Yesterday I unearthed a little nugget of American history of which I had no prior knowledge. While working on a posting on busyness, I did what I usually do on a lot of subjects: went over to Wikipedia to see what the collective wiki-mind might have to say about it. I typed in the words, “as busy as a chicken with its head cut off wiki.” Up popped the listing on Mike the Headless Chicken, whose picture once again graces our page. 

At first I thought the whole thing was kind of a gag. I mean, a picture of a chicken walking around with his head cut off is pretty amusing, as was the incredible fact that Mike lived for a year and a half in that condition after, you know, his head was separated from his body. 

Then, later in the day, I went back and read the entire wiki on the incident, which took place in the late 1940s and was, in its own way, the Britney Spears saga of its day… or maybe Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the story of a living creature turned by an accident of fate into an object of tragic fascination… and how much the public is willing to pay for the chance to buy a little piece of that tragedy.

The bare outlines are these: Mike’s owner was instructed by his wife to get a chicken for their dinner. He went out back and found Mike, who at that point was a pretty normal chicken, in the sense that he had his head. The owner then botched that operation, leaving Mike in his compromised state. The fact that he lived through what many poultry had not made him suddenly an object of affection and fascination to his handlers.

They nursed him back to a certain kind of health of sorts. He was never quite the same, but he was unaware of his status as a diminished entity, trying at times to crow and strutting around proudly as if he was a normal bird.

The owners came to love Mike and care for him during his tortured remaining time on the planet. The physical realities of his situation were dire. He had respiratory problems. Eventually, he died much the way Jimi Hendrix did. Before doing so, however, he had become a national sensation earning, in 2005 dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the people who cared for him and marketed his unique ability to appear in his headless state.

Today, in a small city in Colorado, they still have Mike the Headless Chicken Day, sixty years after the decease of the celebrity, and there’s a whole website dedicated to Mike – his life, his career, his untimely passing. 

In an era that has seen the death of hundreds of once-loved brands throughout our culture, and total amnesia of the populace on a wide variety of famous figures and events, Mike the Headless Chicken remains a legendary presence, along with names like James Dean, Judy Garland, and now Heath Ledger, individuals who were doomed by the very thing that made them infinitely fascinating and marketable.

Perhaps, he didn’t have the talent these icons possessed. But he sure had a lot of pluck.

It struck me, after my tale of the cute little piggies yesterday, how grateful some of you were in your comments for a nice upbeat story in which nobody got hurt. A welcome change from the gloom and doom was the general drift.

When you think about it, this should be no surprise. I think people are sick of all the negative stuff that washes over us every day, from the coming recession which may already be here to the pending inflation that is possibly coming along with it to the massive write downs sweeping throught the banking industry to the fact that more people seem to care about Britney Spears than about the War in Iraq. 

We want to hear some good news now and then, feel that world is a bright and hopeful place, not a bottomless sump pump of murk and schweck.

The good news is that there is good news — so much I can hardly contain it all. Let me give you some in case you need it.

Chairman Bernanke has just indicated that he intends to do whatever he can to stimulate the economy without making the same mistakes as his predecessors. I have no idea how he will do this, but then I’m not expected to. My job and yours is to feel a warm glow about his intentions and then take that jolly mood into our investment decisions. You know how much the fate of the market is determined by emotional factors. This could be just the lift we all need!

Sure, stocks have been taken a beating. But anybody with even a modest little portfolio of bonds is feeling all right. Shouldn’t the gutless conservatives like me who hate to gamble with our savings have a day in the sun now and then?

Think about our political process. It’s going great guns. There hasn’t been so much genuine fervor on both sides of the aisle in years. Young people are energized and enthused and voting their hearts and minds as never before. That’s terrific for our nation. Plus, for those with an eye on local economies, this ferment — not only the candidates but also on the issues — will pump millions of dollars of advertising into the marketplace as voters fight over the wisdom of casino gambling, for instance, as well as who should be the CEO of the world’s most powerful multi-national corporation.

And okay, it’s true that the housing market is in the privy. This has of course stuck a finger in the eye of a lot of dumb entities that loaned money to people who had more dreams than cash to pay for them. Bad? Not completely. First, it’s good when large institutions are punished for greed and stupidity, and their leaders are forced to depart in ignominy. Our entire ethical system is built on the concept of appropriately public disgrace, from the days of colonial Williamsburg, when they put miscreants into the stockade, to today, when TMZ, CNN and Gawker do the job.

Better still, a depressed housing market means that people who DO have a little bit of cash can now afford to move into that dream home whose price was formerly jacked up to ridiculous heights by the idiotic inflation of the market by morons weilding cheap debt. Last year, in my little California community, people were expecting to get $1.5 million dollars for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage with no property. Now these little bungalows sit there with their real estate signs hanging dementedly from one hook for months. Then they go off-sale entirely. When they return, I’ll bet they’re one step closer to people who might actually be able to purchase them with a little more equity.

A few days ago, Apple (AAPL) announced a whole host of new stuff, including tons of movies to be available on demand, a free upgrade of some kind for my Apple TV, and a new skinny-Minnie laptop that sounds super boffo keen. Every year, one of my happiest events is my bi-annual purchase of something I didn’t have before and didn’t know I needed until it was invented. Can’t wait for these, either! Thanks, Uncle Steve!

Beyond that? Consider this: every downside has an upside for somebody. When stocks fall, Warren Buffet does a little dance. For him, because he’s so smart, the moderation of prices represents a chance to invest in companies who are suddenly unappreciated for what they do. I hope he’s looking at mine. Hey! Mr. Buffet! Over here!

Let’s try to keep our heads about ourselves. As a wise man by the name of Chauncey Gardiner once observed, there will be growth in the spring. Until then, bundle up and try to enjoy the cold. I hear it’s good for the circulation.

I’m pretty new at this blogging thing and it’s clear to me, even as a newbie, that some blogs get noticed and some just sort of lie there on their backs, peeing like babies on a changing table into the brisk digital wind.

The ones that really punch through are those that employ tags that pop up later on the important search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AOL.  You know about tags. Look at the top of this page and you’ll see a bunch of them.

If you choose your tags right, everybody pretty much in perpetuity who searches for that word or phrase just might end up being directed to the entity that generated the tag that contained it. Hence this posting, in which I will now attempt to drive traffic to this site by indiscriminately tagging a host of words that might serve that purpose.  Linking doesn’t hurt either. But it’s not as good as tagging. So I’ll do both.

A friend of mine who also has a blog notices that when she posted an item about a gluten-free diet, for instance, she was suddenly hit by a bunch of people who are interested in the subject. Diets in general get a lot of action every day on the web, as does anybody who has anything to do with food, including Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Emeril, like that.

Food is very closely aligned to health, of course, since we are what we eat. That’s why topics like heart disease, diabetes, Addison’s Disease (which struck President John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to have been involved with Marilyn Monroe), arthritis, Alzheimers, among many ailments, are of interest to people, who look up the subject on a variety of sites like the always-excellent Wikipedia and those more specialized.

Of course, the tags that have the highest potential are the ones that involve the celebrity names in just about every field that people want to know about, from the Dalai Lama, who dominates the spirituality game right now (along with his friends and competitive acolytes Steven Seagal and Richard Gere), to Oprah (both as an entertainer and as a force for good), all the way to the celebu-tarts who get more column inches than the War in Iraq (or Operation Iraqi Freedom as it’s still known known by the Multi-National Force and some of the media). You know who I’m talking about, right? Paris! Britney! Lindsay! People go for this sort of thing to sizzling hot aggregator-gossips like tmz and eOnline, where Ted Casablanca continues to report without fear or favor. 

There are so many more! Elvis! Shakespeare! Arnold! Al Gore! Warren Buffett! Barry Bonds! Hitler! Stalin! Bono!

That’s enough for now. If you found your way to this site because you followed any of these tags here — welcome! Take a look around! Hope you find us sticky!