"After a long bus trip with her three young children in April 2010, Raquel Nelson did what other bus passengers did that day, and had done so many days before: She attempted to cross the road from the bus stop, which is directly opposite her apartment complex, rather than walk a third of a mile to a traffic light, cross five lanes and walk a third of a mile back, lugging tired children and groceries."
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Wednesday, 16 January 2013
"15 Frugal Billionaires Who Live Like Regular People."
Fascinating and really cool. Got us going talking about why someone would do this (other than being nutty). Highlights:
1. Warren Buffet, worth $46 billion, "still lives in the Omaha, Nebraska, home he bought for $31,500 more than 50 years ago." And Carlos Slim Helú, chairman and CEO of Telmex, worth $69 billion, has lived in the same modest house he's had for the last 30 years. Christy Walton, worth $27.9 billion raised her son in an 1896 Victorian house so he could have a normal life and, after her husband died in a plane crash, donated the house to charity.
2. Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, gave away $4 billion, leaving himself with (currently) $2 million, and he orders the second-cheapest wine on the menu. David Cheriton, worth $1.3 billion says he's "quite offended" by people who build big mansions, thinks "there's something wrong" with those people, and recently bought a Honda Odyssey.
3. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, worth $3 billion, claims to drive a 15-year-old Volvo and alway fly economy. He eats in cheap restaurants and has his house furnished with IKEA stuff. More on him here, including a picture of his unassuming ranch-style house.
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1. Warren Buffet, worth $46 billion, "still lives in the Omaha, Nebraska, home he bought for $31,500 more than 50 years ago." And Carlos Slim Helú, chairman and CEO of Telmex, worth $69 billion, has lived in the same modest house he's had for the last 30 years. Christy Walton, worth $27.9 billion raised her son in an 1896 Victorian house so he could have a normal life and, after her husband died in a plane crash, donated the house to charity.
2. Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, gave away $4 billion, leaving himself with (currently) $2 million, and he orders the second-cheapest wine on the menu. David Cheriton, worth $1.3 billion says he's "quite offended" by people who build big mansions, thinks "there's something wrong" with those people, and recently bought a Honda Odyssey.
3. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, worth $3 billion, claims to drive a 15-year-old Volvo and alway fly economy. He eats in cheap restaurants and has his house furnished with IKEA stuff. More on him here, including a picture of his unassuming ranch-style house.
He always does his food shopping in the afternoon, when the prices in his local market start to fall....But Kamprad's image may be a big fake, and who knows about those other characters? The modest image helps the company's reputation, and they don't want to attract the attention of tax collectors, government regulators, and criminals (e.g., kidnappers).
Explaining his frugal nature, he said: "I am a bit tight with money, a sort of Swedish Scotsman. But so what?
"If I start to acquire luxurious things then this will only incite others to follow suit. It's important that leaders set an example. I look at the money I'm about to spend on myself and ask if Ikea's customers could afford it."
Saturday, 12 January 2013
Imagine if... women bought cars!
An ad from the May 5, 1967 issue of Life Magazine:
"You'll discover that even driving down to buy bread can be kicks. You'll find yourself saying 'I'll pick you up' even when it's Helen's turn to drive. Or Ed's.'"
I love the use of the word "kicks." It's almost as if our little lady is getting in some of those drugs we've been reading about as the Summer of Love rolls in.
The mid-calf skirt is suddenly a mini skirt, but it's only 1967, and if you're as old as I am, you know what that meant — your stocking tops and even your garters might show:
ADDED: The anti-drug song "Kicks" was a hit in 1966. If you ever worry that you don't know how to dance, I guarantee you that 20 seconds into this "Kicks" video you will be able to dance as well as Paul Revere & the Raiders.
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"You'll discover that even driving down to buy bread can be kicks. You'll find yourself saying 'I'll pick you up' even when it's Helen's turn to drive. Or Ed's.'"
I love the use of the word "kicks." It's almost as if our little lady is getting in some of those drugs we've been reading about as the Summer of Love rolls in.
The mid-calf skirt is suddenly a mini skirt, but it's only 1967, and if you're as old as I am, you know what that meant — your stocking tops and even your garters might show:
ADDED: The anti-drug song "Kicks" was a hit in 1966. If you ever worry that you don't know how to dance, I guarantee you that 20 seconds into this "Kicks" video you will be able to dance as well as Paul Revere & the Raiders.
"Chris couldn't afford to buy a Ferrari 250 GTO..."
"... so he painted one on his garage door."
ADDED: It's a pretty standard idea for a mural: Make it look like the wall you're painting isn't there — fool the eye into seeing something inside. Here are a bunch of examples of that.
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ADDED: It's a pretty standard idea for a mural: Make it look like the wall you're painting isn't there — fool the eye into seeing something inside. Here are a bunch of examples of that.
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Monday, 7 January 2013
"There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms..."
"... of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered."
Ripe, beautiful, cool, gay, radiant, (not) musty, fresh, breathing, redolent, shining, (scarcely) withered. What I'm seeing in today's Gatsby sentence are a lot of adjectives, adjectives all about a house, a house that we're told is a mystery. The adjectives tantalize us about the nature of the mystery. Every adjective says sex. If only we could get upstairs to the bedrooms or into those corridors. Those places are alive! They are breathing.
But within that sex and life there is a hint of death. What does it mean to be "laid away already in lavender." I'm picturing the lavender in a sachet, put in a drawer to impart a semblance of freshness. How do you put musty romances away like that? Those are your memories (or maybe old love letters). But don't worry about that. The point here is that these romances are alive, fresh and breathing. I mean, they are alive somewhere in this house, this mysterious house you've just entered, if only you could find your way into the bedrooms and corridors.
Here at the entry point, we just have a hint. There's a smell. It's ripe. It's redolent. It's not musty. It's not that lavender you use on old things. It's like shining motor-cars and dances where there are flowers. Shining motor cars? It's the famous new car smell people are always raving about, and I guess they loved it back in the 1920s when F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing "The Great Gatsby." So there's this wonderful spell of fresh romance and it smells like new cars and dance flowers.
We've already encountered dance flowers in our little sentence-a-day Gatsby project. My self-imposed rule is to stay within the boundaries of one sentence. But it's so strange to me that a sentence that names one flower goes on to say "flowers" without saying what kind. I guess you could say those flowers are like the women in the romances that are happening now. They aren't memories, which are specific and can thus (in some poetic logic) be laid away with specific flowers. These women could be anybody. Maybe their namelessness is part of the adventure that goes with those unseen rooms and corridors.
But I can't help thinking back to that sentence we looked at on January 2d, which had Daisy — a named woman, named after a specific flower — drowsing at dawn with the shreds of her evening dress "tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." It seems that when the romance is over and laid away into memories, the flowers can be specified. In the January 2d sentence, the flowers, orchids, were dying (as Daisy was drowsing). The flowers we see today are not dying. They are part of romance that is happening right now.
And yet, here it is again, that hint of death: The flowers are withered. Scarcely withered, yes, but withered. And withered is our last adjective. This is another sentence with a narrative trajectory: We went from ripe to withered, in a sentence full of life — hints of life, life just out of reach, with a whiff of death. A mystery!
Read more ►
Ripe, beautiful, cool, gay, radiant, (not) musty, fresh, breathing, redolent, shining, (scarcely) withered. What I'm seeing in today's Gatsby sentence are a lot of adjectives, adjectives all about a house, a house that we're told is a mystery. The adjectives tantalize us about the nature of the mystery. Every adjective says sex. If only we could get upstairs to the bedrooms or into those corridors. Those places are alive! They are breathing.
But within that sex and life there is a hint of death. What does it mean to be "laid away already in lavender." I'm picturing the lavender in a sachet, put in a drawer to impart a semblance of freshness. How do you put musty romances away like that? Those are your memories (or maybe old love letters). But don't worry about that. The point here is that these romances are alive, fresh and breathing. I mean, they are alive somewhere in this house, this mysterious house you've just entered, if only you could find your way into the bedrooms and corridors.
Here at the entry point, we just have a hint. There's a smell. It's ripe. It's redolent. It's not musty. It's not that lavender you use on old things. It's like shining motor-cars and dances where there are flowers. Shining motor cars? It's the famous new car smell people are always raving about, and I guess they loved it back in the 1920s when F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing "The Great Gatsby." So there's this wonderful spell of fresh romance and it smells like new cars and dance flowers.
We've already encountered dance flowers in our little sentence-a-day Gatsby project. My self-imposed rule is to stay within the boundaries of one sentence. But it's so strange to me that a sentence that names one flower goes on to say "flowers" without saying what kind. I guess you could say those flowers are like the women in the romances that are happening now. They aren't memories, which are specific and can thus (in some poetic logic) be laid away with specific flowers. These women could be anybody. Maybe their namelessness is part of the adventure that goes with those unseen rooms and corridors.
But I can't help thinking back to that sentence we looked at on January 2d, which had Daisy — a named woman, named after a specific flower — drowsing at dawn with the shreds of her evening dress "tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." It seems that when the romance is over and laid away into memories, the flowers can be specified. In the January 2d sentence, the flowers, orchids, were dying (as Daisy was drowsing). The flowers we see today are not dying. They are part of romance that is happening right now.
And yet, here it is again, that hint of death: The flowers are withered. Scarcely withered, yes, but withered. And withered is our last adjective. This is another sentence with a narrative trajectory: We went from ripe to withered, in a sentence full of life — hints of life, life just out of reach, with a whiff of death. A mystery!
Saturday, 5 January 2013
"Cash for Clunkers" environmental cost/benefit balance seems to have been negative.
"According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), almost 100% of a vehicle can be recycled."
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Even the fluids can be reused.... Transmission and brake fluids, anti-freeze, oil, gasoline, diesel and Freon from air conditioners are harvested at scrap yards for use in other vehicles. However, still-functioning engines are the most valuable part of a scrapped car....Well, that's the perspective of the recycling industry, and it's all information that was known when the program was adopted. This isn't news, just an industry press release. That should make us skeptical, but also, if it's true, more critical of the government, since (I assume) they knew all this and did it anyway.
Many of the cars that were traded in during Cash for Clunkers were perfectly functioning cars in good condition, and excellent candidates to have their engines and other parts recycled. With the engine destroyed, many clunkers bypassed the recycling companies and went straight to junkyards to be crushed and shredded.... [The engines were] destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again.....
[Cash for Clunkers] mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not... Cars that are shredded are turned into small, palm-sized pieces of metal... For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of shredder residue are produced, meaning about 3 to 4.5 million tons of shredder residue is sent to landfills every year....
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
"A paparazzo hoping to get a picture of Justin Bieber in his Ferrari after the vehicle was pulled over by police in Los Angeles got struck and killed by an SUV instead."
"And as it turned out, the 18-year-old singer wasn't even in the sports car."
This seems to be an occasion for wheeling out that horrible old saying: He died doing what he loved. He thought he had Justin Bieber set up for a shot. The photographer was swelling with delight and then — blam — not from a Ferrari but an SUV. Let's hope he never knew what hit him — to coin a phrase — and never knew that Bieber wasn't even in that car. He died doing what he loved! He had his peak of paparazzi ecstasy and then... annihilation. A consummation. It's over.
But wait! Justin Bieber wants to speak:
Now, should we also get on Bieber's case for calling what happened a "tragedy"?
ADDED: The more apt term is poetic justice — "a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct." The key is the self-contained logic of the story. It makes sense. There should be no call for legislation to find meaning. The meaning is already there. What happened is exactly right: poetic justice. The Wikipedia page I just linked has some examples, and since we were just talking about Wile E. Coyote, I enjoyed seeing him first on the list of poetic justice in TV and film: "Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps themselves." The phrase "hoist with his own petard" expresses the concept. Did you know it's from "Hamlet":
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This seems to be an occasion for wheeling out that horrible old saying: He died doing what he loved. He thought he had Justin Bieber set up for a shot. The photographer was swelling with delight and then — blam — not from a Ferrari but an SUV. Let's hope he never knew what hit him — to coin a phrase — and never knew that Bieber wasn't even in that car. He died doing what he loved! He had his peak of paparazzi ecstasy and then... annihilation. A consummation. It's over.
But wait! Justin Bieber wants to speak:
"While I was not present nor directly involved with this tragic accident, my thoughts and prayers are with the family of the victim... Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders, and the photographers themselves."Oh, Justin. Not every screw-up is an argument for legislation. Putting "meaningful" in front of "legislation" is itself meaningful, but what does it mean? 1. It means meaninglessness, an empty existential cry in the face of helplessness. 2. It means I would like to soothe myself with the fantasy that if the right laws had been in place, the bad thing that just happened would not have happened. 3. It means that we can express meaning through laws, that laws work as expression, quite aside from whether they have any effect on the bad things we would like to call bad.
Now, should we also get on Bieber's case for calling what happened a "tragedy"?
Tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song") is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing....Pedants love to say that the word "tragedy" is misused, but I think we may have encountered a correct use of the word. That correct usage seems out of place with the rest of the statement, with its angst about prayer, inspiration, and meaning. One suspects Bieber bumbled into saying something he wouldn't have meant to say. It's meaning without a mind that meant it. We witness human suffering and feel... good!
ADDED: The more apt term is poetic justice — "a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct." The key is the self-contained logic of the story. It makes sense. There should be no call for legislation to find meaning. The meaning is already there. What happened is exactly right: poetic justice. The Wikipedia page I just linked has some examples, and since we were just talking about Wile E. Coyote, I enjoyed seeing him first on the list of poetic justice in TV and film: "Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps themselves." The phrase "hoist with his own petard" expresses the concept. Did you know it's from "Hamlet":
"For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard." (Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.iv.226).)And did you know (again, from Wikipedia):
During the late 17th century, critics pursuing a neo-classical standard would criticize William Shakespeare in favor of Ben Jonson precisely on the grounds that Shakespeare's characters change during the course of the play.... When Restoration comedy, in particular, flouted poetic justice by rewarding libertines and punishing dull-witted moralists, there was a backlash in favor of drama, in particular, of more strict moral correspondence.
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