Sa Pá When I got off the plane I was amazed immediately: in tropical climates the humid air holds the warmth all night, and I could walk out of the airport in short sleeves in perfect comfort. Miami began its wild growth after the “Great Freeze” of 1894, when Florida’s entire citrus crop was killed off by […]
Tag Archives: money
Landing in Miami.
19-Dec-12Rāmganj Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that […]
The more time passes…
19-Nov-11… the more astonishingly inappropriate it seems that this is the place I went to school: The conflagration began after Princeton student Whitney Blodgett started to yell at the marchers as they passed by the bar. “We’re the 1 percent!” Blodgett yelled at them, laughing and making a thumbs up sign. “Get a job!” his […]
FDR – the greatest American President.
15-Aug-11Just a few months ago I stopped off at FDR’s “Little White House,” the modest country cabin in Georgia where he took his vacations and where he died. Its simplicity – it is one storey, and only a few rooms, perhaps fifteen hundred square feet – mocks our modern mores, and shows more starkly the […]
On the treadmill.
28-Jan-11“MONDAY AUG. 23 – Told my mother today she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending all her time slaving in shoe factories in order to earn just enough money to spend on the system of expenses that is our society. In Russia they slave for the state, here they […]
An Academic Gold Standard.
06-May-10From time to time in literature, direct references are made to money. It might be a sesterce or a half-a-crown, a dinar or a livre. Having a sense of the value of these foreign amounts has always been difficult. For this reason, old Greek and Latin textbooks would translate the amounts into modern dollar equivalents. […]
Mayhem in Queens.
22-Dec-09Stories of airline horrors at JFK, which seems likely to be the case until Christmas Day. Delta having one person at the checkin desk, six hour waits, and so forth. Police called in to quell the angry mob. Where is all the money going in these industries? The employees are not well paid. There aren’t […]
Simple Living.
07-Dec-09You’re off toward the edge of the bell curve when you tell strangers about your life and they say you remind them of anti-money crusaders living in caves. So it happened to me on Saturday night, when I was told to investigate a Moab man who calls himself Suelo (article in the link). I am […]
Wealth, Christ, Romney, Mormonism, and the 47 Percent the President Shouldn’t Be Caring About.
18-Sep-12Sometimes I do think that Christianity’s preaching of poverty is a vice, which has broken people like me – that I will never be right, never be happy, never know what is is to be loved or to enjoy human life, because I have been exposed to the message of Christ. I look on Protestantism […]