Here’s more bad news for parents of teenage boys: Grand Theft Auto is here to stay. In its first week, the latest version of the adult-themed video game racked up $500 million in sales, beating the phenomenally successful popular Halo3 by a country mile. For comparison, the top grossing film of all time, Titanic, pulled in about $600 million over ten years. Grand Theft’s story line, such as it is, concerns drug-trafficking, prostitution and murder, and although it’s mostly the bad guys who get rubbed out, if you get an urge to bludgeon a hooker or flatten some grandma as she hobbles across a pedestrian walkway, such homicidal acts of cruelty are well provisioned by the designers of “GTA,” as the game is called. Compared to a 15-year-old with his thumbs on PlayStation’s controller, Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo character in Kiss of Death was a choir boy.

So enormously successful have video games become that one could wonder why Hollywood even bothers to turn out feature films for the nation’s rapidly declining theater operators. Fifteen years ago, video games were a cottage industry that served a market limited mainly to male sociopaths between the ages of 14 and 18. Since then, the age range has widened some, and it is evidently not just sociopaths who play these games, but rather tens of millions of boys for whom each and every new release, at $70 a pop, is a must-have. Some parents may not realize exactly what they are buying for their kids, even though the games are rated according to age-appropriateness. For the record, E, T, M, and AO stand, respectively, for Everyone; Teen; Mature; and Adults Only.

 Bedroom Play

As is the case with movies, it is not the amount of violence and mayhem on display that differentiates M games from AO games, but sexual explicitness. Because of this, and lest some 13-year-old be exposed to, heaven forbid, a woman’s bare breasts, GTA’s creators have thoughtfully muted the game’s sexual antics so that only the sounds of bedroom play are dramatized, not the presumably traumatizing sights. And, perhaps to curry favor with church and school groups, GTA’s designers have provisioned the game with “good” girls who will not sleep with you unless you rack up “fondness” scores of 90% or higher.  Would you believe that, on the night GTA went on sale, kids (and their parents) queued up at midnight to buy it.

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Free Hidden Pivot Demo

Can a novice learn in mere months how to interpret stock and commodity charts more accurately than many experts who do it for a living? Rick’s Picks  invites you to find out for yourself this morning. Click here  to sign up for a free Hidden Pivot demonstration today (Friday) from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Mountain time The session is open to anyone seriously interested in attending the Hidden Pivot Seminar slated for May 21-22 (two consecutive evenings). During the demonstration, we will attempt in real time to identify trading opportunities in such popular trading vehicles as Comex Gold and Silver, the Diamonds, QQQs and E-Mini S&Ps.

If you are skeptical that chartist “voodoo” can correctly call the trend in any time frame, or that it can consistently identify price reversals to within hundredths of a point, then I would urge you to attend this session.  You will come away convinced not only that it is possible, but that you can do it yourself with just a few hours of training. You’ll learn to look at stock and commodity charts in a completely different way, using your eye to discriminate winning trading patterns from losers as you would good art from bad.

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The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time.  Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.