As everybody knows, Upside Down People aren’t like us. For one thing, their toes are up top and their haircut is down on the bottom. Way down on the bottom. You get all stooped over talking to one, and when he stops to think, he always scratches his feet. It’s all very irregular, I’m afraid.
Money just drops out of their pockets, so Upside Down People don’t carry any. You have to pay for his too if you ever go out to lunch with one. Or hers. Upside Down People women have really short hair.
Just looking at Upside Down People is particularly hard to take, and you can’t even make an Upside Down Person a right side up person again with hand mirrors, though that’s what everybody does. Looks at them in hand mirrors. Upside Down People become very small that way, if you do it properly, and all of them is right there in the same place so you don‘t have to wonder what their feet are doing when you bend down to speak with their faces. Fortunately, Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, invented the hand mirror for herself, otherwise we probably wouldn‘t look at Upside Down People at all.
Now, Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, sat in front of her hand mirror all day long, preening and stuff, unless Mark Antony came up with something better to do, which only took care of Friday nights due to pressing military obligations on his part, which is why the siren had to invent the hand mirror for herself in the first place. But Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, never met the Upside Down People, or Queenie would’ve invented the hand mirror for them instead of her cutesy-pie self, I’m sure.
Carrying on a conversation and dangling hand mirrors at the same time is no fun at all, and what you get is a serious case of the wiggles, and that’s what prompted Leonardo Da Vinci to turn Upside Down People right side up again during the Dark Ages in 1492 AC, or DC, or whenever it was.
Anyway, our tale takes place years after that.
In 1609, the Dutch moved stock trading indoors, and Upside Down people started pouring out of the woodwork, where they‘d been hiding since that Da Vinci business up above. They took one look at stock charts, and didn’t like what they saw.
Everything in the whole stock trading place was going down.
See, when the Dutch finally put their stock trading place under a roof, traders got so excited to be getting in out of the rain they bought up stocks like crazy, and prices shot higher and higher and higher. But Upside Down People see stock charts upside down, logically enough, and it didn’t look like that to them at all. They huddled and saw what had to be done, and sold like crazy, and prices went up, up, up for them, which is, of course, lower and lower and lower from our point of view, but since they’d just poured out of the woodwork the Upside Down People didn’t have any shares to sell and had to make some up.
And that’s how short-selling was born.
So when you hear of short-selling going on and ever catch a short-seller in the act of actually doing it, it’s okay to go ahead and give the irregular $%#!&^%*^() a piece of your mind. They’re just Upside Down People, and aren’t at all like us, and they didn’t do what Leonardo Da Vinci told them to, and if it weren’t for Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, they’d probably be speared dead by Romans or somebody anyway. So just do it.
And help spare the planet all this financial bereavement and sorrow.
Careful though. You’ll probably want to plug them right between the eyes, but that could get wiggly and you don’t want to shoot yourself in the shoes.
Ouch. A good piece of one’s mind will be fine.
