My Dear Mr. Baseball Fan:
I don’t exactly know how to answer your question about the party. Here’s why.
When I take Spiro with me to these kinds of events, there is considerable attention paid to him. To be quite honest with you, sometimes I stand there with him on my arm, and feel like a ventriloquist holding a (very very smart and perceptive) “dummy” (to them). The ladies, especially, like to come up to him and talk to him. They don’t exactly understand that Spiro is a falcon, an ultimate predator who unequivocally rules his world. He is not a macaw, not a parrot and certainly not some kind of parakeet.
“Polly want a cracker?” they say. “Lady want a nose job?”, I’m thinking. They offer him food of all kinds: cookies, fruit, candies, matzo, Indian ice cream and whatever else they might like to eat. Little do they know that Spiro could peck their eyes out and eat half of their body fat in a matter of two hours.
What happens is that we become a type of “entertainment station” at these parties and I don’t get to see all that is happening. I have never seen “drinking games”, as you call them. Remember that I am new around here and I haven’t seen everything, I am sure.
Side parties? There are groups who like to hang out together and socialize but I wouldn’t call them a “side party”. These are just people who feel comfortable with each other in this type of setting. (I used to see this at the institute of mental rehabilitation in Western Mass. The schizophrenics hung out together and didn’t mix too much with the bipolars. The paranoids suspected everybody and hardly socialized at all. The narcissists stayed to themselves. The cryogenics absolutely hung together because, as you know, “Misery loves company”.)
There is one group that you might find interesting, if this is what you meant by a “side group”. This is a group of four sensible, conservative, prudent, honest and experienced investment bankers and hedge fund managers who pal around together. This group of four personifies the slow, gradual transformation that has occurred in the thinking up here. Frankly, it is utterly uncanny to me. (Coach: “Uncanny” means that something is strange, seeming to have a supernatural character or origin.)
These bankers and “hedgies”, as they like to call themselves, have become enamored with CryoPort. (Coach: Think gaga.) Here I am, a high-school graduate, getting these high-powered M.B.A.’s to become interested in our wildly speculative stock that has no revenues, no customers, no contracts, very little cash and very little inventory. Me, little ol’ me has them talking about “ ‘Port”, as they like to call the company. Interesting, isn’t it?
The four guys that have researched the company up one side and down the other. (One of them is the guy that said something to me about cucumberland at a party. Remember this story? See post #2001). They sit around at night, eating ice cream from India (they now have a vested interest in how the ice cream is shipped here) and discuss their ideas about the growth potential of the company and the “explosive potential” (their words) of the stock price. Since there are four of them, they jokingly refer to themselves as the CryoPort Quartet, or “the CryoQuarts”. (Coach: A quartet is four, a quintet is five, a sextet is six, etc….)
Here is their latest game. They save a small shipping label from each container of ice cream that they consume. The guys call these little labels “tiles” because they look like the small, one inch tiles that one might use in a shower or countertop area. After they consume enough containers of ice cream, they take these “tiles” and flip them in the air. Each of the four guys calls “heads” or “tails”, or something like that, and for each flip of a tile they each get some sort of fractional credit towards winning a complete tile for themselves. (I don’t really understand the process because it gets mathematical and math. is certainly not my strength.) The first guy to win five of these shipping tiles gets what they call “quintiles”. (Coach: Remember that the prefix “quint” implies five of something.) When this happens, they all bust up in a big belly laugh and again start talking about the explosive growth potential of “’Port”. Don’t ask me. Maybe somebody can explain to me what winning “quintiles” has to do with the explosive growth of CryoPort and its stock price.
As I have said in an earlier post, “Smart people say smart things.” I am the first to admit that I am not really that smart, so I don’t know what some of this stuff means. Interesting? Yes. Meaningful? I don’t know.
AI
