Signs and Wonders 04.13

Unhappy endings. It's hard not to find more than a little poetic justice in the acrimonious professional divorce between Keith Olbermann and the Al Gore-backed Current TV. Before being canned by Current, where he lasted barely a year, Olbermann had earlier been fired from both ESPN and MSNBC. In all three cases, he was let go for being, well, for being Keith Olbermann. He is just offensive. As National Review's Rich Lowry put it:

"If Olbermann were to join Wayne and Garth as a co-host of Wayne's World on the local public-access channel in Aurora, Ill., it wouldn't be long before Olbermann denounced Wayne's taste in heavy metal, complained about Garth's inordinate airtime, and quit to start his own show with the public-access channel up the road in DeKalb."

Though a liberal who heaped praise on Occupy Wall Street, Olbermann was not just a 1-percenter, but a .001-percenter who had a $50 million, five-year contract with Current TV and publicly complained about the limo service Current used to haul him to work. But no more. The next time Olbermann and Gore will see each other could be in court: Olbermann is suing Current TV for $70 million for breach of contract and other alleged offenses.

A Mac attack. While we're on the subject of elite whiners, we turn our attention to Apple Macintosh owners. In the early days, Mac users used to brag that their computers didn't get viruses. The truth is that so few people used Macs virus makers just didn't bother. Also, given the frequency of Mac crashes, why waste a good virus on it? But Apple's rising fortunes in recent years have finally made it a target worth attacking. According to Mashable, "A Russian antivirus company claims that some 600,000 Macs-most in the U.S. and Canada-are infected with a trojan horse virus called 'Flashback.'" Sorokin Ivan, an analyst at the Russian company, Cupertino, Calif., the hometown of Apple's headquarters, had 274 of the infected Macs. That adds a bit of insult to the injury, especially in light of a message on Apple's website: "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That's thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part." Uh, not anymore.

Whistling past the graveyard? After five straight losing sessions, the Dow Jones Industrial Average staged a recovery on Wednesday and Thursday, with a combined gain of about 250 points. And it was a single company, aluminum maker Alcoa, that changed the mood on Wall Street. Alcoa is famous in financial circles for being the first major company to report its results each earnings season. It's also a bellwether company, as aluminum consumption is a highly sensitive global economic force. Alcoa reported a surprising 9-cent profit for the first quarter. Analysts expected a 4-cent loss. But don't get too excited: These results are worse than last year, when Alcoa reported a first quarter profit of 28 cents. And after a couple of months of quiet in Europe, Spain is starting to show cracks from a growing debt and 23 percent unemployment. The bottom line is that the recovery is still very fragile. Volatility, measured by the VIX, or Volatility Index, has jumped dramatically in the past two weeks, indicating that Wall Street traders are jittery and will pull the trigger to buy, or sell, in a New York minute.

Rock on. I close with a couple of items to interest the aging rockers in the crowd. Larry Norman would have been 65 on April 8. I say "would have" because he died a little over four years ago of heart failure. Norman left a trail of great music and fractured relationships, including two marriages that ended in divorce and at least one child born out of wedlock. He's buried in Oregon, where his tombstone reads: "Larry Norman, Evangelist Without Portfolio, 1947-2008, Bloodstained Israelite." On a brighter note, 61-year-old guitar legend Phil Keaggy recently performed in New York at B.B. King's Blues Club with a reunited Glass Harp, the 1970s-era jazz/rock trio that gave Keaggy his start. During the two-hour show, Keaggy played Glass Harp favorites as well as songs from his current CD, Live From Kegworth Studio.