Ever watch commodities traders on the floor of the exchange throwing gang signs around? OK, those signs are actually buy and sell signals.

It’s always looked like gibberish to me. Now I know what they mean; an oil trader demonstrates the hand signals used on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in this New York Times article.

Royal College of Art graduate (UK) Cristian Zuzunaga has devised a fabric based on a ‘pixel’ concept, which is being produced by Danish manufacturer Kvadrat and sold through Moroso.

Via SwissMiss

Let’s see what we have in the picture cache today, shall we?

 

    

 

  

    

    

        

OK, maybe this toadstool lamp is a little girly, but sometimes girls can be geeks right? Or maybe it would look great on the bedside table of your favorite Super Mario fanatic.

I’m kinda sorta a fan of Motley Fool whose motto is “To Educate, Amuse & Enrich”.

It’s an irreverent community site of regular Joe’s like me that sometimes dabble in the stock market, rubbing elbows with the folks that could make money falling out of bed.

I was receiving a newsletter from them, a paid subscription, turned out it was more expensive than it was worth for a ‘regular joe’ like myself. So this December I canceled it.

Today I finally received the nag mail I knew I was destined to find in my inbox “real soon now” trying to persuade me to come back. This nag mail was a tome. It’s a behemoth. Somewhere a secretary that typed it up for Marketing is undergoing a CT-Scan for a blown carpus.

Our best offer on a ONE-OF-A-KIND NEW SERVICE to win you back…

A private invitation from
Motley Fool Co-Founder, Tom Gardner
(please do not forward this email)

I started to read it because the bait on the hook was looking pretty good in the first couple of lines (these guys are good), and the fact that they didn’t want me to fwd meant there was probably something only us insiders to the Fool should know about. Hey, my wife tells me I’m an easy mark.

So I read through the second paragraph, now I’m seeing lots of numbers thrown around like “305% Profit!” or “beating the S&P 500 by 40%“…and then it happened. My eyes started to glaze over, so I scroll down and kept scrolling, scrolling page after page ’till I finally hit bottom:

Start Now!

Sincere regards,
Tom Gardner
Co-founder, The Motley Fool

This nag mail, to convince me to re-subscribe and win my affection, has these ridiculous numbers:

The e-mail was 16 pages long

The e-mail had 356 lines of text

The e-mail had 4275 words

Holy Mother of all Creatures Great and Small, what the heck were they thinking? Who would read all of that shortly after having kicked their newsletter to the curb by unsubscribing in the first place?