. Last week, I went up to the park to see the eclipse. I avoided the viewing event put on by the town in the local park. Instead, I observed it from a hunting platform a resident has set up on the undeveloped land behind the park. On the way up to the back lot, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ …
Content Warning: This post does not contain a discussion of options trading or musings about other random shit. It is about mobile home park management. Does anyone remember Jack Welch? Until shortly before 9/11, Jack Welch was the darling of the business community. He was Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-Fried back …
Content Warning: This post contains language regarding option trading. Readers looking for the usual crap should peruse old posts or copies of Mad Magazine. Any discussion of investments herein is for entertainment purposes only. Dirt Lease does not give investment advice. Readers should consult their own advisers before making an investment decision. Writers should avoid …