When Knighthood was in Flower

“There lived a Knight, when Knighthood was in flow’r, Who charmed alike the tilt-yard and the bow’r.”

-Edwin Caskoden

I’ve been reading some of an older book called When Knighthood was in Flower. It was published in 1898. I don’t when this copy was printed, but the pages have long turned that characteristic yellow hue of old print and the text is bit splotchy or faded in places. It reminded me of David J. Flood, who had a very peculiar interest in the obscure and forgotten things that are hidden in the world.

A few months ago, I remember this Californian based real estate investor asking where he was. While no one can be sure even now, I had already mourned the loss of David when darkfire asked this. I was the first to notice something strange had happened to him. I was advantaged to that end as David read everything I wrote, and then one day it just stopped. He hasn’t opened a single email since that day and no effort to contact him through any means since have worked.

Backing up several months before Darkfire asked this, I had conversation in private with David that set off an alarm bell in my dome (often a person doesn’t need to say much). I can’t recall why, but I remember he noted that he had stopped blogging in recent time due to some health issues, but he said no more to the matter. I just told him to not go dying on me, but he reassured me that he was okay. I didn’t really believe him.

Fast forward a few month’s time and David’s building a funeral basket of every publicly traded funeral service company in the world. He asked me for some help but for the most part he just did it all by himself. I only did some reading on the FTC’s modernization of the funeral rule and companies like Anxian Yuan utilization of new tech that uses machine learning trained on audio files and photos to recreate loved ones. He called them thana bots and thought they’d eventually be a huge deal. That remains to be seen although I kind of have to agree.

Leading up to the month or so of time before his disappearance, David’s handle changed to “Shinobi”. I thought it was weird, but I didn’t ask him why. A shinobi, if you’re not familiar is a stealth ninja warrior. Someone that fights in the shadow’s mostly unseen, gathering intel. To David I’m sure a shinobi is the idealization of what an investor ought to be… someone that gathers information for themselves to build up an understanding of things unseen.

He never told me anything was wrong, but the small series of clues he left were kind of like an easter egg hunt. Much like David I really, really like puzzle games albeit sometimes when you put the pieces together on a mystery it only hurts. I don’t think David was even gone for even 25 days before I felt convicted that I’d never be speaking to my friend again. Of course, I’d be really happy to be proven wrong and since I like making bets, if he ever comes back to X I’ll make a new account. But I can’t help but feel that David just made a puzzle before he left as a gift for anyone that was willing to look for the pieces.

Thank you for inviting me to help build your funeral basket David. I can only understand the significance of what you ask me for help there really meant in hindsight.

Next on the blog I think I’ll be talking about some of the work I did for David. The modernization of the funeral rule has certainly spooked people albeit SCI has actually done a pretty good job of navigating it (they’re certainly more on the ball than Carriage Services, Inc).

The FTC has some interesting rules about anticompetitive practices for funeral services company and SCI may have also recently passed an important date as it pertains to M&A in a number of markets. But that has to wait until next time...