The National Debt is front page news this week. It seems time to ponder the issue and try to put it in perspective. It is said that debt is what helped make this country great and there is some history to suggest that. The debt began at Independence during the Revolutionary War, which left the young country roughly $75 million in the hole. It was the great Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 plan to have the federal…
My friend Steve just sent me a piece by Garrison Keillor that was uncharacteristically political in nature. He mentioned that he realizes that I have been writing less about politics, but thought I might enjoy reading Keillor’s ramblings on the subject. If I had to liken my writing to anyone’s (only aspirationally, of course) it would be to Garrison Keillor. Keillor’s writing is warm, wry, and nostalgic, built on a folksy Midwestern storyteller’s cadence, the…
It’s only Wednesday and it feels like it’s been a long week already. That is mostly due to the water main leak emergency I have had to endure. I have had to have my irrigation guy come and tell me he thinks there’s a leak in the main line. I have had the big bad leak detection company come and spend three or four hours traipsing the property with radar and sonar devices. Underground leak…
Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…
Today I finally got serious about this water leak that’s been jabbing at me regularly over the last year. At first I thought it was the spa overflow valve so I kept trying to no avail to get the spa guy and the spa plumbing guy to address it. Then I got an hour-by-hour water usage run over a few weeks and noticed that this time the water loss was not when the spa was…
In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…
An expression I have always enjoyed using in general conversation is about the passage of time. We’ve all seen movies they’re they use the visual trick of having pages of a calendar fly off or seasons pass through seasons from spring to summer to fall to winter and we are all made to feel that there are times in storytelling where one needs to show that time marches on and indeed time either changes nothing…
We are in the countdown week before our summer fiesta. I’m not sure why we have never done this before. We live in fiesta territory and we are surrounded by Hispanic culture so it seems like something we should have done before this. I carry an Hispanic surname and am regularly asked if I identify as Hispanic, which I don’t. I spent six of my first seven years living in Latin America, first in Venezuela…
Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical…
For almost six weeks now my weight has hovered at 260. I noted this morning that I was at my absolute lowest point on the scale, but I just haven’t made that downward move into the 250s, which I very much have wanted to see happen in August. I still have a few weeks left, so I’m hoping that can still happen before I fly off to Amsterdam for our river cruise and mountain climb…