Hot Off Depress

I just had to have my share of wit and pun. I have nothing to blog about today because I’m half sleeping, half typing; so I thought of trying my hand at weaving together a story based on multiple headlines.

Stock markets worldwide have been celebrating an advanced Chinese New Year – all of them have been in the red at the onset of the Gregorian calendar year of 2008. The US, has been the global leader in terms of stock market disappointment, and it has pushed no less than their President and Legislative branch to fast track an economic stimulus package to derail the economy from heading towards a path to recession.

The financial system of the United States has been in a state of panic lately, causing the FED to cut (again) interest rates in an emergency move to quell the loss of investor confidence. Most of the stocks listed that belong to the Financial Sector have bled the way, blazing away a trail of blood on the Street.

A unique twist to the melodrama that is the subprime crisis, is that of Societe Generale. Apparently a twisted brilliant mind ran away with 7.15B DOLLARS thereby defrauding the bank, and impacting on their earnings for 2007. This fraud genius has even built up a cult following in Facebook. 7.15B dollars is how many pesos???? I think I’ll lose count of the zeros.

And speaking of zeros, a study has released a report on the number of mobile phones sold in 2007. Wager a guess?

Well it’s a cool 1.1 billion mobile phones. Compare that with a world population of 6.6Billion, and it tells you that there are still about 5.5Billion people in the world who still don’t own a single mobile phone. You have to realize that of the 1.1B handsets sold, there’s probably more than 50% who bought a second or even a third one. So the 5.5Billion may actually be a small figure.

Well, that’s it for today’s news.

Have a White Christmas Envelope

I know that the Christmas season is over, and that this blog entry is (way) long overdue, no thanks to my computer. Now that I have my beloved PC back, I can now write all those blog backlog (try saying that 10 times haha) that I still have stored in my mobile.

Last December, which on hindsight was just two days ago, we received a slew of white envelopes. These white envelopes came from a variety of people – the newsboy, the garbage collector, the mailman, the magazine delivery guy, the bills mailman, and even the caretaker for my grandparents’ grave. What were these white envelopes? And what was inside them?

These are your normal white envelopes that you receive in the mail. The differences are that one, it’s empty, and secondly, they bear the words “Merry Christmas” out on the face of the envelope.

These envelopes, although given in person, are never given blatantly to you. They’re usually inserted along with the item they’re delivering – the mail, the newspaper, the bills or the magazine. Hmm, well except for that caretaker and the garbage man. I guess they can’t insert the envelope into a corpse or a garbage bag. :-p

I figure the reason why these people don’t want to hand out the envelopes straight into your face is because of hiya (coyness, there’s no direct English translation). It’s an indirect way of asking for some money. This practice has gone on for as long as I can remember. And me, being the eternal muser, just wanted to think of this (sad bad) practice, and just dwell on the subject for a while.

I wanted to think of how and why this practice came into being. Both the recipient (more like the asker) and the giver are at fault, when I think about it. There’d be no such practice if nobody ever condoned it. But given that it’s been practiced for so long already, I am to assume that somewhere along all those years past, somebody gave in, and it’s the giver.

I just find it weird that all these people, especially these delivery guys, all know the modus operandi. Maybe there’s a secret underground organization where they congregate annually and they distribute these empty envelopes. Maybe there’s even a contest for them, to see who gets the most money. Haha.

I surmise that it’s actually the politicians, who give out “cash gifts” during election, in white envelopes at that, which gave rise to the habit of these people giving out white envelopes. In any case, it’s moot to try to dig into the history of that.

There are many people who take advantage of the ’season of giving’, and so the season of giving has given rise to the ’season of asking’.

In the end, we still gave them a few pesos worth. Just to give them a holiday cheer. It’s still a sad, bad practice, but I thought about the meager wages they earned (compared to mine), and thanks in part to guilt, we just parted a few paper bills to them. They only ask but once a year. It sounds condescending I know, but then again, I’m never one to scrimp on somebody else’s happiness.