Glitch Manor, Weardale England, June 1856: Not long ago, through an odd circumstance, I became aware of the following letter from Ernest Glitch of Weardale to Michael Faraday. The letter describes the demonstration of a nitrogen TEA (Transversely Excited, Atmospheric pressure) laser, using air as the lasing medium. This occured in Victorian England over a century before Maiman`s ruby laser or Javan`s helium-neon laser. The letter reads as follows …

“My Dear Faraday,

“I would like to expound to you a phenomenon of singular curiosity, apparent during investigations into expanding the electrical spark. It affords me little joy as my discovery took the sight from Hodges right eye and I have had to dismiss him. As my last correspondence indicated, I have surmised that the experiments are deleterious to poor Hodges, his health having sharply deteriorated due, I think, to the quicksilver effluvia he breathed during leyden phial silvering.

“The leyden battery is now complete! What a detonation is delivered after charging for some time! I had Hodges place a ball of box-wood in the path of the spark …

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San Anselmo: As you perhaps know, Adrienne and I are moving to Mount Shasta in two weeks, which is causing a lot of what we could call “packing” activity.

It also causes some money-juggling activity, closing some accounts and opening others. We’d pressed a Bank of America account into service for our new place, and after I returned home today from San Diego I reconciled our accounts.

There was a mystery check on the new account, for $600.

As it happens, during the last week Bank of America has added the ability to retrieve an image, so I was able to look at the check. There was a check written to Adrienne and signed by me! (Or something that kind of resembled my signature.)

Adrienne! That scamp!

San Diego: Today I closed the voicemail company mid-day and drove to the Oakland airport, then spent the remainder of the day getting into a very fluffy hotel called the Wyndham in San Diego.

It’s supposed to be a very ritzy hotel, but I wonder why they can’t even spell ‘wind’. My room has a television that doesn’t get any television channels or HBO. It only offers to sell me movies from $10.99 up to $14.99. I can even pay $14.99 and then I could check my email. After getting $150 per night for the room, you’d think they could include email, wouldn’t you?

For dinner, I wandered locally, and found Kansas City Barbeque, which looked really sloppy so in I went. Actually I ate outside, watching a vast street, as the sky high above faded into indigo. The barbeque was messy and good, the beer was fine, and when I went inside I discovered that the bar inside was the bar in the movie “Top Gun”.

However, there was no sign of Tom Cruise or Rebecca Russo.

Maybe tomorrow.

San Diego: The hotel was confused and said the seminar started at 7:30, but Larry Williams website had said 8:30. So to play it safe, we all showed up early, then started at 8:30.

I’ve been a Larry Williams fan for a long time. If you’ve never examined commodity trading, you might not know that as a young man Larry signed up for this annual trading contest. You start with $10,000 and then trade it for a year, and the guy that makes the most money wins the contest.

(Doesn’t it make you wonder what the contest prize is?)

Larry started with $10,000 and then traded it up, using some blackjack formula for how much to risk on every trade. He made it up to $2,200,000.00 — that’s right, 2.2 million dollars — in about ten months, then had it all riding on one trade which went wrong, dropping his money to $700,000 — Whoah! — and then he traded it back up to $1,100,000. by the end of the year.

So when he offered the seminar, I was all ears.

The seminar was great. I learned about Larry’s ‘Blast Off’ indicator that tells when a big move is coming up. It nicely complements one of my own called ‘AC VPO2 TmBar Diverg’. Catchy name, huh?

I learned why the commercials sometimes buy early. (That is, why does General Mills buy so much wheat before what would appear to be the best time?) There were some others, and I got an interesting one modesty called ‘god’ by the guy sitting beside me, Frank from Cody Wyoming.

If I make 2.2 million I will post it here. It might take me a while. So far, I’m pretty clumsy.

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser’s son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night.”

“What’s a snipe?” I said.

Now, here I was just acting. I had long ago heard about snipe hunting. Although perhaps some such thing as a snipe does exist, somewhere in the world, there are none around these parts. In fact, taking somebody on a snipe hunt is just a way to play a trick on them.

You get somebody who knows no better than to trust you, and you give him a sack and place him out in some desolate place, and then you go home, laughing to see how long he’ll stay out there in the middle of nowhere with a sack.

But in this conversation, just for fun, I pretened to know nothing and asked what a snipe was. Jake and the other driver exchanged a quick look.

“It’s a kind of bird,” Jake said, “They’re mighty good eating, and they’re easy to catch, too.” That was my cue.

“How do you catch them?” I asked. Strangely enough, I was told that these snipe were caught in a sack, out in the empty fields, at night. I played along like Mr. Dummy.

When we got back to our camp beyond the farmer’s buildings, Mrs. Mosier had cooked up another great dinner for all the hands, and we fell to. Afterward, as the light was failing, we sat around, smoking and talking. And somehow the snipe hunt came up again. Jake mentioned that I had never been on a snipe hunt, and all my very good friends chimed in that it was so fun, and they decided to take me snipe hunting that very night.

Jake got some burlap sacks from the farmer, and in a short time we were barrelling along a dark road past deserted fields. As expected, I was taken to a low-lying gully in the field and given some sacks. The others said they’d go up past the higher ground and they’d drive the snipe along the gully. All I had to do was bag the snipe as they came running along the ground.

Off went my good friends.

Under the half-moon, the dark field was vaguely visible into the distance, and my friends soon vanished, and from a distance, began making various kinds of sounds. But as soon as they were out of sight, I’d crept along the gulley until I came to the fence, crawled under the fence, and then walked along the drainage ditch until the field was left behind.

Trotting up the empty road in the fresh moonlight, in a quarter hour I was back at the camp, and lay in my bunk, reading for about an hour. Mr. Moser asked me where Jake and the boys were, and I told him they’d gone snipe hunting.

Jake and the boys showed up soon after, glowering. Somehow they’d not enjoyed the snipe hunt all that much, and they had no snipe to show for the night’s outing.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Saving means NOT SPENDING.

That’s it.

If you don’t save, you will never in your life have anything, because it all goes away.

Saving means NOT spending. If the proposed “savings” are spent, then they are no savings at all.

Of course, there is no value at all in savings all by itself. And so your mind will find urgent reasons why the proposed “savings” need to be spent. After all, your mind isn’t stupid. It will be obvious that a flashy sportscar is lots better than some money just sitting in a bank, doing no good for anybody.

Therefore use “Mental Judo”. From the beginning, your savings should be for a specific purpose. For example, save some to own a home. Save some as insurance that medical or unemployment emergency won’t make you a beggar. Save some for when you’re old, or just for when you’d like to stop working and concentrate on raising tulips and going fishing.

If you are saving for a particular thing, then your mind has a chance of perceiving that it is important, and you’d rather not jeopardize your grand plan for a moment’s flash in a sportscar. Later, when you’re rich, and the cost of sportscars is trivial, at that point you can actually afford a sportscar. Maybe two.

Saving means NOT spending. If you are truly saving, then you have the money in your possession. It has not vanished.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.