• I want to be in a rock band so that I can have a highly-public falling-out with its leader over creative differences — music shorthand for who took the wrong drugs when.
• NFL coach-speak is an odd but highly-evolved dialect whose purpose is to kill time in mandatory post-game interviews while avoiding saying anything of substance. Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is a master of the form. Tomlin’s recent commentary on his team’s up-and-down performances: “We know it’s something we’re very cognizant of.”
• Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh has announced its tuition and fee schedule for undergraduates entering in the fall of 2016. Yearly tuition rises to $51,196 — standard room and board will cost $13,270. This is in addition to the activity fee, technology fee, transportation fee, media fee and orientation fee, which together total $1,114. Without textbooks, this comes to $65,580. When I entered college 45 years ago, the tuition was $2,500, including the $10 activity fee; room and board was $1,150. So, the cost of going to CMU has gone up 18-fold in the last 45 years (an annualized rate of 6.6%) while per capita income in the U.S. has increased only 10-fold in the same period. Small wonder that Bernie Sanders is popular among the young, educated and indebted.
• The reading list for my freshman “Literary Imagination” course was very formative and very 1960s: Slaughterhouse Five; Catch 22; Trout Fishing in America; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. None of those titles was written by a woman, nor did any of them involve strong female characters — Nurse Ratched excepted. In retrospect, what passed for literary imagination in 1970 was still pretty limited.
• One recent clue on Jeopardy referred to the 56-bedroom, 61-bathroom Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California. This led my wife to exclaim, “Who would want to clean all those bathrooms?” Though phrased in the form of a question, this was not the right answer.
• Three Georges, three aphorisms:
There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
— George Bernard Shaw
One cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.
— George Orwell
In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
— George Carlin
• When I was growing up, I had the impression that poet was on equal footing with barber, policeman or scientist as something a person might do for a living. That it was folly in me, thou mayst say! [Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 1610]
• As I write this, the U.S. stock market, as represented by its largest corporations, has fallen more than 10 percent below its long-term trend (see sidebar). Declines of this magnitude are referred to — by the financial community — as volatility. (Ordinary people call them losses.) Sudden drops in the market always bring out the financial pundits, telling the public to stay calm. As David Lebovitz of JPMorgan intones in Barrons, “To us, this recent sell-off looks more like a repricing, rather than the beginning of something more serious, and long-term investors should stay the course.” [My emphasis added.] Does no one else see the irony in Wall Street imploring the public not to sell, when the selling by Wall Street traders is the very reason prices are falling? I know precisely why the market is volatile: because these people are playing with other people’s money.
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Finally, a bit of nerd humor to zap your neurons. Last winter, a local personal weather station (PWS) reported an unusual reading (see image at right). As you see, the “feels like” temperature differs from the 3.7 ° thermometer reading by seven units in the sixteenth decimal place, an astounding degree of precision. How did they find someone with such sensitive skin?
