Outside Bristol Zoo is the car park, with spaces for 150 cars and 8 coaches. It has been manned 6 days a week for 23 years by the same charming and very polite car park attendant with the ticket machine. The charges are £1. per car and £5 per coach.

On Monday 1 June, he did not turn up for work. Bristol Zoo management phoned Bristol City Council to ask them to send a replacement parking attendant.

The Council said "That car park is your responsibility." The Zoo said "The attendant was employed by the City Council... wasn't he?" The Council said "What attendant?"  Gone missing from his home is a man who has been taking daily the car park fees amounting to about £400. per day for the last 23 years...!

I make that about £2.7 million !

Quite possibly the most sensible way to stimulate growth!

 Blonde Parade Lifts Spirits in Gloomy Latvia

Latvians may be feeling depressed as a result of the economic crisis which has hammered the Baltic state, but over 500 blonde women did their best to lift spirits in Riga on Sunday with a parade and other "Blonde Weekend" events.

The global economic crisis has hit the Baltic state of Latviaparticularly hard and left the population feeling blue. But one group of Latvian women has taken a novel approach to fighting the pervasive feeling of doom and gloom.

PHOTO GALLERY: LATVIAN BLONDES ON PARADE

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Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (11 Photos)

On Sunday, a procession of more than 500 blondes paraded through the capital Riga wearing pink and white. Many were escorted by lap dogs wearing the same cheerful hues. Their goal: to use their beauty to shine a little light into the dark mood caused by the global downturn.

Though it was far from being a protest march, some women used the opportunity to counter stereotypes. "I am beautiful, but I'm not dumb," Ilone Zigure told the news agency AFP. The student added that she hopes that those of her countrymen who are depressed about the economic crisis will find her "positive energy" contagious.

 It's a sentiment that many observing the parade shared. "Finally, something positive," one 70-year-old woman watching the parade told AFP. "I just can't stand listening to people talk about the crisis anymore."

The parade was just part of a range of events making up Riga's "Blonde Weekend," which also included a golf tournament, a fashion show, a ball and a drawing contest for kids. TheLatvian Blondes Association, which organized the events, hoped to use any proceeds from the weekend's activities toward a playground for handicapped children.

Good old Bill Kenwright (Chairman of Everton FC)

This is a true and heart-warming story about Bill Kenwright, Chairman of Everton Football Club, written by a Liverpool Supporter:

What A Lovely Man Bill Kenwright Is

Now, before I start, I'm a Liverpool fan.

However, my mum's boss is an Evertonian (no one's perfect eh?), now with his team getting to the Cup final this year he was hoping against hope he could take his young lad to the final and so called to book tickets on the day they became available, the lady at the ticket office takes his credit card details and says he has two tickets for the game - up in the gods, but still, he would get to take his son to Wembley to watch his team - a special day out (especially as they don't get there very often eh?).

So, last week comes around but still no sign of the magical tickets - so my mums boss (we'll call him Simon...because that's his name) rings the club to ask what's going on, should he come and pick them up? Only to be told (4 days before the final) that no, he doesn't have tickets!

You can imagine how annoyed he must have been!! So he sits down at his desk and writes the strongest of strongly worded emails to all and sundry (including the Everton supporters club apparently). Thursday afternoon the office phone rings and Simon picks up the phone (they're solicitors so sitting round doing nothing is their idea of hard work) - its only Bill Kenwright!

"Hi Simon, I have seen your email and I'm sorry you have had such a hard time about the tickets - its unacceptable that you should be told you would have the tickets and then not get them and not get told until a few days before the game, I'd like to offer you 4 tickets, pitchside, right next to the tunnel to make it up to you!"

Now I know football these days is all about money (they are businesses after all) but I thought this was a really nice touch, and I can hardly imagine Roman (or many of the other premier league chairmen...sorry, chair-people) doing something similar.

So nice one Bill - you went someway to restoring my faith in there being at least some decent people left in the game and even though you lost, you made Simons young lads year (probably decade judging by their ability to get to major cup finals)!

Market manipulation, short-covering rallies and cyclical bulls

An interesting piece by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns


There has been a lot of chatter in the markets about why U.S. equities continue to rally. Three distinct viewpoints have surfaced, two of which are bearish and one which is bullish. Let me share those theories with you.

1. Market Manipulation aka. the Plunge Protection Team

In this storyline, someone (probably the famed Plunge Protection Team) is manipulating the market to push it higher. Michael Panzner pointed out this view last Friday in a post called “Manipulation, Anyone? Now, Michael’s site is called Financial Armageddon, so you know he’s bearish and the post reflects this.

Coming as it did on the last day of the week at the end of a month, some might find the action that took place near today’s close to be rather interesting.

From 3:54:28 pm to 4:00:02 pm, S&P 500 e-mini futures rallied 17.25 points on approximate volume of 356,300 contracts, or 19.3% of the total turnover from 9:30 a.m. until futures finished trading at 4:15 p.m.

Hmmm. Manipulation, anyone?

2. Short-covering rally

But, while Panzner thinks outright manipulation is to blame, he is not alone in seeing this upward move as suspicious. Others point to technical factors as responsible for why the market(s) is rallying (It is not just the U.S. - as I write this the Dax has rallied 4% AND the S&P 500 is up over 2%). Yves Smith pointed out a post over at the Market Ticker which sees short covering as very much a factor in Friday’s late-day rally.

What does this all mean? A few things:

The stops up there are gone. They were potential rocket fuel for next week and the propellant to take us to - and potentially through - the 200DMA on the cash.
A bunch of someones had a lot of contracts that were short taken out on them. Those nearly 250,000 E-mini contracts did change hands, and odds are a very large percentage of them constituted stop-loss orders on contracts sold short from when we were up toward 933 a few weeks ago. Those traders are going to be quite pissed off, but that’s the risk of the game.
Next week is very likely to be extraordinarily violent, especially Monday. /ZN (10 year Treasury futures) has seen an insane drop in open interest over the last few weeks. This little game undoubtedly severely damaged open interest in the E-Mini /ES contract.

Thin markets are dangerous markets. While the E-Mini still is very liquid, the removal of these stops from the order book leaves the door open for both little resistance if the market decides to move higher early next week, and also provides the potential for irritated shorts to re-establish their positions short, driving the market lower. Those who wound up long during that little ramp job are likely to be rather nervous as well.

For my part I shorted that spike. Not large, and I am fully prepared to hedge it Sunday evening if necessary or just take it down, as there is every possibility, this close to the 200MA, that we will at least hit it on the cash, and blowing through it on volume and continuing higher cannot be ruled out.

I will note, however, that the last time we saw this sort of dislocation activity start up into the close it it too began with these sorts of “rocket shot” moves higher - and once the shorts were all blown out by having their stops run, the market essentially pancaked.

Look sharp - the sharks are in the water and you taste good.

For those of you who need a translation of what this means, I would say this: someone who was short had to liquidate a very large position due to a margin call and this forced the market up. In fact, many people believe (Meredith Whitney included) that much of the recent rally has nothing to do with fundamentals and is a short-covering rally plain and simple. Even so, it is a powerful rally nonetheless, and the shorts are getting killed.

3. Bull-Market/Secular Bear Market Rally

Then there is the bullish view. This view sees the market rally as a real bull market based on the potential for economic recovery sometime in the second half of 2009. Some think this is a secular bull – a view I am not discussing in this post. Others see this as a cyclical bull-market a.k.a bear market rally I would put Jeremy Grantham in this category. I would also put myself here, although I do think short-covering has made this rally dangerously over-bought. Paul Kedrosky recently made the bear market rally story very well in an interview with Tech Ticker’s Aaron Task (see the attached video as well).

Kedrosky thinks the S&P could approach 1100 by year-end, which would translate into the Dow well above 10,000.

Nonetheless, he believes it’s a bear market rally and unlikely to continue into 2010 as the market to get hit by fears of a “double-dip” recession.

How long the rally last is dependent on how long authorities can prop up the economy artificially. Remember the huge rally from 2002-2007 that took the Dow and S&P to new highs? That was a very long bear market rally. So, it is not altogether clear where the market is headed over the medium term. In my view, the U.S.market is going to eventually re-test its 2009 lows (which are 14 year lows when adjusted for inflation).

For now, there are enough doubters about how ‘real’ this rally is to provide road kill for the uptrend, making the kick up that much more powerful. Witness today’s breathtaking surge to the upside. When and whether systemic weakness re-asserts itself is another question altogether. For now, the bulls have gained hold.