CSotD: Friday Follies
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We’ll touch on something vaguely political before moving on into folly. Or, that is, intentional folly.
I have nothing, theoretically, against brokers except a general prejudice that they should set you up with a portfolio that works and then leave you, and it, alone, barring some major change, like having the President say “Now is a good time to buy, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.”
Now, if someone can get you in on the ground floor of an IPO, that’s good, except that he probably can’t or wouldn’t. I see ads saying “If you’ve got a million dollars in your retirement account …” and I laugh because if I had a million dollars in my retirement account I wouldn’t need a lot of advice, would I?
But I wouldn’t have trouble finding some, which reminds me of Richard Benjamin making pointless cold-calls all day in Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, the 1971 film of a novel by Charles Webb, who also wrote The Graduate, which is about someone with a whole lot more direction in life than the Richard Benjamin character.
Anyway, it’s good to consult a broker, but don’t pick one who calls himself a “wealth manager” because that’s probably who those pirates buried with the loot.
Speaking of mythological creatures, here’s a hoop snake, courtesy of Ben Zaehringer. I gather there are people who believe in hoop snakes, which doesn’t surprise me, because I spent 13 years living on the shores of Lake Champlain and was initially astonished at the number of people who believed in Champy.
I got over it.
I suppose now that everyone has digital cameras, they’ve stopping coming into the newsroom with undeveloped film assuring us that they saw Champy and got a picture.
I’m open to new information, mind you. The head of my department in college acknowledged that, given the age and extent of the universe, there probably are UFOs, theoretically.
However, unlike the science teacher at my son’s parochial school, he didn’t actually see them. During class.
Anyway, please don’t point out that hoop snakes don’t have teeth like that. When you don’t exist, you can have any kind of teeth you want.
If you haven’t been following the current storyline in Crabgrass, it may be too late to try to figure it out, but Kevin has wound up in a parallel universe and his evil twin is in our universe. However, the strip occasionally takes a break for a bit of humor like this.
Which reminds me that the best part of Thanksgiving after your kids are grown is sitting around while they laugh about all the things they got away with. Assuming you have long since realized you weren’t the perfect parent after all.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Maeve’s beau has come over from Paris with his ex, which is putting Maeve through some emotional gyrations.
I very much doubt that Benoit is going to move to Canada and it would disrupt the strip if Maeve permanently relocated to France, but I find this latest twist quite promising. I met a GF’s ex and, like Maeve, found I liked him a lot.
I decided it meant my GF had consistent taste.
Consistently good taste.
Yesterday I marveled that the Baby Blues kids weren’t horrified at going on vacation and today they reverted to Comic Land Reality.
Maybe the disconnect is that we never took our kids to commercial places except as part of something else. Yellowstone was a specific destination, but if you’ve been there, you realize it’s got a lot of variation and no roller coasters.
But generally we’d go to a city, not a specific place, and so some days we’d head for the roller coasters and other days we’d head for the science museum or the zoo.
I remember when Six Flags was doing commercials in which some unfortunate kids were dragged to museums while the lucky ones got to ride roller coasters. But I guess I wouldn’t expect an ad where the makers of chicken nuggets suggest you try a cobb salad instead.
Poor traumatized Pig. I’d note that it’s only relatively recently that carnivores in nature films ever got to eat much at all. Herbivores were the heroes even in films that were ostensibly about lions, and sometimes the lions would be seen eating something dead, but sort of as if they just found it. We never saw them actually succeed in catching anything.
I think I know when the shift happened, because just about the time Jane Goodall was proving that chimpanzees could do simple quadratics, her then-husband Hugo Van Lawick was shooting ground-breaking film of African Wild Dogs, which are beautiful animals but do not settle for a diet of Beyond Antelope.
Suddenly, carnivores became competent.
BTW, the Denver Zoo has a display where one part is inside housing for Wild Dogs and another is for Hyenas, but there’s a single outdoor area. They let the animals outside one species at a time, because if they let them all out at once, the kids would get a dramatic demonstration of The Circle of Life.
A major issue for those of us who live alone is portion control. I made gumbo the other day and wound up eating it for dinner, again for breakfast and also for lunch, I gave a portion to a friend and have three more in the refrigerator. Fortunately, it came out really well, because I don’t know how you make a single portion of something like that.
Which means my freezer is full of plastic containers of things like bean soup and spaghetti sauce and pea soup and chili.
And those are just the things that came out well. Unlike the fellow in the cartoon, I’ve finally given myself permission to discard failed experiments, but he looks to be in his 20s, so I’ve had more practice in making things nobody would want to eat.
This is what experience means: Guys like me and Willie can do more dumb things in an hour than most people can accomplish in a lifetime.
Practice, practice, practice.
Coming Tuesday, April 15 on PBS (h/t to Mike Lynch)
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