Gosh, I got the impression they would be released for general sales in 2011. How did you come on the plant? Yeah, Rhizo..........they are pretty darned black and not just a murky purple and they live up to their name. Do I like them? No, not particularly. I have had black flowers in my line and they usually sell decently, mostly because of their shock value. This year I grew a black and white dianthus and the black pansies I used to grow had an eager market too. Until the novelty wore off. I trial all my new varieties in my own gardens and my impression on the black dianthus is you don't even notice them in the landscape in broad daylight, because the bloom does not contrast well against the dark foliage. When it's dawn or dusk.........the blooms all but disappear, even when planted against a backdrop of plants with lime green foliage. But, they look to be a well behaved plant, and for those wanting something different, I'm sure they'll be popular for awhile.

Hi Glenda, When I used to tell daughter's Female Canine to "sit" she didn't seem to pay a lot of attention. ______________________ Chemocurl, Well done. I didn't know the purchase price. I calculate, though, that one share grew to 144 ... which would make the 100 shares grow to 14,400. ... for better than $969,000. If the guy had started with 104 shares, which would have grown to 14,976 ... at Tuesday's closing price of $66.94 (somewhat lower than when you calculated earlier that day) ... today's value would have been $1,002,493.40. At your quote, it would have been $1,008,034.50 ... $5,541.10 more (a reasonably decent month's pay). Plus ... the dividend rate grew, over the years, more or less in tandem with the share price. Iva Mae, When you go to the "Stock quotes" on Yahoo->Finance, put in "RY.TO", for Royal Bank. If on Yahoo Canada, if you put in "RY" the ".TO" will be added on its own. Try "ENB" for Enbridge, "BCE" for BCE, "GWO" for Great-West Life, "TCK-B" for Teck Cominco, "TA" for TransAlta Utilities, "TD" for TD Canada Trust. There's a place where they offer "Symbol lookup" and if you write the company name in there, it'll tell you the symbol. If you ask for "Bar" chArts, instead of a line joining the daily closing prices over a period, it will give a bar linking the highest and lowest prices at which transactions took place that day, with a little line to the left showing the opening price that day, and one to the right showing the closing price. If, when you have a page where the price information of a given stock is showing, you look over to the left, near the top, there's a place where you can click on "Historical prices" and it will allow you to check the daily, weekly, monthly, etc. price levels of that stock over a given period. As a matter of fact, the price list for JNJ goes back to Jan 2, 1970. And, believe it or not, I didn't know that when I set up the project in the first place. The criteria that I used was to start a couple of years before the first split that appeared on the database that I was using. And not far from the 40-year period that I've heard to be the period during which they increased dividend rate every year. I must confess that I thought it more relevant to put this thread over on "Money Saving Tips" or "Household Finance" ... but thought that it would receive greater exposure here. And that a number of the residents here might find it interesting. Good wishes for managing your income and assets with increasing skilfullness. ole joyful

Letting it fall.

Well, I'm back to being annoyed about their underpricing. This morning they went through my listings (and probably everyone else's) and relisted their books to sell for one penny less. This is common on Amazon, but I find it cheesy. BetterWorld has sold 1,420,712 books on Amazon (so far), but they have a feedback rating of only 95% That's poor. They say the same thing about every book ("Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear....") and give no details about the condition. That could be why people leave negative ratings about them--too many unpleasant surprises when the books arrive. I hope they're really doing those good deeds.