Boo! & etc.
The Week in Review -- October 30, 1998
by Jerry "Tombstone with Cheeze" Thomas ([email protected])

Greetings, Fools.

Have you ever woke up screaming in the dead of night to find your bed surrounded by ghouls and goblins menacing you with bloody claws and dripping fangs?

Me neither, thank God, but it's Halloween, so you never know. I'm taking every precaution, from spraying my room with garlic-scented air freshener to placing an exorcist on retainer. Morbid paranoia is serious business, and I put a considerable effort into making sure my screaming meemies go off without a hitch. If you want me before Sunday, I'll be hiding under the bed with the rest of the cowards.

In the meantime, here's a list of really scary things to get you in the mood for Halloween:

1. Alan Greenspan, with his shirt off, under fluorescent light
2. 3,000 shares of Boston Chicken in your mother's IRA
3. Saddam Hussein's picture on a box of oatmeal cookies
4. Bela Lugosi, D.D.S.
5. Day trading with your eyes closed
6. Donny and Marie with chainsaws
7. The slate of candidates on next Tuesday's ballot
8. A hedge fund with heavy exposure to Latin America
9. The check for $6.80 I got this week for one full day's jury service
10. Brain-eating zombie full-service brokers from beyond the grave

Halloween is a special day for Fools. For starters, it's one of the few days each year when those jangly bell caps look sort of normal. (The other days are April 1st, alternate leap years, and whenever your beanie copter is at the cleaners. Ha!) We've even got our www.fool.com home page decked out with black and orange trimmings. But Halloween is doubly special this year, because this week's special guest on The Motley Fool Radio Show is none other than Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I'm not kidding.

Do you understand what a coup this is for Tom & Dave? Cornering Elvira on Halloween is like nailing an exclusive interview on President's Day -- with George Washington. (This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, considering that a few weeks ago the Gardners' special guest was Ben Franklin). Elvira on Halloween rocks, and you can be sure that I'll be wearing my Official Junior Vampire Cadet Fangs with my ear pressed against the radio speaker this Saturday at noon, Eastern Time -- and if you're lucky enough to be within range of a radio station that carries the program, you will be, too.

Fools everywhere have been sending chills up and down the spines of the Wise all week. The main haunting comes in our annual Halloween Feature. In it, the Motley Ghouls offer tricks (stocks to avoid) and treats (stocks to love), and tell some scary stories about the dark side of Wall Street. You'll have to make your own s'mores, but there are plenty of horror stories here -- stories scary enough to make Vincent Price look like Julie Andrews. Amid the various and sundry goosebumps they might induce, you might even find a promising investment idea or two.

And so we seek to fend off the monsters. Halloween conjures many demons -- the bloodsuckers, the flesh-rippers, the soul-drainers -- and all of them, somehow, resemble the one real monster we all must face sooner or later: the Tax Man. And thus does October 31st echo April 15th -- these are the two days on the calendar when, thanks to some harrowing astrological warp, you are most likely to feel drained of your strength by an unspeakably hellish succubus. While I'm congratulating myself for this really slick segue, go look at our Foolish Tax Strategies area. This Fool feature offers lots of help to those who are beset by IRS gremlins. Most especially helpful is the new Motley Fool Investment Tax Guide. Selena Maranjian (TMF Selena) and Roy Lewis (TMF Taxes) did us proud with this useful guide, which will serve you like a silver bullet, a wooden stake, and the light of day to ward off those nasty tax vampires.

Some quick plugs... Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible) continues the Halloween theme in Thursday's Fool Portfolio Report, which, unlike the blazing affront to cyberspace that you are now reading, actually contains some laffs. And it was a vintage week for Fribbles, too -- my two favorites came at the extremes of the week -- Monday's piece from Hunzi re-writes Dr. Seuss in Foolish fashion, while Friday's Fribble from Jeff (AKJayhawk) Campbell brings our attention back to where it should always be: with our children.

Finally, and departing from thoughts of the holiday, I'm compelled to toss a little gee-whiz into my usual comments. For me, this week's write-home-about-it moment came with Thursday's shuttle launch, which sent John Glenn back into orbit after a 36-year layover between flights. I am not old enough to remember Glenn's first jaunt, but I grew up on astronaut lore, collecting all the trading cards, and mesmerized by the moonwalks. When, on our Motley Fool message boards, I asked for suggestions from our community for topics I might mention in these weekly Notes, the Fool who calls himself Raggmopp responded:

Well, the John Glenn thing got me to thinking (always dangerous), years and years ago when the Space Race was going on someone asked what good it was to the average man. The paper in question (name escapes me) decided to do a publicity stunt and go into a Department Store and put a sticker on everything that the Space Race had impacted upon. So they did, turned out that it would have been a whole lot easier to tag everything the Space Race HADN'T impacted upon (remember this was the late sixties and everything from Corning Ware to Dacron was effected). So it occurs to me that without the necessity for miniaturization in space we wouldn't be sitting in our respective chairs having this conversation. At least not at the speed of light.

I find that particularly poignant. The value of our efforts to put people into space might be questioned, but I do believe that the effect those efforts have had on our lives is beyond argument. Something to think about.

Until next week,
Fool on!

Cheeze