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Technology Stocks : The Learning Company (TLC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul richards who wrote (6214)	1/6/1999 7:36:00 PM
From: Trader Dave	Respond to of 6318

Nice language paulie!! You are actually quite wrong about the 15 million options. They can't vote on the transaction. (If you knew anything about US securities law, you'd know that.) They only vest in case of a competing offer for TLC from another buyer. It's a purchase protection plan. Management and the board don't control anything near 40%. Although Lee, Bain and Centre own about 15% of the company, it is currently preferred stock and will vote in a separate class from the common stockholders. When the vote comes, Mattel stock better be quite close to the $27.50 level or Oleary and Perik will have a lot of trouble convincing the substantial number of very large institutions that are angry with this deal. That's why the vote won't take place until after Mattel releases its final results on January 20th and after the February toy show. Barad and crew will have to clean up their act and demonstrate they have a viable vision or this deal goes bust. I may agree with you on one point, this transaction is a pretty clear indication of the strongly self interested nature of the management team. The massive option exercise they get on change of control was a pretty powerful incentive to sell out. (Those options don't vote on the deal either.) Perhaps we'll see some interesting things at the toy show. But now that this is almost over and your dire predictions of a single digit stock price are incorrect, you have yet to explain your long term affiliation with the company. You've certainly put in an awful lot of effort. When were you fired? TD

To: paul richards who wrote (6214)	1/6/1999 8:54:00 PM
From: Fred Fahmy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6318

bitter one, I can tell by your tone that you are more upset then ever that we all made gobs of money on this stock while the shorts got nailed. Better luck next time sucker<gg>. FF

To: paul richards who wrote (6214)	1/6/1999 11:45:00 PM
From: R.S. Blum	Respond to of 6318

you mindless dick... you dumb ass.. Hmmm, sounds like Paulie's having another spat with Butchie<g!> Er, that's his name, right? Jeez, please adjust your panties and spit it out already. Maybe if you two clowns would learn to reciprocate and take turns, you wouldn't be taking out your frustrations here on us on account of your sore knees...

To: paul richards who wrote (6214)	1/7/1999 4:46:00 PM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6318

Paul Richards, I assume that is not your real name, whereas I am not concerned with hiding my identity. I have never called you any names, ridiculed you, flamed you, or even engaged in making claims about the stock with which you could take issue. So why suddenly take such a tone with me? I am not a mindless dick for buying TLC without reading the SEC filings because I never bought any and never wanted any. I bought BROD stock and ended up with TLC when BROD was merged into it. The merger wasn't my idea and I didn't vote for it. I may or may not be a dumb ass for buying BROD, but that is something that you are not in a position to judge. I suppose that I could have read the various quarterly and annual reports for TLC immediately and bailed out in a panic after the merger was announced, or after the merger itself. However, BROD was already down significantly from where I got in and I didn't see much downside risk in the short term. So I decided not to act in a panic, but rather to watch TCL for awhile to see how it performed. Indeed, it has been beneficial for me to wait. I did not lose any money due to the merger. Today's TLC price x 0.8 is higher than BROD before the merger. Could BROD have recovered on its own? Useless speculation. The exact same logic applies to the MAT merger. It wasn't my idea, I don't like it, and I won't vote for it. But nobody gave me private notification of an upcoming merger so that I could decide whether or not to get out of TLC before it was announced. Nor was there a chance for me to get out between the merger announcement, the announcement of MAT not meeting estimate and the drop of MAT's stock price which took down TLC with it. So once again I am inclined to wait until the dust settles and see what happens rather than just bailing out and changing the loss from a paper one to a real one. I don't have any ax to grind here. I have been following this thread only since the merger, so I haven't read your posts before that time, but from what I have read, I have never seen you come out and admit to holding a short position in TLC, as others claim. If you had a long position, I doubt that you would be always talking trash about TLC. So one can assume that you either have no position, or a short position. You have mentioned in a previous post that you have been in and out of short positions at opportune times, implying that you have in the past but are not now holding a short position. If you have no position, why do you even concern yourself with this thread or what other people are doing with their money? I do not ascribe your posts to a genuine and helpful concern for other people, in an effort to save them from losing money. It seems more likely that you are holding a short position and are too embarrassed to admit it due to the drubbing you have taken. And you are desperate and have nothing to lose by saying anything at all which might scare one or two investors away from the stock. The alternative would be just waiting and hoping, and hey, ever little bit helps. Well, feel free to post all the negative comments about TLC you like, but I would thank you not to call me mindless dick in the future. Perhaps it was a bit lazy of me to simply ask others on the thread about details of your claim rather than checking it out personally, but you make so many claims that it would be a full time job to uncover the full story on all of them. There are other people who chose to buy TLC and who have much bigger stakes in it than me, and who have already done all that, and one of the purposes of this thread is for me to communicate with them. If I wanted to do all the research myself, I have much use out of this thread would I? If you really want TLC to go down, then the best thing you could do would be to shut up. I'm not telling you that I want you to shut up. Reading your posts and the responses to them is the one thing which makes this thread so entertaining. My point is that the negative comments that you make are so extreme that nobody else wants to raise legitimate concerns about TLC for fear of being in your company. So the only negative remarks made about TLC on this thread are ones that are obviously so manipulative that they are easily ignored. Could it be that you are really long on TLC and this is a clever trick to distract from and drown out any legitimate concerns? That would be too clever by half, I think.