Anyone got any found poems to share? Best MN Here's (a long) one from my editor days at a Wall Street newspaper. _____ Wisdom of the CEOs -based on out-takes from actual interviews with American CEOs- Since peace broke out we've always been looking over our shoulder, looking forward through thick or thin -- off the cuff and out in the blue. There's no doubt in my eyes a thread which falls through many of these is that we don't want to talk about another fallen angel. I mean we've never liked it when an industry was tarred with bad apples. We would be taking the tail of the elephant and wagging it for everybody. Especially when markets are turbulent you spend a lot of time hand-holding that could be better spent in other directions. That is, we don't want to run to a telephone when it rings, we want it to ring on us. Connoting a positive flavor to vertical integration, going strong and smoking like a fish, we would start to reflect upon our corporate navels and decide whether the moment of truth had been reached. To be more specific, some of these stocks have been taken out behind the barn and shot between the eyes and they don't deserve it at all. People don't have to disappear to vanish. That's putting a lot of the monkey on the investor's back to turn it around. If their feet are on the ground an their eyes are on the stars and they have some idea of where they are, they focus on just serving the retail market in Spain, not getting into a lot of sexy lending, not feeling up real estate. Also it's probably smarter to marry someone who won't take insidious dilution on you. They'll probably do it again. My strategy is very simply to keep the powder dry, lay in the bushes, wait for something to happen, and then pounce. I'd wait for them to lay in the bushes and wait for the fallout, at which point they could kick off some real plums ... bulks of people ... They have very deep pockets but very short arms. What I've learned is on top of everyone's teeth these days. Unless the industry gets at arm's length of its unregulated affiliates (and I mean at full arm's length -- and right now they're perhaps at skin length) the hammer of regulation is going to fall on the unsuspecting unwary anvil of the utility manager in a most painful way. There's a voice inside me that looks at the Coca-Colas of the world and says, "Gee whiz..." We've got to open to the same page and pull the same oars together. _____ Eric Yost ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html