so roy bostock just read my item on carl icahn’s old man smell and says he needs to explain something about this. he says the trick is you have to get carl icahn excited and the way to do that is to provoke this pavlovian response that he’s got to money. it’s driven by both smell and by sound.

no guff. icahn can actually smell money. roy says he brings a roll of freshly minted bills, and they don’t need to be hundreds, a stack of ones will do just fine. it’s just the smell they give off when they’re fresh from the press that drives icahn nuts. what roy does is he puts the fresh bills in the pocket of his suit jacket and when he sits down across from icahn he puts his hand into his pocket and starts flicking the bills with his finger. that way the smell is released plus there’s the sound of flicking bills.

roy swears that within seconds he can see the hair on icahn’s hands stand up on end. then comes the pee smell. roy learned this trick from one of his college buddies who worked at twa back in the 80s when icahn took them over. they’re the ones who figured it out. they used to do it to him all the time and then they passed along the word to everyone else that icahn ever attacked.

my first reaction was simply that i couldn’t believe a guy who’s worth fourteen billion dollars could still be so crazy to get more money. roy says well how do you think he got to be worth fourteen billion dollars? think about it, kid. think. the guy will run out into the street to get money. when he was going after motorola zander used to have people glue twenty dollar bills down in the road around schaumburg hoping to lure icahn out there so he could get hit by a bus. somehow icahn always got the money and dodged the bus. crafty bastard.

by the way if you really want to drive him nuts, roy says, what you do is put some bills on the table in front of him when you’re in a meeting. this makes him so crazy he can’t concentrate. he just stares at bills and then grimaces and pees his pants. it’s like this weird form of tourette’s syndrome. he can’t even eat in restaurants anymore because if someone else in the restaurant tries to pay with cash money icahn will run over and grab bills and take off, streaming pee behind him. supposedly he’s been banned from a bunch of restaurants in new york over this.

and now this crazy freak wants to toss me out of yahoo and run the place himself. great.

btw fwiw i’ve asked katie to tell iulia and natasha to stop capitalizing my sentences before they publish my stuff because it’s not the way i write and not the way i want my stuff to appear. they insist that all lower case looks bad and is hard to read. well for now i’m having my way and we’ll see how it plays out. thoughts anyone?