Investment

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2. Aug 2, 2006 4:51 PM

» Normxxx - $384,000 for pee by the sea

Town wants $384,000 for pee by the sea

By Reuters | 2 August 2006

DUBLIN (Reuters)— A ramshackle public toilet could fetch 300,000 euros ($384,000)— the price of a new house— if politicians in western Ireland get their way.

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20060...

The town of Lahinch reckons property-hungry buyers will snap up the dilapidated, out-of-order toilet because of its great location— a surfing beach on Ireland's rugged Atlantic coast.

"You could leave the toilet block and be in the sea in less than 40 seconds," local politician Martin Conway told Reuters, but admitted: "It's quite remarkable that an old toilet block would fetch 300,000 euros."

The average cost of a home in Ireland, where house prices have gone up 15 percent in the past year, is 299,929 euros.

Local property auctioneer Nicola Leyden said the site, overlooking Ireland's best known surfing spot, was breathtaking: "It's probably the most sought after pee you'll ever take on the west coast of Ireland."

-- posted by Normxxx

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3. Aug 3, 2006 12:33 PM

» Normxxx - Scottish sex scandal

Scottish sex scandal court case nears climax

By Gideon Long | 3 August 2006

LONDON (Reuters)— Spanking, four-in-a-bed sex, ice cubes rubbed over naked bodies, a charismatic politician, his glamorous wife and a former prostitute called "Christy Babe."

Even by the standards of British political sex scandals, the allegations made in court over the past month during the case of Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan have been salacious.

Sheridan, a 42-year-old socialist member of the Scottish parliament with a round-the-year suntan and a taste for sharp suits, is suing the News of the World newspaper over allegations it made in 2004.

Under headlines like "My kinky 4-in-a-bed orgy with Tommy," the newspaper claimed Sheridan cheated on his wife and went to seedy night clubs for group sex.

Sheridan denies the claims and is seeking damages. In doing so, he has opened a Pandora's Box of colorful accusations and denials, all reported in full by Britain's tabloid newspapers.

"From four in a bed to five in a bed. From five in a bed to sex clubs, from sex clubs to champagne, from champagne to cocaine and from cocaine to orgies in a hotel slap bang in the middle of Glasgow," Sheridan told the court Wednesday, summing up the case against him.

"The allegations in the course of this case have been as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara Desert ..."

"Christy Babe"— real name Fiona McGuire— is a 32-year-old former prostitute who said she had sex with Sheridan over four years, starting shortly after the politician's marriage to childhood sweetheart Gail in 2000.

McGuire's allegations, and those of two other women, formed the basis of the News of the World reports. The paper is standing by its stories, saying the guts of them— if not every last detail— are true.

To add to the drama, Sheridan sacked his entire legal team half way through the case and called his wife as a witness.

Gail Sheridan, 42, gave a passionate defense of her husband and said she would have killed him and dumped his body in Glasgow's river Clyde if she believed the allegations.

"You would be in the Clyde with a piece of concrete tied round you and I would be in court for your murder," she said.

Gail Sheridan also said McGuire had obviously never had sex with her husband because, if she had, she would have mentioned his hairy body in her kiss-and-tell revelations.

"You are like a monkey, so anybody rolling an ice cube around your body would end up with a hairball ..." she told her husband across the packed court room. "There is more hair on your body than there is on your head."

In a slightly back-handed defense of her husband, Gail Sheridan told the court he was "boring" and was more interested in playing Scrabble than socializing. He was not the kind of man who would indulge in group sex, she said.

The prosecution is to wrap up its case Thursday.

If Sheridan wins, the News of the World will face a libel bill of several hundred thousand pounds. If he loses, he faces financial ruin.

"It's my life and reputation that is on the line," he said.

-- posted by Normxxx

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4. Aug 18, 2006 11:45 AM

» Normxxx - Trapped in tank of chocolate!

Wis. man trapped in tank of chocolate

Fri Aug 18, 9:35 AM ET

KENOSHA, Wisconsin— A 21-year-old man was trapped in a tank of chocolate for about two hours early Friday, police said.

Capt. Randy Berner said the worker said he got into the tank at the Debelis Corp. to unplug it and became trapped waist-deep in the chocolate.

"It was pretty thick. It was virtually like quicksand," Berner said, and co-workers, police and firefighters were not able to get him out until the chocolate could be thinned out.

"It's the first time I've ever heard of anything like this," the police captain said.

The worker said his ankles were sore after the incident, and he was taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries, Berner said.

[ Normxxx Here: Remind me not to eat any commercial chocolate candy! (Wonder if they got his shoes out?) ]

-- posted by Normxxx

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5. Aug 18, 2006 12:59 PM

» pjstack - Trapped in tank of chocolate!

In response to Trapped in tank of chocolate! posted by Normxxx:

I wonder if he yelled, "Fire!"

Remember the Smothers Brothers' routine?

"..Why did you yell Fire when you fell into the chocolate?".."Because nobody would come if I yelled CHOCOLATE!"

-- posted by pjstack

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6. Aug 18, 2006 2:02 PM

» pete2214 - is this wierd?

Karr drove flashy car, wedded teens
Suspect in JonBenet slaying raised questions in home state of Alabama

HAMILTON, Ala. - The man who claimed he killed JonBenet Ramsey was known in his Alabama hometown for his flashy red sports car, but he was also dogged by questions about his marriages to teenage girls and behavior in elementary classrooms where he worked as a substitute teacher.

John Karr, who lived in northwest Alabama from his preteen years until after the brutal slaying in Colorado, stood out in this rural town both for his gull-winged red DeLorean and his intelligence.

"You couldn't help but like John. He always had something going," said Marion County School Superintendent Bravell Jackson, who both taught Karr and later had to fire him as a substitute teacher amid parent complaints.

Karr received a substitute teaching certificate in Alabama in 1996. Mitch Edwards, spokesman for the State Department of Education, said the certificate was requested by the Marion County Board of Education.

Jackson said the school system was contacted Wednesday by the DA's office in Boulder, Colo., which was seeking employment records. He said the town was shook up over Karr's arrest. "It's a situation that happens once in a lifetime in a small place like this," he said.

Annulment after marriage to 13-year-old
Few people seemed to know Karr well in Alabama, yet his marriage to young brides generated plenty of talk.

Court records show a 14-year-old girl sought an annulment of their "ceremonial marriage" in 1985, claiming she feared for her life when she agreed to wed him in 1984, when she was just 13 and he was 19.

Karr admitted she was a minor, documents show, but he disputed she was 13. A judge granted the annulment, and they didn't have any children.

Karr later married Lara Karr, who was 16 when their twin daughters died the day they were born on Sept. 1, 1989. The girls, Angel and Innocence Karr, are buried in the cemetery of a rural church in a family plot.

Twins die after home birth
Former Sheriff A.C. Tice and others recalled the death of the newborns partly because of the circumstances: They were born at home rather than in a hospital.

"It seems he delivered his children at home," said Probate Judge Annette Bozeman. She said Karr was in her office frequently working on car titles.

"He had a used car business. We saw him quite often. He was a very polite fellow, but he was a little unusual," she said.

Originally from Atlanta, Karr came to live with his grandparents in Hamilton around age 12. Records indicate he remained in town through the fall of 2000, when Lara Karr transferred her voter registration to California.

Lara Karr told KGO-TV in California that she and her former husband were in Alabama when JonBenet was killed. She said she does not believe he was involved in her death.

Jarnigan said Karr dropped out in spring 2000 while taking the elementary education student internship at Kilby School in Florence, where students get experience teaching in a fifth-grade classroom. Karr left UNA without graduating and the school did not recommend him "for licensure or certification" as a teacher, Jarnigan said.

Issues over relationship with girls in class
Karr left the program abruptly when issues were raised about his classroom performance, said Sandra Ford, a retired fifth-grade teacher at Kilby who supervised Karr's internship.

"We had some issues with him and I notified him that a meeting was being scheduled with him, the department head and others to discuss those issues," Ford told the TimesDaily newspaper in Florence.

Ford said the issues she questioned included Karr's relationship with girls in the class.

"I had some concerns about him early on because of the way he wanted to relate to my female students," Ford said. "During break time, he often sat on the carpet in the classroom with the girls while they were eating snacks. It gave me a bad feeling."

Greg Risner, a professor of education at UNA, told the TimesDaily he taught Karr in two classes — reading for third grade through sixth grade and first-year teaching.

"I'm just numb, and it's frightening knowing that he was here at UNA after that terrible murder occurred," Risner said. "I've never been associated with anything like this in my professional career. There's no way of knowing what might be happening in a person's life."

Risner told The Associated Press his superiors had asked that all questions about Karr be referred to Jarnigan's office.

The retired football coach at Hamilton High School, L.C. Fowler, said he remembered Karr making occasional trips to see his father in Atlanta, but didn't recall him being close to anyone. "He was just a loner. He may have had a friend or two," Fowler said.

At Bevill State Community College in Hamilton, records show Karr was a student from the fall of 1996 to the winter of 1998. School officials wouldn't comment on what classes he took.

-- posted by pete2214

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7. Nov 23, 2006 5:07 PM

» Normxxx - Silver: clothing deodorant

Silver in clothing keeps odors away [¹]
Click here for link to complete article:

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Associated Press Writer | 23 November 2006

SCRANTON, Pa.- Bill McNally believes he has found a silver bullet for keeping the stink out of your socks. Not to mention your underwear, workout clothes, travel outfits, and hiking and hunting gear.
McNally's company, Scranton-based Noble Biomaterials, embeds silver in clothing worn by U.S. soldiers, elite athletes and weekend warriors alike- thus capitalizing on the precious metal's increasing popularity as a way to keep clothes smelling fresh, even after multiple wears without a wash.

Noble is among a handful of companies that produce silver-coated textiles for use in the burgeoning market for high-tech performance clothing. The 10-year-old, privately held company's sales have grown an average of 50 percent per year, and doubled in the last 18 months.

Silver kills odor-causing bacteria; it also redistributes body heat, keeping the wearer warm in cold weather and cool in hot weather.

"I think it's a great concept for workout clothes and athletic gear, things you don't necessarily wash every single time," said Marlene Bourne, president of Bourne Research in Scottsdale, Ariz. Bourne studies emerging technologies- and has worn a pullover threaded with Noble's silver-coated fiber, called X-Static.

Noble has licensed X-Static to more than 300 companies, including Adidas, Umbro, Puma, Polartec and other apparel makers. England's national soccer team wore X-Static jerseys at the World Cup, and track-and-field squads from 60 countries clad themselves in it during the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Lululemon Athletica Inc., a Canadian sportswear company, incorporates X-Static in workout and running garments, "a lot of the sports you would sweat in," said spokeswoman Sara Gardiner. "The feedback we've received has been fantastic."

While most of Noble's growth has been concentrated in Europe and Asia, X-Static is gaining ground domestically. "The U.S. is always slower to pick up on technology advancements in the apparel market, but it's really starting to catch up," said Joel Furey, who heads Noble's consumer division.

U.S. soldiers and Marines already wear X-Static socks and T-shirts, which provide "olfactory camouflage" as well as a first line of defense against shrapnel wounds, because any of the silver fabric that becomes embedded in the wound "actually starts treating the wound," according to McNally, the company founder.

"You spend enough time in the jungle like I did, with clothes rotting off you and all sorts of skin infections, and I knew there had to be a better way," said McNally, 45, a Marine veteran.

Though a pair of X-Static socks contains only about one-hundredth of an ounce of silver, Noble cajoles wearers to take the "Double Dog Dare": Put one foot in an X-Static sock and the other in a regular sock for a week straight without washing- and "smell the difference."

Silver's germ-killing properties have been known for thousands of years. In ancient times, silver was used to purify water. More recently, silver nitrate was dropped in newborns' eyes to ward off bacterial infections from the mother, but has largely been replaced with antibiotics.

As manufacturers look to feed America's obsession with germ-fighting, they are adding the metal to a wide array of consumer products.

Samsung Electronics Ltd. has launched a line of washing machines and refrigerators that use silver to kill germs. Sharper Image Corp. offers food-storage containers lined with tiny silver particles. Curad sells silver bandages. And Motorola Inc.'s i870 phone includes an anti-bacterial silver coating.

"It is a growing field, there's no question about it," said Michael DiRienzo, executive director of The Silver Institute, a Washington-based trade group. "You're talking microscopic amounts of silver being used in this application, but over time, it could chew up a lot of silver and that's what interests us."

However, environmentalists have expressed concerns that silver entering the environment could kill helpful bacteria and aquatic organisms or even harm humans.

The Environmental Protection Agencysaid Wednesday that it would require manufacturers to provide scientific evidence that their use of very finely divided silver, an application of so-called nanotechnology, won't harm waterways or public health.

McNally said his company's use of silver would not be classified as nanotechnology by the EPA.

-- posted by Normxxx

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8. Nov 27, 2006 5:25 PM

» Normxxx - Seeking an Edge

Seeking an Edge, Big Investors Turn to Network of Informants
Mark Gerson Assembles Web Of Moonlighting Managers;
Applebee's Bars Practice, Drawing a Line at 'Nonpublic' [¹]

By Laurie P. Cohen, WSJ | 27 November 2006

Marlin Kilgore's day job is purchasing parts for Penske Truck Leasing Co. in Memphis, Tenn. His second job, which pays $100 an hour, is to answer questions from hedge funds and other big investors about the truck-parts makers he buys from.

The investors interrogate the 36-year-old maintenance manager about the pricing and availability of parts, about how long they last, about how the warranties work and how often they are used. What they are after is intelligence about publicly traded parts makers such as Federal-Mogul Corp., ArvinMeritor Inc. and Exide Technologies.

Mr. Kilgore's moonlighting job is the creation of Mark Gerson, a New York networking wizard who has done for professional investors something akin to what Match.com has done for the nation's singles. He hooks up current and former middle managers from hundreds of companies with professional investors desperate for an investing edge. Mr. Gerson has assembled an army of 180,000 "consultants" from companies ranging from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to New York Times Co., and he sells their time for top dollar.

Two things have made Mr. Gerson's network both successful and controversial: Some of his consultants dish to investors without the knowledge of their bosses, sometimes in violation of their employers' policies. And they are doing so at a time when federal regulators have made executives at public companies gun-shy about talking shop privately with big investors.

Mr. Gerson, although unknown to many investors, has emerged as an important information broker to an increasingly powerful force in the investment world- hedge funds and private-equity firms with hundreds of billions of dollars under management. These private investment firms, which are loosely regulated, have turned to Mr. Gerson's fast-growing research firm, Gerson Lehrman Group, for information they hope will give them an investing edge.

Gerson Lehrman says it instructs its consultants never to disclose material nonpublic information or even to discuss their own companies. All of its consultants, it says, must agree in writing to follow the rules of their primary employers. (Most of them, it adds, do not even work for public companies, but are lawyers, accountants, professors and other professionals.)

Interviews with dozens of Gerson Lehrman consultants and their employers, however, reveal that the consultants are sometimes unaware of their own companies' restrictions and sometimes have only a hazy understanding of what qualifies as nonpublic information.

Mr. Kilgore, for example, says he isn't violating any policies at Penske Truck Leasing. A spokesman for the company, a joint venture of Penske Corp. and General Electric Co., says employees aren't permitted to use data "obtained in the course of employment for personal advantage," and that the company had no idea one of its employees was moonlighting for Mr. Gerson. (Mr. Kilgore wasn't identified to Penske Truck in an inquiry about its moonlighting policy.)

Mr. Gerson, a 34-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, picked a fortuitous time to launch his company, now the largest of several firms that match investors with experts in various industries. For years, executives at many public companies had few qualms about discussing business directly with big investors and with analysts working with their investment bankers. But in 2000, in an effort to level the playing field for all investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission instituted Regulation Fair Disclosure, or Reg FD, which barred companies from selectively disclosing important nonpublic information.

Hedge funds were soaring in number, expanding the appetite for useful investment information. At the same time, the Internet had democratized the information-gathering process, putting SEC filings and other corporate disclosures a few keystrokes away for all to see. For big investors, getting a leg up was suddenly much harder, and worth paying for.

"What's in the public domain is worthless in terms of making money," says Chip Morris, a partner at Integral Capital Partners, a private investment firm that occasionally uses Gerson Lehrman's consultants. In the new regulatory environment, he says, companies put out less information and qualify it more. It is hard, he says, for an investor "to randomly call someone" at a company and get them to talk about their industry.

The business has thrived. Since 1999, Mr. Gerson says, revenues have grown by more than 30% a year, on average. Investors say they are expected to approach $200 million in 2006 and that profit margins exceed 25%. Clients now include Steven Cohen's influential hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments and many of Wall Street's big investment banks.

Mr. Gerson arranges his experts into eight sectors, including technology, health care and real estate. He charges clients by sector. For $60,000, a client can make unlimited telephone calls for six months to experts in one sector. The fanciest service costs $1 million for six months, which gives clients all eight sectors, plus bonuses such as one-on-one meetings with experts.

Mr. Gerson, who has never married, seems unsuited to the business of matchmaking. His friends describe him as socially awkward. "He's intensely serious," says Roger Hertog, vice chairman of AllianceBernstein Corp., who has served with Mr. Gerson on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Newark's Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, became a fast friend of Mr. Gerson at Yale Law School. While praising Mr. Gerson's philanthropic and professional accomplishments, he says: "He's a little peculiar, but I relish his strangeness."

Mr. Gerson approaches the activity of meeting people and introducing them to one another methodically and indefatigably. "Mark is the most successful networker I've ever met in my life," says Ed Nicoll, the chief executive of broker Instinet and an early Gerson investor.

"The Internet has changed connectedness," Mr. Gerson observes, enabling "people like me to become connected at young ages."

Mr. Gerson grew up in Short Hills, N.J., attended Williams College, then deferred admission to law school to teach at an inner-city Roman Catholic school in Newark. Before getting his law degree in 1998, he spent a summer at McKinsey & Co.

While working on a pharmaceutical-marketing project for that management and consulting giant, he says, he was struck that there was no easy way to locate an industry expert whose brain he could pick. "There was no service to call," he says. After brainstorming with Thomas Lehrman, a former analyst at Tiger Management, the two decided to try to fill that void.

In 1998, they raised nearly $1 million from friends and family and hired experts to write guides on industries such as health care, media and technology. They couldn't sell a single one. Professional investors told Mr. Gerson they weren't interested in more reading. But several investors said they'd love to talk to the authors of the guides. So in 1999, Mr. Gerson recast the firm as an information broker, and began lining up experts.

Gerson Lehrman recruits consultants, which it calls "council members," at conferences and trade shows and through referrals. It finds others through Internet searches of publications and professional and career Web sites. Their pay averages $240 an hour.

In September, a legal reporter for The Wall Street Journal received an unsolicited email from someone who identified herself as the manager of Gerson Lehrman's "law council." (See the email.) The email carried the subject line "Invitation to Consult." She offered the reporter the opportunity to join nearly 5,000 lawyers in Gerson Lehrman's law group, which she said includes members of "every U.S. presidential cabinet since President Nixon's." The benefits, the email said, included the opportunity to "Earn Consulting Fees." (The Wall Street Journal has a policy prohibiting outside consulting work.)

Gerson Lehrman's recruiting from public companies has sparked debate about how close its 'experts' get to legal limits on sharing material nonpublic information. Gerson Lehrman says just 12% of its consultants work for public companies. Others are ex-employees of public companies.

Former SEC commissioner Harvey Goldschmid, who helped write Reg FD, says there's nothing wrong with investors' digging around for information "from different sources that may add up to something material"- that is, which could affect a company's stock. What could lead to problems, he says, is that payments to corporate employees "may create temptations to go too close to a line in order to curry favor" with Gerson Lehrman clients. In addition, those employees might not understand "what is material," he adds.

Mr. Gerson says both consultants and clients are constantly reminded that discussing material nonpublic information isn't allowed. Two law firms- Proskauer Rose and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom- reviewed the firm's compliance procedures. Gerson Lehrman officials maintain that few consultants are in any position to dole out inside information. "Our council members are, for the most part, pretty junior people in the industries they work in," says Jonathan Glick, Gerson Lehrman's research director. "The likelihood they'd have proprietary information is extremely low."

Mr. Glick says Gerson Lehrman consultants contribute "mosaic" tidbits to clients- describing, for example, an emerging consumer trend in a certain region- that aren't useful alone, but when put together with other data, could constitute useful trading information. Consultants who work for public companies, he says, discuss only their industries, and "are never asked to comment on their company or employer."

Some critics are skeptical of such assurances. "Sophisticated investors are potentially taking advantage of people who don't know they're going over the line" by disclosing nonpublic data such as internal sales figures, asserts Jill Fisch, director of the Fordham Center for Corporate, Securities and Financial Law. "Once someone is being paid, it's hard for them to draw the line and say 'no.' "

Ted Siegel began consulting for Gerson Lehrman in 2004 when he was training to be a district manager at Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. in New Hampshire. Most Gerson Lehrman clients, he says, obeyed the rules, but two investment analysts were "extremely pushy in terms of trying to get specific information" about his employer. He says he didn't respond and told his Gerson Lehrman contact he wouldn't talk to the two again.

Mr. Siegel, who recently left the home-furnishings retail chain, says Gerson Lehrman clients have sought him out in recent months because of his knowledge of Yankee Candle Inc., a Bed Bath supplier that last month agreed to be sold to a private-equity firm. A Bed Bath & Beyond spokesman says the retailer bars outside employment that constitutes a conflict of interest or that could result in disclosure of confidential corporate information. He declined to comment on Mr. Siegel's situation.

Grant Ginder started consulting for Gerson Lehrman six months before he left his job as a children's apparel buyer for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. He says "there are times when people have asked" for inside information, "and I haven't answered." Since leaving Wal-Mart, he says, he has worked his contacts to gather information about the company's earnings trends. "Anyone's privy to it if they know the right people," he notes. He often shares his opinions with analysts who are Gerson Lehrman clients. "I've been pretty accurate every quarter," he says.

Eminence Capital, a roughly $2 billion hedge fund that has held shares in Wal-Mart, is one client that has consulted him. Mr. Ginder says he spoke frequently to Eminence analyst Scott Alberi about Wal-Mart's competitors and suppliers, such as Children's Place Retail Stores Inc. and infant-clothing maker Carter's Inc. Mr. Alberi declines to comment.

A Wal-Mart spokesman says "employees cannot work for Wal-Mart and for another company where a conflict of interest exists.... We can't restrict what someone does after they leave our employment."

Gerson Lehrman says consultants who don't have their employers' written permission to moonlight are restricted to three calls a year with each investing client. And when companies ask Gerson Lehrman to back off on recruiting employees, it abides by such requests, the company says.

Carol DiRaimo, head of investor relations at restaurant chain Applebee's International Inc., says Gerson Lehrman offered one store manager more than $400 an hour to consult and invited the chain's risk management director to set his own hourly rate. Ms. DiRaimo says she thinks Gerson Lehrman was trying to get store sales figures before they are publicly disclosed. "It is a way to circumvent Reg FD," she asserts. Mr. Glick responds that Gerson Lehrman "would never let a store manager talk about his own company."

Applebee's subsequently informed associates "they shouldn't be talking about our business to outsiders," Ms. DiRaimo says. Mr. Glick says Gerson Lehrman promptly stopped recruiting from the chain.

Verizon Communications Inc. and Citigroup Inc. are among the companies that have instructed Gerson Lehrman to quit contacting employees. But if Gerson Lehrman clients want information about Verizon, they have alternatives. Gerson Lehrman can hook them up with the telecommunication company's suppliers and resellers. Alvin Myers, who used to manage big accounts for Verizon Wireless, listed his Gerson Lehrman consulting position on a resume posted on Monster.com, the online job board, in September. Verizon says "former employees and business suppliers" are prohibited from disclosing nonpublic information. Mr. Myers, who worked for Verizon from 2004 until May, declines to comment.

Some companies don't know about employees who are also consulting for Gerson Lehrman. Joseph Toedt consulted occasionally for Gerson Lehrman while working as a first vice president in J.P. Morgan Chase's commercial card division. "I don't think the company would have a problem with it," he said last month. His conversations with investors, he said, were "generic and open-ended" ones about commercial credit cards.

When the Gerson Lehrman consulting gig was described to a spokesman for the bank (Mr. Toedt wasn't identified), the spokesman said such an arrangement "would typically not be permitted.... Any outside business affiliation must be preapproved by an employee's business manager, the firm's compliance group and the office of the secretary." Mr. Toedt has since left J.P. Morgan.

Mr. Glick, Gerson Lehrman's research director, argues that companies will eventually conclude that there are benefits to cooperating with the firm. "Over time, companies will want people doing this," he contends. "They will want their experts to be the experts."

The New York Times hasn't tried to stop Nicholas Ascheim, director of entertainment, audio and video at its online division, from consulting for Gerson Lehrman. Mr. Ascheim, whose affiliation with Gerson Lehrman predates his New York Times job, tells Gerson Lehrman clients that he is speaking as a media specialist, not a Times representative, says a spokeswoman for the Times, speaking for Mr. Ascheim. "Never has he been asked to discuss anything about the New York Times," she says.

Now that his research firm is thriving, Mr. Gerson has handed over day-to-day control to Mr. Glick and others. In 2004, he considered cashing out, retaining Morgan Stanley to explore a possible sale. But after he talked to several potential suitors, Mr. Gerson says, the effort stalled. "We wanted more money than they were willing to pay," he explains.

Mr. Gerson likes to keep numerous balls in the air and run on minimal sleep. In his spare time, he pens articles for publications such as the New York Sun and Commentary. Instinet's Mr. Nicoll recalls that on a flight to Tokyo, Mr. Gerson piped up from across the aisle that he had an idea for an article, and he began typing on his laptop. On the flight back, Mr. Gerson showed him a new issue of The Weekly Standard, which contained his piece. Earlier this year, Mr. Gerson was deeply involved in Mr. Booker's winning campaign for the Newark mayoralty.

At salon dinners Mr. Gerson regularly holds at his sparsely decorated Fifth Avenue rental apartment- events he says are unrelated to building his web of professional contacts- he spends most of his time listening to others talk. Although Mr. Gerson isn't gregarious, says Mr. Glick, he "loves to connect people and watch them learn from each other."

The gatherings feature speakers, making them more like seminars than dinner parties. One week in August, for instance, Mr. Gerson drew 70 or so guests over two evenings to hear from Peter Thiel, a founder of the PayPal online-payment site, and from Jon Benjamin, Britain's acting consul general. In attendance were the Rev. Arne Panula, U.S. spiritual director of Opus Dei, a conservative Roman Catholic institution, electronic musician Moby and a slew of academics and investment professionals.

Mr. Gerson continues to network almost hyperactively on behalf of his firm, hopscotching to Gerson Lehrman offices in London; Shanghai; Sydney, Australia; and New Delhi in a hunt for new clients and experts.

Concerns about inside information, among other things, have caused some hedge funds to approach his firm and its competitors, which include Standard & Poor's Vista Research, with caution.

James Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates, a more than $3 billion hedge fund specializing in "shorting" stocks, or betting against them, says he stopped using such firms a couple of years ago. He says he "got increasingly uncomfortable" that the information provided by the firms was either "too good to trade on or too pedestrian to care about." Kynikos does its own research, he says, "because that's what our clients are paying us for."

Before engaging Gerson Lehrman consultants, Farallon Capital Management, which has some $4.7 billion under management, has its lawyers chew over whether the consultants are qualified to talk and whether they might qualify as insiders in the eyes of regulators, according to people familiar with the firm. Farallon won't speak with anyone who has worked during the prior year at any company it is targeting for investment, these people say.

Steven Durkee began consulting for Gerson Lehrman in 2002 and has ranked among the top 20% of its consultants in popularity, making him one of Gerson Lehrman's "scholars." His specialty is retail. Over the years, he has worked for General Mills Inc. and Sherwin-Williams Co., and consulted for Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc.

Among the Gerson Lehrman clients he has spoken to over the past two years, Mr. Durkee says, are Afton Capital Management, Atlas Capital Management, Royal Capital Management and FAF Advisors. All four firms declined to comment. These clients, he says, wanted his views on Eddie Bauer, which was sold this month to two private-equity firms. He says he kept up with the company through friends working there.

Early this year, Mr. Durkee, who is 54, took a job as a senior manager at Walmart.com. He had to sign an agreement that barred him from continuing his $200-an-hour consulting gig, so he put Gerson Lehrman "on the shelf." Nov. 3, he left Wal-Mart and plans to begin consulting again.

"I have experience people are screaming to get ahold of," he says.

Normxxx
______________
The contents of any third-party letters/reports above do not necessarily reflect the opinions or viewpoint of normxxx. They are provided for informational/educational purposes only.

-- posted by Normxxx

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9. Dec 2, 2006 2:34 PM

» Normxxx - Malaysian snake king dies from cobra bite

In response to Malaysian snake king dies from cobra bite posted by Kirk:

And, it's a thrill a minute! Even beats Evel Knievel!

-- posted by Normxxx