all the sweeter when they finally arrive.

But, can they please hurry it along? The first hundred times on a tractor there’s always something to learn. It’s like those first hundred texts you sent. Now? It’s a reasonable thing to ask “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Point is I finally had time to work out a question that has been bugging me for decades: Who was Alfie, anyway?

Near as I can tell, he was the first guy to realize that after the first hundred times, everything turns into maintenance.

And the real trick to Life isn’t finding meaning…it’s not running out of diesel, spares, beer, or motivation before the next holiday shows up.  Are we there, yet?

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net