It is official – David Lereah quoted on CNN – and everyone is doing just what he says!
Category: Casual Friday (page 24 of 25)
A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
I got to the hospital after visiting hours, but the nurse led me to the room anyway. “There hasn’t been anyone,” she confided.
I pursed my lips in grim acknowledgement. “That’s why I’m here.”
Inside the room the patient looked like purple death. It was a critical-care room, bright and white and cheerfully clinical. The bed was surrounded by apparatus, with lines and leads and probes and IV tubes running to him. The only unbruised part of him that I could see were his eyes, and his eyes were more deeply wounded than anything.
I’ll tell you his story, but I won’t tell you his name. His name is yours. His name is mine. His name is legion…
I pulled up a chair and got as close to the bed as I could. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted him to see mine. His jaw was wired and he was breathing though a plastic tube mounted in his throat, which makes for a fairly one-sided conversation.
“I just came from the funeral,” I said. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen. The procession must have been two miles long. Kathleen Sullivan, mother of six, grandmother of two, with two more on the way, loving wife of Brian Sullivan — in the newspaper it’s just something that’s there, like the basketball scores or the stock tables. People die every day. People are born every day. It doesn’t seem to matter very much.”
I shrugged. “I think it does. I’ll tell you a story: About six months ago there was a woman driving down Endicott Avenue. Driving very safely, five miles an hour below the speed limit, doing everything just exactly right. There were some schoolboys riding their bikes on the sidewalk beside her, and, all at once, one of the boys decided to dart out into the street, right in front of her car. She stood on the brake pedal, but it was already too late. Screech, crunch, tragedy. The boy was killed instantly.
“She saw it, of course. His little schoolfriends saw it. Half a block away was the crossing Read more
If you don’t have a sense of humor, you probably don’t have any sense at all.
To get things started, here is Lereah as a Dancing Elf. Turn your sound on to get the full effect.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds Demand. 
Not His Favorite Clown What follows are a few “Economist Jokes”. Not wanting to shock anyone but all of these were written and were being told when David Lereah was still in grade school. Here is a news flash – people who are finding themselves being “victimized” by the pronouncements of an economist have to be looking for ways to be a victim. I’m not defending Lereah, I’ve never bothered to pay any attention to anything he (or any other economist) had to say about anything.
NO major economist accurately predicted, in advance, the phenomenal run up in prices that started two years ago. Every last one of them was asleep at the switch. The switch was turned on and they – along with everyone else – THEN could make pronouncements about it. That is observation of effect, after the fact. That is not “predicting” anything.
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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“I’m thinking of leaving my husband,” complained the economist’s wife.
“All he ever does is stand at the end of the bed and tell me how good things are going to be.”
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There is also a joke about the last Mayday parade in the Soviet Union. After the tanks and the troops and the planes and the missiles rolled by there came ten men dressed in black.
“Are they Spies?” Asked Gorby?
“They are economists,” replies the KGB director, “imagine the havoc they will wreak when we set them loose on the Americans”
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Economists don’t answer to questions others make because they know what the answer is. They answer because they are asked.
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The only thing more dangerous than an amateur economist is a professional economist.
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Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing.
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An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
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An Economist is someone who didn’t have enough personality to become an accountant.
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Q. What’s the difference between an economist and a befuddled old man with Alzheimer’s?
A. The economist is the one with the calculator.
____________
The last severe Read more
We see everything through the lens of real estate, including films and television programs. It’s baked in the cake. Houses, always, and rooms and neighborhoods, and god help us if there’s a real estate transaction in a movie or TV show. When we were leaving The Pursuit of Happyness last night, Cathy said, “That makes starting out in a split shop look easy.”
(For non-Realtors, a split shop is one where you have to split your commissions with your broker. New agents often have to give the broker 50% of their earnings, and they may have to pay a mandatory mentor 50% of the remainder. The attested quid pro quo is training, but most new licensees starve and quit before they see much training. They often leave a ton of money behind in other people’s pockets, though, so almost everyone is happy.)
Anyway, the travails Chris Gordon undergoes in “The Pursuit of Happyness” make everything associated with mere straight commission sales look downright easy. Yes, I know successful salespeople go through a lot to get to a place where money problems seem remote, but few of us take the path through Dante’s torments followed by Gordon.
Despite a dogged persistence he is dogged by persistent failure. His wife leaves him, and he voluntarily undertakes the burden of single parenthood. All of his capital is invested in portable medical devices that street people keep stealing. He is evicted from his apartment. His limited savings are confiscated by the IRS. He and his son end up homeless, vying and sometimes failing to get space in homeless shelters. Through all of this, he is working as hard as he can in an internship at a stock brokerage, competing against nineteen other applicants for the one available paying position.
This is a Hollywood movie based on the real-life Chris Gordon’s autobiography, so you know how it’s going to end. It’s the getting there that makes this film worth seeing. To say it is inspirational is a massive understatement.
I’d tell you to go see it, but I can’t imagine that anyone who cares about human achievement would not see this Read more
I first heard of the idea of memes in 1986 or so. Analogized to a gene, a meme is a transmissible idea. We’re apt to think of things like “Dood!” or “Dyn-o-mite!” when we think of memes — linguistic fads — but the idea can run much deeper than that. For example, the principle that it is better to die for your principles than to renounce them did not originate with Socrates, but because Plato made the death of Socrates famous, he essentially transmitted the idea that defines Western Culture. That’s a big deal.
On the flip side of the coin, the analogy to genes is troublesome, insofar as it implies unavoidable transmission and relative immutability. The United States was founded on the meme “rights,” but there was no one among the founders who would have thought in terms of a “right” to subsidized food or to a subsidized crop. The meme persists, but the original meaning is vastly diluted.
That much is me, a sort of mild taste/distaste relationship with the idea of memes. I’ll get over it.
This much is the RE.net: I have been tagged by Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato in what he says is a meme game. I don’t get why it is, but I don’t have to. I will play along because I like Jim, even though I detest party games, chain letters, etc.
My challenge: To tell you five things you did not know about me. My life is outrageously public, but — all appearances to the contrary — I don’t do very much to publicize it. If I tell you something about my life, it’s because I think it’s important to the point I’m making. Anything I don’t mention — I’d rather not mention.
So, here goes nothing. Five things you didn’t know about me:
- I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about and writing about political philosophy at a very arcane level. The school I work in is called Agorism or Market Anarchism or Anarcho-Capitalism, depending on who you talk to. My own philosophy is called “Janioism” (a meme!) after a character in the book Read more
Dear Abby:
I have two brothers and
two sisters; one brother
is a Realtor, the other was
just sentenced to death
for murder. My mother
died from insanity when
I was young. My two
sisters are prostitutes and
my father sells narcotics
to feed the family. Recently
I met a girl who was released
from a reformatory, where she
served time for smothering
her illegitimate child, and I want
very much to marry her.
My problem is this: If I marry
this girl, should I tell her about my
brother who is a Realtor?
Paging Doctor Tufte.
Richard Riccelli snagged this from Three Oceans Real Estate, but he’s too busy posting his FSBOs on Zillow to write it up…
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing
Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.
One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.
For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.
Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.
Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!
This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.
Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.
Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.
The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.
Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:
If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.
If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more
New contributor Richard Riccelli has already figured out the true secret to weblogging: Get somebody else to do it. Watch as he gets me to cite this smug essay by Michael Kinsley in Slate Magazine:
Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?
If so, we are all crazy now. There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It’s not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn’t wish on Hitler.
But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.
This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
Here’s my take: Kinsey’s insufferable vanity is sneering at the insufferable vanities of others. In the end, he is doing what they are doing, but Read more
Todd Tarson posted his Thanksgiving regimen, and I can identify with it even though our days will be very different. There is nothing I would rather do than work, so I just shoehorn it in where I can.
Cathy watches the parades, so she won’t mind me sitting at my desk for those few hours. We’ll take separate cars to her parents’ house so that Cameron and I can make our escape before our fidgeting becomes too pronounced. In truth, I like her family just fine, but there is a finite amount of time I can spend doing nothing.
Ayn Rand said, “Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.” This I completely endorse. I need to research a hardware issue, and the nets should wail today as everyone takes the day off.
Be who you are. Do what you want. Have what you love. Happy Thanksgiving!
All that is by way of introduction to a recommendation: The film Talk Radio by Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian. It’s the most amazingly brutal film I’ve ever seen, absolutely no let-up from start to finish. I have Bogosian’s original playscript, but the film screenplay is substantially richer. Moreover, Stone’s camera tricks are superb; the film plays huge implication games with reflections, focus-shifting, facial reactions, etc. Similarly, Stewart Copeland (of The Police) provides a deeply disturbing score. Finally, the actors — especially Bogosian as radio talk show host Barry Champlain — are outstanding.
The film is “based on a true story,” the last days of Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, as documented in the book Talked to Death by Stephen Singular. But “true stories” are omnipresent and banal, where art is the thing that won’t turn you loose. I defy anyone to even breathe in Act III of Talk Radio. The film builds and builds until the tension is so immense it envelopes the room. And then, just when you can’t stand it, Stone and Bogosian throw the most horrifyingly perfect five minutes of agony right in your face, and you sweat and the tendons in your neck pop and you strain and you strain and you strain, desperate to turn away. But you can’t turn away, you can’t stand what you’re seeing and you can’t bear to miss a second of it.
Hedda Gabler, always, and Ghosts, and the fourth and fifth acts of Hamlet. I can think of more examples, but not many more. Great art says, Read more
You come to me by twilight
In a gown of gauzy white
Your sacraments revealed concealed
High priestess of the night
You whisper vespers whisper prayers
Whisper vows of faith and fear
In still and silent grace you stand
As I in trembling awe draw near
I kneel in worship grasp your hand
Press it to my searing lips
Pray god to know the endless peace
Flowing from your fingertips
You come to me in night divine
Your glory lit by crowning gold
You consecrate by hungry glance
Devotion’s heat in evening’s cold
You come to me I kneel I stand
You lay me on the dewy ground
You guide my worship guide my hands
Lead my heart your heart to sound
You speak to me with loving grace
You catechize in passion’s glow
You reach you teach you seethe and burn
And I am blessed by truth to know
You come to me in gauzy gown
High priestess of the night
I lay in awe in faith in fear
Lifted to your heaven’s light
It happens this way every year at Halloween. The Suns have their season opening game, and I’m left home alone to parcel out the candy to the neighborhood children. I hope I’m not being churlish, but the Suns can score 15 points in the time it takes to hand out five KitKat bars. Phoenix will be ready to play and Kobe Bryant and the Four Dysfunctional Minions will not, and the exhbition of run-and-gun pyrotechnics will be awe-inspiring. What I get to see of it, that is…
Further notice: Arrrgh!! They played eight minutes of amazing basketball… in a 48 minute game…