Well, Duh.

Captain Obvious

Hello from the Weekend Gene Pool, where we solicit your anecdotes and observations for use next week, and, in return, entertain you as best we can.

So. Donald Trump has managed somehow to bankrupt not one but six casinos, a sleazy industry based on a stacked deck and known for runaway profit-making. He bought a professional football team and it went belly-up in two years. He ran several hotels into the ground. He bankrupted a fraudulent college. His steak business failed. His vodka business failed. His mortgage company failed, as did his magazine. Economists say that if, as a young man, he had just invested his huge inheritance into the S&P 500, he would be $400 million richer today than he is today.

This man is the anti-alchemist. He turns gold into lead. This is the guy with the reverse Midas touch. Because I am angry and cruel, I will call this the Wide-ass touch.

My point is … well, duh. Who could have seen this coming? How could we possibly have known he would run the world’s greatest economy into the ground almost immediately upon taking office?

That is today’s question: What is a “well, duh” moment that you have personally encountered, or have observed? To avoid being boring and repetitive and just too damn easy, let us exclude any mentions of Trump or the Trump regime.

Remember, funny is good. Poignant is good. Funny and poignant is the best.

Send your anecdotes and observations here:

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Your “well, duh” moment can be about anything at all. Doesn’t have to be about money. I have a brief personal story that does happen to be about money, however, and though I wrote about it 15 years ago it is oddly resonant with today’s news. I can’t link to it so I will excerpt it here:

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A long time ago, I learned something important about myself; I learned that money management is not my strong suit. It is, in fact, a particularly weak and pathetic suit, a clown suit with duck feet and one of those bleating Harpo Marx horns. I am, for example, a financial benefactor of the Washington Post because I never get around to submitting expense forms for reimbursement. Also, every single parking ticket I get doubles in penalty because I wait too long to pay it. Sometimes, it triples.

Because I know this about myself, I long ago surrendered to my wife complete control of my financial affairs, much the way the courts protect the feeble-minded.

During the last week of August, I awoke one day with a thought. This thought arose in the single financial brain cell I have, and it somehow struggled its way past the New York Yankees lobe, through the voluminous dirty-joke archive, past a few hundred thousand flapping red flags, and popped out, fully formed. It said: Bad days lie ahead.

Feeling heroically prescient, like John D. Rockefeller, who famously saw that his shoeshine boy was dispensing stock tips and decided to pull all his money out of Wall Street just before the 1929 crash -- I, too, decided it was time to get out. Just like that.

And so I did. Bypassing my wife entirely -- greatness requires daring -- I called up Joe, my finance guy, and gave the order. Joe is paid to do what he is told, but he did point out that, in terms of the potential for moneymaking, taking everything out of the market is essentially like putting everything in a coffee can and burying it in the back yard -- which, as it happens, is something that a nutty relative of mine once did. Most of it was eaten by gophers.

This knowledge might have stopped a man with two financial brain cells. But, as I said, I have just the one. So I did it.

Yesterday, Joe telephoned my wife -- for some reason, he bypassed me entirely -- to recommend that I undo my order. I wish she hadn't asked why, but she did.

"Because," Joe said, "we've just had the best September for the stock market in 71 years."

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This was a classic “Well, duh” moment, of course. How could anyone have predicted that a financial idiot like me would perpetrate a financial idiocy like that?

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Okay. Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

And finally, the shortest “and finally” to date:

Please. Need. In this together.

Again, send in questions and observations about anything on your mind, but in particular, “well, duhs.”