Crrrrrack.....The zen-like stillness of dawn was cruelly broken by the sound of blood soaked whip against rough horse skin. Aged old eyes weary from many years of bearing the weight of man pleaded against all odds, looking to the red broken clay soil below for some shred of pity. Yet, he was strong, the strongest among his five brothers. Sometimes, he felt that had lead to his present predicament. Even now, straddled by an unforgiving master, he still stood tall and hefty, his pride untouched. For he carried no ordinary man, this was a time to be reckoned, his master had a purpose and he knew there would be no stopping him. The gods, the winds, kings and kins had tried. All had been slain, left to rot behind for the vultures. On top, the rider looked rocking with his eye piercing, tatooed arms, tapered jacket, faded blue jeans and the biggest, meanest electric guitar with Humbucker twin pickups slung across his shoulder. A simple yet elegant neck, crafted to perfection by the best in the world, Mr.Gibson himself. The odd thing though was that the place where you'd expect a cord to plugin was missing, instead stood the longest pole attached to the base of the guitar. It made the jousting lances look like mere toys. For 14 hours straight he rode over the clay roads, never hesitating, never faltering, steady in his whipping, ensuring the steed would never let down its rhythm. Suddenly, he pulled on the reins, stopping to look up into the sky. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the reason he had slain all those men that had dared seek his purpose in their lands. This was the only place it was possible, night had fallen, it was dark and still, yet in the distance one could make out a storm approaching, as if jusytifying his presence. When lightning struck there was a huge noise, masking the thunder and all sound around the planet. He began playing knowing he was on the path to ascension, to the world where only the worthiest and hardiest of strummers would be allowed passage, "The Rockers Abyss".

At the begginning there was..ummm...lets say x (the algebraic "unknown" notation). Now after n years from the dawn of era, there is x+y (y could lower or increase the total). If we assume the universe evolves at a steady state (this assumption is ofcourse very naive, nevertheless, lets see what we can come up first with simpler worlds) then the rate at which content changes is (x+y)/n. Lets define content as Matter + Energy + z (where z is all the unknown content types we are yet to discover). If y were contributing to lowering the total content then that would mean our universe would shrink to nothing. So lets avoid such a state where we cannot do anything and focus on the positive, an expanding universe. Now we already know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, if our school textbooks are anything to stand by. That leaves us energy and z. Lets take it for argument sake that salvation is a way of converting our human form into energy. This means that all the saints in the olden days of Mahabharatha, Ramayana that were seeking salvation were not only seeking truth, but had a purpose. They were increasing content in the universe, contributing the steady state at which it blew up. However, off late, we see that the Kali Yug has caused a bottleneck in the salvation rate meaning that the rate of increase of energy has not been keeping up. Of course, you mgiht have noticed, we totally skipped explaining that a certain quantity of human matter can produce more than the equivalent quantity of energy, else there would only be equilibrium. This drastic drop in the salvation rate has wrecked havoc on the balance of the universe, causing (x+y)/n to be dropping to dangerous levels. Evidence for this is apparent. The Mars probe reached orbit around the red planet 2 days in advance, the reaosn being we are now in a shrinking unverse, in fact you might notice that the very same Honda Accord is able to reach places microseconds faster. We are all shrinking and since relatively our scales of measure are shrinking as well, we do not realize it. No flaw here, Honda Accords shrink less than the land in between. Of course the great Brahma hardly leaves behind unfinished work, so he must be hard at work trying to get more of us to salvate while we seem capriciously happy in our greed and quest for instant gratification. Which is why there is no hope unless we find z. Rally the armies of the world and lets unite to find z, to save our universe form catastrophic meltdown.

Mid November last year, Arizona based US Airways announced its offer to acquire Delta Airlines Inc. for a net worth of $8.6 billion which was promptly rejected by Delta. Last week, US Airways upped this bid to a net worth of $10.2 billion. While claiming that their earlier offer would have been just as lucrative to Delta, they stated that this increased offer would serve to establish their commitment to increasing the wealth of Delta's unsecured creditors, what with Chapter 11 filing in place. The new offer includes a $5 billion dollar cash payment and roughly 90 million shares (at their Jan 9th closing price, totals to around $5.2 billion). In preliminary talks, Delta has rejected the deal yet again, reassuring shareholders that they are confident of coming out of bankruptcy in 2007. Going further, they claim that their research on the US Airways offer has not taken into account the cost of negative synergies involved in such an acquisition and that a total debt burden of $23 billion would end up having to be shouldered.

All this seemed pretty reasonable to me, however there was one lingering doubt I needed clarified. What makes an acquisition deal like this different from a merger. Other than, of course, that in a merger there would be new shares, probably new names, trademarks and symbols. It would be easier to understand if say Mark Cuban were approached by Microsoft to acquire the Dallas Mavericks franchise, bceause that would result in a conglomerate with Cuban walking off with cash and/or Microsoft shares. In the Delta-US Air case however, it took sometime for me to figure out the picture, but I think after some web research on M&A definitions, I finally got it. If Delta accedes to the acquisition request, it will be because it sees profit to the shareholder in the long run and it sees profit to the creditors who must be putting a lot of pressure on the rest of the board to pick the route that gets back their investments. And the $10.2 billion that is promised will go into the individual hands of the people that have sunk in the money which imho should include the creditors as well as the shareholder. I know it does include the creditors, but I pretty much doubt any share will go the other way. Another thing that confuses me is whether the word creditors includes shareholders as well? Because, in an acquisition there will not be any shares of Delta left, either they will need to be bought up by force of law or converted at some rate to US-Airways shares. I hope the deals goes through, so I can understand further how things work.