Viewer discretion is advised:
Coen Brothers' Movies, Ranked
I need to re-watch a lot of these, but this is my snap judgment:
1998 The Big Lebowski
1984 Blood Simple
2007 No Country for Old Men
1996 Fargo
2009 A Serious Man
1991 Barton Fink
1987 Raising Arizona
2001 The Man Who Wasn't There
2013 Inside Llewyn Davis
2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2018 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
1990 Miller's Crossing
2010 True Grit
2004 The Ladykillers
2003 Intolerable Cruelty
2008 Burn After Reading
1994 The Hudsucker Proxy
2016 Hail, Caesar!
Maoxian's One a Day Playlist for July 2026
Here is the One a Day playlist for July 2026. Check out the One a Day playlists for June, May, April, March, February and January.
It’s unusual for me to include an artist more than once in the One a Day playlist since I combine the monthly lists to make the annual list … but I love Melissa Leveaux and Olive Jones and Ellen Mcilwaine enough to bend the rules for them. I also took perverse pleasure putting Billy Joel between Pablo Moses and Junior Murvin … hey, it’s just chronology.
The songs are ordered chronologically from latest to earliest:
The Sha La Das, Stop Using My Love
Foushee, war
Olive Jones, A Woman's Heart
The Lemon Twigs, My Golden Years
Nectar Woode, Good Vibrations
The Innocence Mission, On Your Side
Snoh Aalegra, I Want You Around
Melissa Leveaux, Nan fon bwa
Andrew Bird, Are You Serious
Mazzy Starr, In the Kingdom
Gnarls Barkley, Crazy
The Derek Trucks Band, Volunteered Slavery
Feist, Secret Heart
The Libertines, What Katie Did
Kurt Elling, Orange Blossoms in Summertime
Richard Ashcroft, A Song For The Lovers
Belle and Sebastian, Is It Wicked Not To Care?
Tarkan, Simarik
2Pac, Dear Mama
Massive Attack, Tracey Thorn, Better Things
Francky Vincent, Le jeu des cinq
Pablo Moses, Dubbing Is A Must
Billy Joel, Just the Way You Are
Junior Murvin, Police & Thieves
Ellen Mcilwaine, Higher Ground
Minnie Ripperton, Lovin' You
Smokey Robinson, The Tracks of My Tears
Millie Small, My Boy Lollipop
Nancy Wilson, I Wish You Love
Lorez Alexandria, Nature Boy
The Chordettes, Lollipop
Seven Guys Named Vinnie
This is a fun excerpt (with my edits) from this conversation between Barry Ritholtz and Chris Davis:
Davis: “I met Charlie [Munger] long before Warren [Buffett]. The reason was I was trying to sell a business. My grandfather, as I started going through his accounts and going in there on the weekends, he had a business called Securities Lending. And I don't know how well you know that business.”
Ritholtz: “Any time you're going to short a stock, you need to borrow from somebody and it's going to cost you a little.”
Davis: “It's going to cost you a little margin. So my grandfather's view was he had a portfolio of appreciated stocks that he was never going to sell. And he said if somebody wants to short the stock and pay me to borrow it, fine. And the number one borrowed stock in those days was Berkshire Hathaway, of course, because you couldn't borrow it anywhere because everybody had the certificates.”
Ritholtz: “They literally had the paper certificates.”
Davis: “Yeah, there was very little Berkshire that was in street name and it was an individual people and therefore you couldn’t borrow it.”
Ritholtz: “It was locked away and safe.”
Davis: “Yeah. So he had a big holding and he had a broker-dealer, Shelby Cullom Davis was a registered broker-dealer [CRD #767]. And so he could lend out the shares and make a couple hundred basis points a year extra return on top of the Berkshire return. So that's how he started in the securities lending business.
But gradually the guy who was doing it for him and administering it said, wow, you know, we can also help. We've got all these people that want to short all sorts of different securities, and we can act as what was called a broker finder. We'll go out and find the securities for these people to short, and we'll make a little, a little spread as they go through. Well, this business grew and grew and grew. And soon there were, you know, 17 employees in this securities lending business. And it was a big operation.
And my grandfather by then was, you know, probably in his 80s and was nervous because, you know, as I went through the list of counterparties with him, there were firms we had never heard of. There was this one called LTCM and I said, what is this LTCM, we've got like, you know, $500 million … $800 million lent out to them. What? Oh, that's Long Term Capital Management. So we talked about it. He said, yeah, I think we gotta get rid of this thing.
And he said, fine, well, see if you can find somebody to take it over, because we do have 17 employees and they made their careers here. We're not going to fire everybody. And so we started calling around and I thought, what characteristics do we need? We need a lot of excess capital, someone who holds ideally an appreciated portfolio of securities, you know, sort of a triple A type balance sheet. And somebody that can understand. So I thought, well, Berkshire.
So, a wonderful friend in those days named Bob Lenzner was a reporter at Forbes. Our kids were in the same elementary school. And I got to know him. Just, you know, watching basketball games for third graders or something, and I heard his name around and he said, he mentioned casually in the conversation that he had met this brilliant guy, Charlie Munger.
And I said, well, I know who Charlie is, but I'm dying to meet him. And so Bob arranged for us to have breakfast, and Charlie was in New York and I went down, it was at the Millennium Hotel, down by the World Trade Center. And I went down and I sat down and introduced myself to Mr. Munger. Pleased to meet you. I'm Chris Davis, and I said, you know, I'm working with my grandfather. Shelby Cullom Davis & Company. And have I got a business for you? And I pitched our securities lending business, and Charlie put up his hand after about four minutes and he said:
‘I have no intention of buying a business run by seven guys named Vinnie.’
And Barry, it was the perfect description. We had Vinnie, Tony, Mikey, Nicky. And so we did end up finding a buyer eventually. And it wasn't really a buyer. We just did sort of an earn-out. We just wanted everybody … we just wanted them to have jobs. And so they all got a job at a broker-dealer.”
As someone who pays hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for “locates” to a mysterious, opaque “lending pool,” I too found this story very funny.
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Maoxian's One a Day Playlist for June 2026
Here is the One a Day playlist for June 2026. Check out the One a Day playlists for May, April, March, February and January.
I “discovered” Olivia Dean on YouTube a decade? ago and said this girl is gonna be a star. I have a HUGE crush on Mari Froes, who is super beautiful and has an amazing voice. Dent May is my kind of smartass. Then we have classic GenX stuff (Sade, David Bowie, The Cure). Then we have GenX baby-in-the-womb stuff: Ellen McIlwaine, Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, Roberta Flack, Allman Bros. And that old Cole Porter song takes me back to many a night spent in the Cafe Carlyle. R.I.P. Bobby!
The songs are ordered chronologically from latest to earliest:
spill tab, Suckerrr
Olivia Dean, A Couple Minutes
Andrea Laszlo De Simone, Per te
Mari Froes, Figa De Guine
Avenue A, Run Cold
Sababa 5, Bezani
Peter Cat Recording Co., Seed
Shay Hazan, Nitai Hershkovits, Sunflowers
Bloom Bat, Odd Friends
Albin de la Simone, Les cent prochaines annees
Joe Yorke, Dreaming
Wolfgang Valbrun, Keep Your Head Up
Tank and The Bangas, The Ton3s, Communion in my Cup
Benjamin Schoos, Dent May, All Night Every Night
CAKE, Mahna, Mahna
Portishead, Only You
Edwyn Collins, A Girl Like You
Gipsy Kings, Hotel California
The Cure, Close To Me
Sade, The Sweetest Taboo
David Bowie, Ashes To Ashes
Hugh Mundell, Run Revolution A Come
Ellen McIlwaine, Can't Find My Way Home
Stevie Wonder, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life
The Doobie Brothers, Listen to the Music
Bobby Short, Katie Went To Haiti
Janis Joplin, Cry Baby
Roberta Flack, Do What You Gotta Do
Allman Brothers Band, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed
Mahalia Jackson, A Satisfied Mind
Nick Davis's 100 Favorite Films
Again I am re-formatting this list so that it’s readable … looks like 109 titles in total:
1930 Min and Bill
1932 Blonde Venus
1935 Alice Adams
1947 Possessed
1949 Adam's Rib
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire
1954 Executive Suite
1959 Pickpocket
1959 Suddenly, Last Summer
1962 Walk on the Wild Side
1963 Hud
1966 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
1967 Cool Hand Luke
1968 Night of the Living Dead
1968 The Lion in Winter
1972 Solaris
1973 The Way We Were
1974 Claudine
1975 Chronicle of the Smoldering Years
1975 Dog Day Afternoon
1977 3 Women
1977 Eraserhead
1977 Opening Night
1978 Les Rendez-vous d'Anna
1979 The Brood
1979 The China Syndrome
1981 Pennies from Heaven
1982 Frances
1982 Illusions
1982 Peel: An Exercise in Discipline
1985 Kiss of the Spider Woman
1985 Mask
1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo
1986 Sherman's March
1986 The Fly
1987 Fatal Attraction
1987 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
1987 Where Is the Friend's Home?
1988 Another Woman
1990 Postcards from the Edge
1990 Without You I'm Nothing
1991 Boyz N the Hood
1991 Cape Fear
1991 Frankie & Johnny
1991 JFK
1991 Naked Lunch
1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula
1992 Dream of Light (aka The Quince Tree Sun)
1992 Howards End
1992 Husbands and Wives
1992 Hyenas
1992 Orlando
1992 The Crying Game
1992 These Hands
1993 Dottie Gets Spanked
1993 The Baby of Mâcon
1993 The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom
1994 Bullets over Broadway
1994 Cemetery Man
1994 Vanya on 42nd Street
1995 Babe
1995 Georgia
1995 Home for the Holidays
1995 Nixon
1995 Strange Days
1995 The Bridges of Madison County
1996 Crash
1996 Female Perversions
1996 Irma Vep
1996 The English Patient
1996 The Pillow Book
1996 The Portrait of a Lady
1996 Walking and Talking
1997 Jackie Brown
1997 Titanic
1998 Hands on a Hardbody
1998 High Art
1998 Psycho
1998 Velvet Goldmine
1999 Beau travail
1999 Boys Don't Cry
1999 Eyes Wide Shut
1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
1999 Magnolia
1999 Pola X
1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley
2000 Best in Show
2000 Blackboards
2000 Bring It On
2000 Erin Brockovich
2000 I'm the One that I Want
2000 The Cell
2000 You Can Count on Me
2001 Late Marriage
2001 Ocean's Eleven
2001 The Piano Teacher
2002 Eleven Minutes, Nine Seconds, One Image: September 11
2002 demonlover
2002 Solaris
2002 The Cremaster Cycle
2002 The Hours
2003 Monster
2003 The Corporation
2004 Birth
2004 I ♥ Huckabees
2005 Dave Chappelle's Block Party
2005 Grizzly Man
2005 Junebug
2005 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Nick Davis's Top 100 Movies
I discovered this gentleman’s top movies list today, but found it so unreadable that I will re-format it here … the numbers reflect his ranking:
1 Persona
2 The Earrings of Madame de...
3 The Piano
4 Diary of a Country Priest
5 Citizen Kane
6 The Ballad of Narayama
7 Modern Times
8 Harlan County, U.S.A.
9 Sanshô the Bailiff
10 Andrei Rublev
11 Nashville
12 Singin' in the Rain
13 Vertigo
14 The Passion of Joan of Arc
15 Pinocchio
16 ??? [missing from list]
17 Meshes of the Afternoon
18 His Girl Friday
19 The Battle of Algiers
20 The Green Ray
21 The Thin Red Line
22 Aguirre, the Wrath of God
23 Taste of Cherry
24 Laura
25 Chinatown
26 Bicycle Thieves
27 A Woman Under the Influence
28 Apocalypse Now
29 Taxi Driver
30 Safe
31 The Lady Eve
32 Man with a Movie Camera
33 Holiday
34 Casablanca
35 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
36 The Fall of the House of Usher
37 Nanook of the North
38 McCabe & Mrs. Miller
39 Hannah and Her Sisters
40 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
41 Imitation of Life
42 Woman in the Dunes
43 The Conversation
44 Cries and Whispers
45 Shoah
46 The Travelling Players
47 Days of Heaven
48 Morvern Callar
49 Pickup on South Street
50 The Battleship Potemkin
51 Metropolis
52 The Scarlet Empress
53 The Gospel According to St. Matthew
54 Aliens
55 Pather Panchali
56 Tokyo Story
57 The Seventh Seal
58 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
59 Dead Ringers
60 Raging Bull
61 42nd Street
62 Psycho
63 All About Eve
64 Russian Ark
65 The 400 Blows
66 Xala
67 The Joyless Street
68 The Docks of New York
69 The Last of England
70 Letter from an Unknown Woman
71 The Wages of Fear
72 The Letter
73 New York, New York
74 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
75 Fanny and Alexander
76 L'Atalante
77 Dancer in the Dark
78 Smiles of a Summer Night
79 Black Rain
80 Viridiana
81 Shame
82 The Godfather
83 Under the Sun of Satan
84 Notorious
85 Mulholland Drive
86 The Third Man
87 Long Day's Journey into Night
88 Sunset Boulevard
89 Annie Hall
90 2001: A Space Odyssey
91 Velvet Goldmine
92 Riddles of the Sphinx
93 Close-Up
94 When Harry Met Sally...
95 Flesh
96 Nostalghia
97 Marat/Sade
98 Talk to Her
99 Daughters of the Dust
100 Mary Poppins
Movies Watched -- High Art (1998)
102 minute running time including credits so the right length… I had never heard of this movie before watching nepo baby Hannah Einbinder’s visit to the Criterion Closet. I am the keeper of the Master List of Every Criterion Closet Pick Ever Made and noticed that nepo baby Hannah was the only guest ever to pick High Art, which intrigued me. My local library had a copy so I borrowed it and watched it last night.
To my surprise, I really liked this movie. I didn’t love it, but I liked it enough to give it 3.5 stars. 4 stars is a recommended movie, but there are only a few hundred of those in existence. 3.5 is pretty good, considering.
Anyway, it’s mainly a lesbian love story. There’s this cute, fat-faced Australian girl (a blue-eyed beauty named Radha (hippie parents?) born in 1973) who falls in love with her older upstairs neighbor, played by Ally Sheedy of all people! You’ll remember Ally Sheedy (born in 1962) from The Breakfast Club, but in this she plays a scrawny bra-less lesbian in a tank top (wife beater). In fact all the women in this movie are scrawny bra-less dykes wearing tank tops, which made me laugh. Cute fat-face thankfully never shows up in a tank top.
They make the Ally Sheedy character Jewish, which also interested me. Ally Sheedy herself had a Jewish mom (Catholic dad), which explains her great hair. Ally’s rich mother (in the movie lol) bankrolls her existence (and heroin habit). Ally also borrows mom’s old Mercedes (Nazi car) for trips to their upstate house from Manhattan. Does she drive as far as Otsego county? Sexy air up there.
Ally is a great photographer, one-time famous kinda. Ally has a German girlfriend named Greta who is brilliantly played by Patricia Clarkson. She made me fall down laughing with her ridiculous heroin-slurred German accent. “Ze teenager!” Radha works as an “assistant editor” at some fashion/photography magazine, a job that mainly involves bringing tea and scones to some asshole with a ponytail who looks a little like Jeff Goldblum. Radha has the bright idea of advancing her career by featuring Ally’s great photographs. She’s ambitious.
Bunch of beautiful people of assorted colors and ethnicities (though no heart-of-Africa blacks) lounging around Ally’s dingy loft snorting heroin. Bad idea, kids. “Pervasive drug use” was on the R rating, which made me laugh.
So the vibe of this movie was really great. It captured New York City East Village loft life in the late 1990s in a realistic way. There’s something about the mood that is very appealing. The script is good, the acting is good, but the ending is no good. If it had a good ending, this could have been a four star movie. I’ve never seen Radha in any other movie, which is suprising since she’s clearly another talented actress from Oz, like Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts.
Here’s a good post about the movie by by B. Ruby Rich, who appears to be a non-scrawny dyke.
This guy also wrote a good review, which included this funny line: “Impressively, however, it's Sheedy—and who ever thought this sentence was possible?—who holds the picture together.”
A brief interview with Cholodenko from 1998, back when there were, gasp, newspapers.
Radha good at crying on demand
MSTR Quietly Hides Average Cost of Pet Rock Holdings
This is GIGO’s report on it:
The dashboard layout on strategy.com and [strategy.com/btc](https://strategy.com/btc) underwent a subtle shift, and the average purchase price is no longer featured as a primary highlight card on the main pages.
The metric was highly prominent during the bull run when MicroStrategy’s average cost basis was well below the spot price. However, with Bitcoin pulling back below $60,000, MicroStrategy's overall average purchase price of $75,651 per BTC places their massive 847,363 BTC hoard into an aggregate unrealized loss exceeding $10 billion.
Where did it go?
While it has been removed from the main summary metrics on the home page and /btc page, the data is not entirely gone from the site:
The "Purchases" Tab: If you navigate to
[strategy.com/purchases](https://strategy.com/purchases), they still maintain a comprehensive ledger of every corporate purchase batch. The top total row of that table still explicitly shows the aggregate Avg BTC Price ($75,651) and total acquisition price.SEC Filings: It remains a mandatory disclosure in their official financial reporting (such as their 8-K and 10-Q filings), where they list their digital asset cost basis.