Stand and Deliver!!!

“Stand and Deliver!! I want you to hand over all the lupins you've got”.
“What do you mean,lupins?”
“You mean the bloody flower,lupin?”

Perhaps some of you will recognize the “Dennis Moore” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus where the highwayman steals from the rich to give to the poor but instead of riches, he steals lupins. But how many are familiar with the fact that this could be based on true story? The Tulip craze in the Netherlands in the 1630's reduced this country’s economy into a shambles as aristocrats as well as peasants were caught up in an orgy of trading, buying and selling of tulip bulbs. Yes, that is right, the flower.

In those days the tulip was a very rare commodity, originally imported from Turkey only for the very rich and affluent. If the tulip had stayed within the reaches of that minority, the devastation that it caused would never have been as wide spread as it was. But when the Smiths’ chase the Joneses as they have throughout history, the status symbols of the rich become all too alluring for the general public. To own a tulip became the status symbol to have, it showed that you had “arrived.” Bling for the 17th Century, as it were.

Tulips were cross-bred, cross-pollinated and interbred in almost any manner to produce a more unique display of color or colors. Stripes, meaning a tulip with two colors, were the most desired but even the single colored ones were still highly collected by the masses. The mere owning of a tulip bulb was important for one’s social standing. What used to be available only from horticulturalists and estate gardeners in major cities now had traveling salesmen roaming the countryside hawking their bulbs. What even added to the temptation to get into the tulip market was that the flowers reproduced themselves allowing growers to then sell the offsets to the drooling public who demanded them.

Historically, the physical bulb was what had always been traded, a “you bought it and now you plant it” approach and this was usually all done within the appropriate season for planting or growing. But due to the demand people began to “sell” future offsets of their plants. This would give a buyer a commitment to take delivery of a tulip bulb before it had been grown, thereby creating a “futures” market for the plant. This lead to the creation of a marketplace where the futures of the plant were traded and not the physical bulb. Sometimes this option to buy a bulb would be traded for profit before taking delivery of the bulb. That is, it created a marketplace where “negotiable piece of paper with a notional delivery date” ruled.

Trading became a mania with prices for a single bulb reportedly exceeding 200 times the price of a pig. This national obsession then started to affect other industries as the citizens focused all their energy and capital into the tulip market ignoring basic farming and industry. That in itself would have a lingering effect of the economy for years following. As demand outstripped supply, the prices for tulips were reaching an ever increasing level and no one gave a moments thought to the inevitable price ceiling.

The end came in February of 1637 when the major growers and the professional speculators, as opposed to the inexperienced traders, realized that prices could no longer continue to rise and began a major sell off of their holdings. Within days the price had fallen through the floor and any paper stock was virtually worthless. Recriminations were thrown back and forth between the government and the speculators who were blamed for the collapse of the market. Thousands of people who had previously enjoyed a rapid rise in fortune were suddenly facing financial ruin. The growers blamed the masses for their reckless greed and turned to the government for financial recompense. They claimed the horticultural industry would not survive without some financial aid. So in 1638 the government of the day awarded the growers compensation equaling approximately 5% of the paper commitments made to them in 1636.

At the end of this economic boom and bust, lives and fortunes were ruined. The get rich scheme that propelled many to dabble in the stock market and lead them to more wealth than they had ever experienced before also brought them crashing back to earth in many cases costing them their homes, businesses and security. Many people put all they had into this, more than they should have ever invested. Almost to a person they broke the cardinal rule of thumb of investing in any stock market, never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Sounds terrifyingly similar to today, doesn’t it?

Time To Be A Dancer

I've got a good friend who has become really serious lately. Not serious in a bad way, but serious in an extreme way. All of us, at different times in our life come to a point where we've got to take things a bit more soberly than when we were younger. But the has to be a limit. In my friends case, there doesn't seem to be a spark anymore, it's like he's on auto-pilot with an ”I'm on the highway of life and there ain't no getting off” attitude. Now of all people, I can’t make any harsh judgments on the subject of seriousness. A case for having the opposite tendency could easily be made against me

A case in point, (I felt a little like Rod Serling for a second there). If my aforementioned friend and I are sitting down in the same room to read the newspaper, my friend invariably: a) won’t even look at it or b) instantly finds the most depressing article and somehow relates it to his life. For example if the headline reads, "Locusts Invade Israeli Farming Community," he’ll look up and begin a long diatribe about the problems he is having with pests in his own garden. My eye has a tendency to find articles like "Private Dick Bill Passes Council." Now that’s an article that jumps out and grabs your attention, if nothing else. The story itself has nothing to do with my life and unless I become a private investigator, it will soon be forgotten. My favorite headline, which may be apocryphal, was reprinted in National Lampoon's True Facts. It was an article about a crazed person who escaped from custody and sexual assaulted a woman in a laundromat. Now, the story is not in the slightest way funny, but the headline reads, "Nut Bolts Screws Washer." The person who wrote that should get some kind of trophy.

But I digress. It seems that all around me people are getting far too serious about their careers, their diets, their finances and even their entertainment. Sometimes you just have to step back and say, “Enough of that,” and start to smile again. A while back I was having one of “those” days. I swear, some cosmic force was picking me out that day. It started off with my car simply stopping on my way to do some errands. I made my way to a banking machine to get some money for a cab and discovered that the computer at my bank incorrectly instructed itself that my account was closed rendering the card useless. Eventually I did get to meet my wife for lunch and I grumbled about what a rotten day it was and what else could go wrong. She smiled at me and said something that both made me feel better and made me feel worse. She said, "Well, you've had worse days." She was right, I have had worse days, really worse days than that and survived them too. But even with that positive thought I began to count those worse days and figured out I had better stop if I wanted to finish the day off with any sort of good mood. Things that day did get better, the car just had a piece of ice stuck in the fuel line and by the time I got to it, the sun had warmed the engine enough to dislodge it and the car started right up.

Just a while ago I watched a “Best of” video about the late comedian John Belushi. In it was an unreleased short film done by Belushi shortly before his death. It was called "Don't Look Back in Anger". It showed a very old Belushi visiting the gravesite of the "Not Ready for Prime-time Players", the cast of the original Saturday Night Live. As he moved stiffly along through the snow, he pointed to each headstone and described to the camera how each of his co-stars died. He wryly pointed out that everyone thought he would be the first to go. Belushi lived by the sixties philosophy of “live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”. He said the reason he survived the others was not because of the way he lived his life but because he was a dancer. I guess it’s all in the attitude. Granted, he did die and that kind of takes the edge off the argument, but Belushi did have a point. Nothing will remove the stresses of family or work or simply breathing, but maybe we just have to realize that this is just life, it isn't a test and God is not going to grade us at the gates of Heaven (I sure hope I am right, if not I think I am pushing a D-). So maybe we should take a small lesson from a dead comedian. Maybe if there was a bit of a dancer in all of us life might be a little easier to take. So if things start to get a little too serious, pull out your dance card and take a look around you. Let yourself go, be a dancer. I don't know if it will work for you, but I have a full dance card.