The greatest single life-enhancing step you can take in early summer is to change your lawnmower blade. It’s a thing that gets ever duller with use, and you adjust and adjust to the diminished cutting ability with each mow, until the point that you think it is normal that it takes all your strength to shove the thing across the yard and leave a trail of clippings and unevenly cut grass in your wake.
The trend picked up steam in World War II, when the Italians too were suspected and so had to declare their loyalty. The flag issue became universal during the Cold War when everyone was expected to rally around the nation in its fight against its foreign adversaries.
These were sharp businessmen, the four guys who pointed out that there were three dead trees in my backyard that needed to be cut down lest they attract horrible bugs that would infest my entire property. They would cut them down and remove them for $475.
In cash.
We dickered back and forth and finally settled on $350. In cash.
They attacked the trees like ants on ice cream. In 45 minutes, the trees were gone without a trace.
I paid them. In cash.
What do you do if you are on a long car trip, you have heard all your Renaissance polyphony CDs, it’s too dangerous to answer email at 80 mph, and there is no GPS on the dashboard to keep you entertained? Well, what else but turn on FM radio? Yes, it can be painful, but there are also ways to make it fun.
I’ve held my peace for as long as I can, but there will be no more silence on this critical issue of the day. Here is the bottom line: you need to learn to make a link or you should fall into the grave early.
The use of lard in cooking is slowly being rehabilitated but the cultural shock of the stuff hasn’t diminished in the slightest.
There I was at the store buying just two products: lard and salt. They sat on the black conveyor belt awaiting checkout at the store. The guy behind me — something like this happens every time I buy lard — asked incredulously: “what are you going to make with that?”
It’s a strange thing that all the leading progressives feel schadenfreude toward all the Starbucks closings around the country.
I mean, this institution samples all the fashionable attitudes in music, aesthetics, and politics, subtly embracing the ethos of the arch-lefty consumer class: happy to promote commercialism provided that the commercialism points to all the right environmental and social-justice causes.
In early 2009 at the AEA meetings, Stanford economist John Taylor, used the term “Mondustrial Policy to criticize the Fed and Treasury response to the financial crisis. Taylor, as quoted in a WSJ bolg post by Jon Hilsenrath (http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/01/05/the-feds-outspoken-critic/, used this “unflattering term” to describe a policy environment that was “not a monetary framework. It is an intervention framework financed by money creation.”
Robert Murphy may think Ben Bernanke is a joke, but Mr. Bernanke’s outfit busted out an almost $82 billion in profits last year. All that paper the Fed sucked up onto its balance sheet during the financial crisis is now throwing off bookoo bucks. Under Bernanke’s guidance central banking is suddenly a growth industry, with Ben’s balance sheet now at $2.43 trillion, up $193 billion from ’09.
