Unlike most park owners, I am not a small-government guy. I think that public institutions can be a force for good and a useful counterweight to the uglier aspects of the market. If I had lived in the thirties (that’s the nineteen thirties), I would have supported the New Deal. If I had been able …
I will take a break from the usual crap and write a little bit about P.L. 117-7, the 2021 stimulus bill. The official name of the statute is The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, but it is referred to hereinafter as the “Act”. In its final version, it is 242 pages of turgid PDF …
One night last week, a former writing instructor forwarded me a link to this article in the New Yorker. Upon receiving her email, I immediately shot off a reply to the effect of, how’s-the-writing-going-yeah-PE-funds-have-been-bidding-up-this-asset-class-for-years and then slid into an alcohol- and Netflix induced stupor. But then, overnight, the emails kept coming. Some people forwarded the …
I have written about Mrs. Wilson before. She is the woman who winds up my dopamine motor, chains herself to trees and appears, like Schrodinger’s Cat, simultaneously in northern New York and Alabama. She refuses to speak with Mike, the manager in her park. Early yesterday, my phone farted and a text from Mrs. Wilson …
Late in the day yesterday, my mobile phone rang showing a number with a 330 Ohio area code. I thought, “That ringtone sounds like a fart. I need to change it.” A mechanical voice said, “This is Daniel Padilla from Amazon. There has been a fraudulent charge on your account. Your account is compromised. Press …
I will insert a banner ad for One Eyed Bastard Frog once I get around to learning how to steal the code for that. In the meantime, you can enjoy music from the band that Janet Maslin, of the Gray Lady Times says is “like ending world hunger, only more satisfying”, and about whom Brigitte …
We all know about Occam’s Razor. I recently learned that Christopher Hitchens coined his own epistemological rule that has come to be known as “Hitchens’ Razor”. Per Hitchens’ Razor, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. If you say that the moon is made of Gribble without any evidence of the …
I have written earlier about online scams. The previous story involved a tripartite scam. Scammer 1 posts a Craigslist ad for a skid steer. They promise to ship it to me, once I give payment to a third-party freight forwarder. The harsh light of common sense shows that the seller and the shipper are the …
Martin Amis says that it is bollocks that truth is stranger than fiction. When – he says – did you last awake from troubled dreams having turned into a human-sized cockroach? I read Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad Love Story shortly after it came out, in 2010. I do not remember anything about it, except …