The past few days brought two moments of genuine amusement, one of them sour and the other sweet. I’ll start with the sour.

In almost every city of significant size, there’s an alternative weekly newspaper which devotes space to the inside doings of its bigger, daily cousin. In South Florida, where I worked for a few years during the “Miami Vice” era (yeah, buddy, those were some days), that alternative paper is New Times, which posts news about the area’s daily papers on its Web site. On Wednesday, the site reported on the jobs cuts at the Miami Herald, and provided a partial list of the journalists who’d been let go. As I checked the list for familiar names (and sadly found some), I came across this comment:

Thank you for publicly embarrassing people who had zero control over their futures by publicizing their names…. We’re not public employees living on the taxpayer dime. Our industry didn’t get a bailout.

Below that was another:

Why would you publish this list? Horrible.

There’s my sour amusement. Every journalist alive has, at some point, embarrassed somebody by putting their name in the paper. It’s just a regrettable part of the job. When journalists themselves become the momentary object of news interest, it’s absurd for them to cry foul when their names appear. Funny thing about ink (even the digital kind): It runs in both directions.

The sweet amusement was provided by my son, or more specifically by the mutual fund company which has custody of his Roth IRA account. He’d opened the retirement account a year and and a half ago — which is to say, at almost exactly the peak of the stock market — and returned home from Iraq last month to a smoking ruin of an economy. I told him to be prepared for carnage in his investments, but when we checked his account, a surprise awaited: His balance was up.

We stared at the computer screen for a moment before I realized what had happened. Through misunderstanding or mistake, his initial Roth investment had been parked in a cash fund. Usually, that’s the last place a young person would put retirement money, because it generates a pitifully small interest rate. The only benefit is that, unlike stocks, the balance never goes down.

In short, while investment experts like Warren Buffet took a beating, my son rode through this historic bear market in great shape. He didn’t lose a dime, and now that the market is near its bottom he’s dumped a big chunk of his combat pay into the Roth account — which is now switched over to stocks.

The downside? Buffet keeps calling the house, looking for investment tips.

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