Have some fun in a Bear Market

The prolonged bear market seems to have taken away all the fun and thrill of investing in the stock market. Brokers and business TV hosts have long faces. Analysts are predicting gloom and doom, with worse to follow. Capacity expansions are being curtailed, GDP is cooling off, WPI is coming down but CPI is going up.

Amidst all this, bored operators chose to have some fun by jacking up the prices of Akruti City to stratospheric levels in an effort to trap short sellers. The jury is still out on who had the last laugh.

I thought, let us all have some fun. So I've chosen an excerpt from a crazy short story titled 'Examining Psychic Phenomena' written by Woody Allen (yes, the loony actor and filmmaker). It was published in an anthology of  humorous stories (The Ultimate Humour Book, Chancellor Press, 1991).

The excerpt has a tenuous connection to this blog. Read, enjoy, pass it along.

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Spirit Departure

Mr Albert Sykes reports the following experience:  'I was sitting having biscuits with some friends when I felt my spirit leave my body and go make a telephone call. For some reason, it called the Moscowitz Fiber Glass Company. My spirit then returned to my body and sat for another twenty minutes or so, hoping nobody would suggest charades. When the conversation turned to mutual funds, it left again and began wandering round the city. I am convinced it visited the Statue of Liberty and then saw the stage show at Radio City Music Hall. Following that, it went to Benny's Steak House and ran up a tab of sixty-eight dollars. My spirit then decided to return to my body, but it was impossible to get a cab. Finally, it walked up Fifth Avenue and rejoined me just in time to catch the late news. I could tell that it was reentering my body, because I felt a sudden chill, and a voice said, "I'm back. You want to pass me those raisins?"

'This phenomenon has happened to me several times since. Once, my spirit went to Miami for a weekend, and once it was arrested for trying to leave Macy's without paying for a tie. The fourth time, it was actually my body that left the spirit, although all it did was get a rubdown and come right back.'

Spirit departure was very common around 1910, when many 'spirits' were reported wandering aimlessly around India searching for the American Consulate. The phenomenon is quite similar to transubstantiation, the process whereby a person will suddenly dematerialize and rematerialize somewhere else in the world. This is not a bad way to travel, although there is usually a half-hour wait for luggage. The most astonishing case of transubstantiation was that of Sir Arthur Nurney, who vanished with an audible pop while he was taking a bath and suddenly appeared in the string section of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. He stayed on as the first violinist for twenty-seven years, although he could only play 'Three Blind Mice,' and vanished abruptly one day during Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, turning up in bed with Winston Churchill.