Watching the BEPI (Black-Eyed Pea Index)

Some people measure the economy's well-being counting cranes on the Manhattan skyline. Others by shower curtain sales. Today I found my own bellwether - sales of black-eyed peas on New Year's Eve.

Almost every year since I flew the nest in 1995, I've bought a bag of dried black-eyed peas on New Year's Eve, soaked them overnight, and made a pot of black-eyed peas and ham on New Year's Day. It's one of the things my mother drummed into me: you always say please and thank you; you never open an umbrella indoors; and you always, always, always have black-eyed peas and ham on New Year's Day.

Today, I went to two supermarkets. At both, shelves of dried beans were piled full - except where marked black-eyed peas, where they were bare. (At my second stop, I had to ask the manager, who got some from the back of the store for me.)

Every southerner knows you're chancing a poor and hungry year if you don't eat some black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. It seems like this year, even yankees are getting superstitious.

My history with Scandinavia and disaster

A comment by Highland Capital's Paul Maeder at the MIT Venture Capital conference earlier this month got me thinking. He likened some investors to the Roadrunner, overshooting a ledge and realizing mid-canyon that a fall was in store. (I think that was Wile E. Coyote, but I won't nitpick.) The point is, the same thing has happened to me twice. Both times, Scandinavia was involved.

In spring of 2000, bored with my publishing job, I signed on as a copy writer for a Danish software maker. I was at IT FACTORY two months before I was laid off along with half the staff as the company began a long, slow crawl back to Copenhagen. Apparently, shenanigans ensued. Company president Stein Bagger disappeared in Dubai in November under a cloud of allegations that included massive fraud and hiring a Hell's-Angels beatdown of an associate.

After I got laid off, I continued to work as a freelancer for IT FACTORY. It took two planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers to make me realize the company hadn't paid any of my invoices since July. I sold their IBM Thinkpad, got a job as a courier and just barely made October rent.

Flash forward seven years. In spring, 2008, I was the transportation reporter for BostonNOW. Our fledgling free daily was backed by an Icelandic telecom. On April 11, I read that Iceland's economy was tanking. I was surprised three days later when, whilst viewing portraits in the National Gallery on a vacation to D.C., I got a text message informing me that our little paper was officially defunct.

At the time, I also had no inkling that Wall Street and the concept of wealth as we know it would burn like the California hills in October. I think for the rest of my life, anything that comes over the transom is going to get a careful nosing for the smell of disaster. Especially if the postmark looks Nordic.