More Quick Hits

* Now it seems as if the bears are having a "come to Jesus" party and getting long on the market. I do like the market action. It was rough buying in a few weeks ago when everybody seemed so bearish and negative, but that's always the time to do it. No matter what your gut is telling you. Now the conversion from bearish to bullish begins, and once that's done we'll be in a brand new trading range.

* On CNBC, you can even sense the change in mood from bearish to bullish. And of course, all the gurus are saying that it was so obvious and claiming that they were on the right side of this thing. Well, you be the judge on that one!

* Greenspan's up on the Hill, and he says he's worried about inflation. While folks usually spend hours parsing the meanings from Greenspan's Fed-Speak, he was very obvious when he remarked consumers were likely to be "quite surprised" by the heating bills they receive this winter. (Get some fleece, folks.)

* Kobe Bryant, in the Lakers opener in Denver last night, nailed a shot in over time with .6 seconds left to give Los Angeles the victory over the Nuggets. Welcome back, NBA! (And you too, Phil Jackson.)

* Did you read the book Freakonomics? It's a great read, and challenges some of our pre-conceived points of view. I wondered over the weekend "Hey, I wonder if Steven Levitt has a blog." Instead of guessing, I just did a google search and found it here. Apparantly, it's worth almost a million bucks, too. Of course, I could've saved the Google search step and just typed in the www. freakonimcs URL. That was a little obvious, eh? By wasting the time doing a Google search, I was battered with hundreds of links to other websites that talk about Freakonomics, including those that just sell herbal male enhancement products that put Freakonomics in their web description. Sigh.

* President Bush is ready to cough up $7.1 billion to fight the bird flu. You know, President Bush is a spendin' kind of guy. He's Mr. Moneybags. If anyone reading is thinking that the caricature of Monopoly's Mr. Moneybags should be changed to resemble President Bush, I wouldn't have an argument with that.

* Maine is running out of room for its trash. In just 5.5 years, there will be no more space. What will they do when Oscar the Grouch hangs up the "Closed" sign and sends the dumptrucks elsewhere? I've often wondered about the logic of landfills. We constantly generate trash, week after week. It has to go somewhere. This is one of the few topics that I agree with the environmental folks, in that we have to be a little smarter about how we package products.

* Michelle Malkin has a new book out, just in time for the holidays. Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone wild. I find her blog an extremely entertaining view of how things appear to the Right. She writes well, and has the uncommon ability to mix in humor with her daily ramblings.

* From Blame Bush, Bush Drowns Three Children in San Francisco.

* I'm rapidly becoming a fan of Bill Cara's financial blog. I'm not evaluating his rightness or wrongness about market moves, but his writing style is entertaining and he puts out a lot to think about. Read his latest Shift in Tactics entry.