Daily Archives: June 15, 2007

Enjoy some laughs with Robin Williams

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RobinWilliams.jpgOne of my sons and I had a good laugh together watching this David Letterman interview of Robin Williams from a couple of years ago, so I am passing it along for you to enjoy at your leisure. Who other than Williams could, in the course of a 15-minute interview, generate laughs on subjects as diverse as the U.S. legal system, jury duty, golf announcers, linguistics, family therapy, acting with his daughter, welding, baseball, Barry Bonds, and Christopher Reeve? The first excerpt of the interview is below and the three other excerpts from the interview are after the hyperlinked break below:

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A risky strategy in the Black trial

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conrad_black%20061407.jpgMark Steyn — who has done a wonderful job blogging the Conrad Black trial — reports that the case will go to the jury next week after the defense rested this week with Black electing not to testify.
The Black’s defense team strategy in holding Black off the witness stand is risky. As Martha Stewart and Jamie Olis learned the hard way, jurors in white collar criminal cases expect to hear the defendants explain why the government’s charges are not true. When the jurors do not hear from the defendant, no jury instruction will ever remove the seeds of doubt from the jurors’ minds that the defendant is trying to hide something. Granted, as Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay experienced, testifying in one’s own defense certainly does not assure a successful defense. Likewise, the courtroom dynamics of each trial are different, so those in play in the Black trial courtroom may favor Black staying off the stand. But as the late Edward Bennett Williams used to advise his white collar criminal clients, “If you elect not to testify, then you better bring your toothbrush with you to the courthouse.” Inasmuch as the government’s case in the Black trial appears to be extraordinarily weak, here’s hoping that the Black defense team’s decision to keep Black off the stand does not come back to haunt them.

Investing in fat people?

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doughnuts2.jpgFollowing on earlier posts here and here on how the U.S. anti-obesity industry often misrepresents the nature and extent of the health problems related to widespread obesity in American society, Laura Vanderkam reviews NY Times nutrition columnist Gina Kolata’s new book, Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss–and the Myths and Realities of Dieting (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) in which Kolata challenges the conventional wisdom that an obese person’s capacity to lose weight and maintain that reduced weight is merely a question of an individual’s willpower.
Despite Kolata’s book and a growing body of research that questions the anti-obesity crusade, investing in anti-obesity appears to be a potentially lucrative investment opportunity. A case in point is this Merrill Lynch research report on how best to invest in “the emerging obesity epidemic.” Table 5 presents “stocks that represent the ML Obesity Theme” which, by the way, includes Whole Foods and Wild Oats Markets.
“The developed world is getting older and fatter,” writes ML analyst Jose Rasco. “People are increasingly eating more proteins and processed foods, leading more sedentary lives and gaining weight.” Inasmuch as ML projects that the number of obese people worldwide will increase to 700 million in 2015 from 400 million in 2005, there’s money to be made in those companies that are fighting obesity or, as ML might say, “why not monetize a trend of more fat people?”