Groupon Stock Price Drops Over 14% in Three Days!

The stock market had a real bad day today because of Eurozone and Italy worries and things there are going to get worse. Nevertheless, after Groupon's IPO, even with the Bear Market rallies, Groupon has been a loser three days in a row. 

Nov. 7, 2011. Dow Jones rises 0.71% yet Groupon drops 0.54% (after hours drop another 0.85%)

Nov. 8, 2011. Dow Jones rises 0.84%... Yet Groupon drops a massive 4.12% (after hours drop another 0.12%)

Today, Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011 (USA time) Dow Jones takes a beating on Euro news and sinks 3.20%.  Groupon decline accelerates and drops another massive 3.53% (after hours drop another 0.08%)

In three days, Groupon shares have lost 14% of their value. I predict Groupon is heading for penny stock within 2 years. This is a serious opportunity to short this company stocks.

On top of that, the news is all bad for Groupon. From the Wall Street Journal just today!:

Merchants Grumble Over Groupon Late Payments

Competitors are threatening the daily deal site leader by offering quicker payment to merchants, possibly jeopardizing a key part of the company's business model.

Groupon, which offers online deals for local merchants, keeps itself in cash by collecting money immediately when it sells its daily coupons to consumers while dragging out payments to the merchants over 60 days.

As I have said many times before, the Groupo business model won’t work. All business deals, in order to be successful, must be beneficial for all sides concerned. The business owners who make deals with Groupon lose out big time. 

From that same article:

"The payment timing is so erratic you can't count on any of that money helping to pay your bills," says Mark Grohman, owner of Meridian Restaurant in Winston-Salem, N.C.

After running three Groupon promotions this year and last, Mr. Grohman says he won't use the service again in part because it puts too big a strain on his cash flow. "With smaller margins in restaurants, you need that capital in the bank as fast as possible," he says.

Heissam Jebailey, co-owner of two Menchie's frozen-yogurt franchises in Winter Park, Fla., says he also has begun to view Groupon's installment payments as too slow.

"You want to get paid in full as quickly as possible," says Mr. Jebailey, who has run deals with both Groupon and its rival LivingSocial Inc. offering customers $10 of frozen yogurt for $5. He says both promotions were successful but that he'd only use Groupon again if the service promises to pay faster. "We're the ones that have to cover the cost of goods for giving away everything at half price," he says. "I will not do another deal with Groupon unless they agree to my terms."


Here's a video from Market Watch that came out today, too. Groupon's Payment Lag Irks Merchants:

Godzilla Lawyers? Meet Middle-Finger Zilla

The lawyers for Godzilla seem to claim that any sort of dinosaur image usage or use of the word "Zilla" is an infringement upon their rights for the Godzilla character. I think I can show you today where they are wrong.


Just recently, they got into it with Apple lawyers over Finger-zilla.


A while back they threatened a mom and pop barbecue restaurant.


Well, I am now convinced that these Godzilla lawyers couldn't really win in court. Why? Well dinosaur characters can't be copy-written unless they are totally unique and a T-Rex is not totally unique. And the next part: Zilla is the name of an ancient plant species that grows in the Saharan desert.


Since it is ancient, I'd guess it came before a 1950's B-Grade horror flick.


Now, to blow them thar lawyers out of the water, here's Gigantis! (Not to be confused with Godzilla...)


Wait a minute! Gigantis looks like Godzilla's anemic little sister! How could those lawyers claim that Godzilla is unique?


The name isn't and the character certainly isn't!


If Godzilla lawyers send anyone a cease and desist order, show them this. Those Godzilla lawyers are bluffing!

Japan WWII Anime: Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors

Once again, I'd like to present for your pleasure and interest a Japanese World War II cartoon. I showed a clip from this cartoon in Holy Sh*t! World War Two Japanese Propaganda Anime of the Attack on Pearl Harbor. That was a very popular blog post, so I searched and found an entire feature length cartoon.

The cartoon is not nearly as bloody and gutsy as American anime at the time, but you can sense the subtleties of the Japanese mindset and just how "dark" a society Japan really was at the time (I still think, in many ways, Japan is a very "dark" country... But that's a post for another time).


The cartoon is Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors. In Japanese: 桃太郎 海の神兵（ももたろう うみのしんぺい）"Momotaro Umi no shinpei." Interestingly, there's an entire Wikipedia entry in English no less (saves me a lot of work!)


Wikipedia says:

Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei (桃太郎 海の神兵, lit. Momotaro's Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors or Momotaro, Sacred Sailors) is the first Japanese feature-length animated film.[3] It was directed by Mitsuyo Seo, who was ordered to make a propaganda film for the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry. Shochiku Moving Picture Laboratory shot the 74-minute film in 1944 and screened it on April 12, 1945. It is a sequel to Momotarō no Umiwashi, a 37-minute film released in 1943 by the same director. It is black and white.

Plot: After completing naval training, a bear cub, a monkey, a pheasant, and a puppy say goodbye to their families. Like the prior film, the movie features the "Peach Boy" character of Japanese folklore. The film is about the surprise maneuver on Sulawesi island, depicting parachute troops' actions. The monkey, puppy and bear cub are the ones that become parachute jumpers while the pheasant becomes a pilot. The whole movie also depicts the Japanese "liberation of Asia", as proclaimed by the Government at the time.

There are some musical scenes. Of note is The Song of AIUEO (アイウエオの歌AIUEO no Uta), a scene where Japanese soldiers teach local animals how to speak.

Background: The Naval Ministry previously showed Seo Fantasia, a 1940 Disney film. Inspired by this, Seo tried to give dreams to children, as well as to instill the hope for peace, just as he did in the prequel movie, Momotaro's Sea Eagles.

The Song of AIUEO (アイウエオの歌 AIUEO no Uta) is famous for being given a homage in the series Kimba the White Lion (ジャングル大帝 Janguru Taitei) by Osamu Tezuka (Tezuka watched the film in April 1945. He later said that he was moved to tears by the movie's hints of dreams and hopes, hidden under the appearance of war propaganda).

For a long time, the film was presumed to have been confiscated and burnt by the American occupation. However, a negative copy of the film was found in Shochiku's Ofuna warehouse in 1983 and was re released in 1984. A reproduced movie was later screened and the VHS package is now available in Japan.

So, without further ado, here is the cartoon Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors in it's entirety (parts 1/9 to 9/9). I placed them all here for your convenience so you wouldn't have to search for them.


If you just want to get the gist of the film, I suggest watching the first part and the very last part... The lunacy of war. Why do we do this?

By the way, the foreign soldiers in the final scene are British and not Americans... But the very last scene where the Japanese kids are jumping out of a tree onto a map of the USA drawn on the ground is, quite, well, "interesting." 

Move Your Money Nov. 5, 2011 ~ Dec. 31, 2011

My wife and I removed all our money from Citibank last week.

Minister Farrakhan on Ron Paul & Exposing the Federal Reserve (BLACK ACTION & THE NWO series)

Minister Louis Farrakhan is one of the few people in the USA left telling the truth... Sometimes, even Islam has the "word"... Something to think about.

Six-Dollar iPod? Yes. It's Real and It's Here!

Remember a while back when I showed you a team of Tokyo University student's who had invented an iPad clone for $7! They sold them out within hours. See that story here with photo's: The $7 dollar iPad Look-a-Like Made in Japan.

 $7 dollar iPad Look-a-Like

This morning, I stumbled upon this extremely interesting video about a guy who has come up with an idea that he calls, "The Poor Man's iPod." Regular iPods cost anywhere between ¥4,200 ~ ¥20,900 (about $54.00 USD ~ $270.00 USD)... This Poor Man's iPod (the smallest ones) can hold about 15 songs for $5... 


His idea uses a Thumb Drive to store songs to play on your car stereo. Since Thumb Drives have gotten so cheap these days (and are getting even more  inexpensive soon) this seems to have potential... Perhaps back to the old days when we had cassettes with our fave artists in a box? One Thumb Drive for your favorite Rock artist, one for dance, one for ?

The Poor Man's iPod

Interesting, no?


Many have said that Apple could be in trouble because Steve Jobs is gone and Steve's replacement is a clone (meaning no new ideas or initiative). Maybe so.


Perhaps this isn't a earth-shaking new idea or even profitable, but it is a new idea and it shows that this guy is thinking... 


See more at: http://johnu78.blogspot.com

Holy Sh*t! World War Two Japanese Propaganda Anime of Attack on Pearl Harbor!

Yesterday's blog was extremely, er, "popular"... Actually, I posted about this sort of stuff on this blog long ago when this blog was just in infancy, but at those times, I guess I only had 5 readers (4 of those being my family). 

This brings me to being able to coin a new word in the blogosphere. And that word is "Blag." "Blag" means a blog post that brags. OK? So I brag that I have made a new term because I am so fricking superior that I can show you stupid white imperialist trash just how superior our Japanese air-forces are to your corrupt Rooseveltian power-hungry scum are. Damn! I'm great!


Also just how cool and suave and debonair I am because I have come up with new terminology.


Anyhow, here's another cool Japanese anti-American anime is that I want to introduce to you uncultured foreign savages....


From Youtube (especially watch from 1:00 in the video...) Ha! Ha! Ha! We bomb Pearl Harbor in Momotaro's Sea Eagles and kick some serious American butt!) Die! Die! Die! Amerikanischer Swine!: 


Momotaro's Sea Eagles

American cartoons weren't afraid of stereotypes during World War II; Popeye and Bugs Bunny battled racist visions of Japanese soldiers, and one can easily guess why the short "Tokio Jokio" wasn't part of regularLooney Tunes TV rotation. Of course, Japan had its own school of WWII cartoon propaganda, and the most famous are Momotaro's Sea Eagles and its sequel, the first feature-length Japanese cartoon, Momotaro's Divine Warriors.

Unlike the slapstick of Popeye shorts, the Momotaro cartoons are relatively serious children's films in which Prince Momotaro and his cuddly animal friends don sailor suits and bomb Pearl Harbor. Well, they don't actually say it's Pearl Harbor, but Momotaro's Sea Eagles glorifies its heroes' attack on the ogres and other vicious foreign devils of Onigashima. Momotaro's Divine Warriors tells much the same story, but with even more scenes of cute little bears and squirrels and monkeys crowding into realistic airplanes and parachuting down to slay their racial inferiors.




Momotaro's Divine Warriors isn't available on DVD in North America, but Momotaro's Sea Eagles is. Zakka Films released it as part of a "Roots of Japanese Anime" collection, along with less offensive animated works. Historical value aside, the film is both insidious and surreal, like a Funny Little Bunnies version of Triumph of the Will.