Bill Kousmanides is Speedy Gonzales. He answers emails before you send them. He picks up the phone when you are on the second digit of the area code. He participated in the Caltech Negative Time Run and arrived an hour and a half before he left. His responsiveness is an important quality, because he is …
Motion picture, video game, music, merch and sneaker endorsement rights are still available for the story below. Interested parties should contact the Dirt Lease staff by DM. All offers will be entertained in the strictest confidence. Chat GPT: Write a Story About a Wall Street Trader Who Inherits a Mobile Home Park Once upon a …
This morning, the general counsel of Dirtlease came back from a seven-day drunk. The head of HR dropped by to have a word with him. ‘Knock, knock’, she said. Her heels took up most of the doorway. The GC was cradling his head in his elbows and had not yet turned on his computer. ‘Could …
The Dirt Lease staff recently conducted a team-building retreat in New Mexico. When the doors to the rental car shuttle in Albuquerque airport closed and the chirpy voice intoned, ‘Welcome to New Mexico – Land of Enchantment!’, a wizened airport worker seated across from the staff said, ‘Land of Entrapment.’ Here is what we have …
The house always wins. If you play slots, the casino has an edge of up to 15%. That means that, if you put a billion dollars into the slot machines on a given night, you should expect to get back $850,000,000. That is a crappy bet. In American roulette, the edge is 5.26%. In European …
The Irish seem more interested in stories about manufactured housing communities than anyone else. I suspect that that is because they connect with the themes of substance abuse, rural poverty and rural despair. God bless them. So what if they say, ‘to here’, when you ask them where their round-trip ticket is to, or if …
Before I was born, I was an Eisenhower Republican. I didn’t care much about ideology. I supported politicians who were good managers who rewarded competence and punished corruption, a domestic policy that favored growth with a social safety net, and a foreign policy that cultivated alliances with democracies and stood up to dictators. The Republican …
The first time I wrote about Arch Stanton, I looked up the movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on Netflix and watched it. I do not recommend doing so. It is not a good film. It is not even the kind of shitty film that is fun to watch. Maybe we just have …
Unless you have read The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,[1] Eskimo Words for Snow,[2] or Stephen A. Jacobson’s Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary,[3] or are a native speaker of Inuit or Yup’ik, you probably think that the Inuit have a limitless number of words for snow. That is bunk.[4] Yup’ik has rich derivational and inflectional morphology.[5] There is …
Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …