Going Broke Peacefully

 
Couple holding hands

Let the world slide, let the world go;
A fig for care, and a fig for woe!
If I can’t pay, why I can owe,
And death makes equal the high and low.

— John Heywood, “Be Merry Friends”

According to Tahira Hira, a professor of personal finance and consumer economics at Iowa State University, a big source of money problems is that people just don’t know enough about their own financial reality:

They don’t know what they earn, they don’t know what it takes to live, and they don’t know their discretionary income.

That is so true.

Unfortunately, in my family, my wife is dead-set on managing the finances, despite the fact that her idea of financial “management” consists of writing checks when the bills come due.

I used to fight with her about that, but I’m a very sensitive person — I can’t live in an atmosphere of constant conflict — so at this point, I’ve just resigned myself to going broke peacefully . . .

Jack LaLanne at 88

 

From a Dateline NBC interview with fitness guru Jack La Lanne, who will be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Sept. 26, his 88th birthday:

Keith Morrison: A lot of people, once they start to get older, have things like strokes and heart attacks, high blood pressure, arthritis, those kinds of diseases that are associated with age. Have you had a heart attack?

Jack La Lanne: I can’t afford to. It’d wreck my image. I can’t afford to die, man.

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Useless and Pointless Knowledge

 

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge.

— Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues”
 

“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while–just once in a while–there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”

— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
 

Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

— T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”

Does an Elite College Really Pay?

 

This article concludes that the answer is no — that if you’re smart enough to get into, say, Princeton, you’re smart enough to make money wherever you go to school, even if it’s someplace a lot less expensive.

Not to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my kid get into an Ivy League school, but I’ve always thought that it’s no great feat to graduate “the best and the brightest” if you only admit the best and the brightest to begin with.

Baby Talk

 

One of my wife’s friends in Thailand has been trying for years to have a baby and finally did. Her typing and English are not so good, but her email I thought was quite affecting:

My girl, JOOK-KRU,is so young, so I want to spend most time for her. I had a little trouble in first 5 months pregnancy. Now I feel very good, I think big trouble in my life was gone. As you know We see docter for 8 years continuiously and spend a lot of money for the problom. We get her by IVF technique. She is healty , try to climb to upatairs, always make loud noise. I think she can call ‘ mae’ or ‘mama’ or ‘papa’ soon.

“Mae” means “Mom” in the Thai language. “Jook-Kru” means “little bird.”

The Difference Between Austin Powers and Citizen Kane

 

With as much fun as we had doing this one, and with how much everyone enjoys these films, we should at least get together and talk about doing another one.

— Canadian funnyman Mike Myers on Austin Powers in Goldmember

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

— Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, wiring from Hollywood to Ben Hecht in New York
 

History doesn’t record how much fun was had “doing” Citizen Kane, but as film buffs are no doubt aware, there never was a sequel.

Healing Power

 

“Healing power of sports” nonsense thoughtfully refuted:

If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.

Geometry or Epistemology?

 
Parallel lines?

With school starting up in a couple of days, my wife is trying to get our boy in an academic frame of mind . She has him doing some exercises from a geometry workbook and of course he’s not interested.

“I can’t tell if these lines are exactly alike,” he says.

Holds the book up to his face.

“They look exactly alike . . .”

Call me biased, but turning the whole exercise into a philosophical problem, rather than just saying “I don’t want to do this,” is a pretty sophisticated plan of attack for a 9-year-old.

At the Ballpark

 
— ESPN.com

Nothing like this ever happens when I go to the ballpark.

The story doesn’t give the woman’s height and weight — it may have been newsworthy in that 28-year-old women normally don’t keel over and die after a short run.

At least one paper elected — somewhat insensitively, I think — to run news of the woman’s death in a baseball roundup column, immediately followed by the mesmerizing news that the Blue Jays activated Carlos Delgado from the 15-day DL.

“Hiring the Best” Explained

 

An employer is always somewhat reassured by the ignominiousness of his staff. At all costs the slave should be slightly, even much, to be despised. A mass of chronic blemishes, moral and physical, are a justification of the fate which is overwhelming him. The world gets along better that way, because then each man stands in it in the place he deserves.

A being who is useful to you should be low, flat, prone to weakness; that is what’s comforting; especially as Baryton paid us really very badly. In cases of acute avarice like this, employers are always a bit suspicious and uneasy. A failure, a debauchee, a black sheep, a devoted black sheep, all that made sense, justified things, fitted in, in fact. Baryton would have been on the whole rather pleased if I had been slightly wanted by the police. That always makes for real devotion.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Related Links

Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002

 

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this,’ well, that would be enough immortality for me.

— Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra, a pioneer in computer science and structured programming, has died of cancer at age 72.

He was widely known for his note “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” — published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM — which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars.

(For an opposing viewpoint, see “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal.”)

Reportedly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will, by policy, no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice.

Use of titles of the form “X Considered Y” remains a persistent in-joke.

Another in-joke: Dijkstra and his wife enjoyed exploring state and national parks in a Volkswagen camper van called the Touring Machine.

Related Links

  • EWD Archive
    Dijkstra’s collected papers are maintained by the University of Texas at Austin.

Ironic Twist of the Year Award

 
Woman with squirt gun

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die . . .

— Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”

According to Slate, if NRA president Charlton Heston does in fact develop full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, California state law would compel him to surrender his firearms.

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