{"id":12247,"date":"2016-01-16T21:20:55","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T02:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=12247"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:02","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:02","slug":"thoughts-at-large-xxx-to-all-my-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2016\/01\/thoughts-at-large-xxx-to-all-my-fans\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts at Large: XXX to All My Fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022 I want to be in a rock band so that I can have a highly-public falling-out with its leader over creative differences<\/em> — music shorthand for who took the wrong drugs when.<\/p>\n

\u2022 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.\u00a0 Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is a master of the form.\u00a0 Tomlin’s recent commentary on his team’s up-and-down performances: \u201cWe know it\u2019s something we\u2019re very cognizant of.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh has announced its tuition and fee schedule<\/a> for undergraduates entering in the fall of 2016.\u00a0 Yearly tuition rises to $51,196 — standard room and board will cost $13,270.\u00a0 This is in addition to the activity fee, technology fee,\u00a0 transportation fee, media fee and orientation fee, which together total $1,114.\u00a0 Without textbooks, this comes to $65,580.\u00a0 When I entered college 45 years ago, the tuition was $2,500, including the $10 activity fee; room and board was $1,150.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Small wonder that Bernie Sanders is popular among the young, educated and indebted.<\/p>\n

\"Course<\/a>\u2022 The reading list for my freshman “Literary Imagination<\/a>” course was very formative and very 1960s:\u00a0Slaughterhouse Five<\/em>; Catch 22<\/em>; Trout Fishing in America<\/em>; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest;<\/em> and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test<\/em>.\u00a0 None of those titles was written by a woman, nor did any of them involve strong female characters — Nurse Ratched<\/a> excepted.\u00a0 In retrospect, what passed for literary imagination in 1970 was still pretty limited.<\/p>\n

\u2022 One recent clue on Jeopardy<\/em> referred to the 56-bedroom, 61-bathroom Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California.\u00a0 This led my wife to exclaim, “Who would want to clean all those bathrooms?”\u00a0 Though phrased in the form of a question, this was not the right answer.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Three Georges, three aphorisms:<\/p>\n

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
\n— George Bernard Shaw <\/em><\/p>\n

One cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.
\n— George Orwell<\/em><\/p>\n

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
\n— George Carlin<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022 When I was growing up, I had the impression that poet<\/em> was on equal footing with barber, policeman<\/em> or scientist<\/em> as something a person might do for a living. \u00a0That it was folly in me, thou mayst say! [Shakespeare, Cymbeline<\/em>, 1610]<\/p>\n

\u2022 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<\/a> (see sidebar).\u00a0 Declines of this magnitude are referred to — by the financial community — as volatility<\/em>.\u00a0 (Ordinary people call them\u00a0losses<\/em>.)\u00a0 Sudden drops in the market always bring out the financial pundits, telling the public to stay calm.\u00a0 As David Lebovitz of JPMorgan intones in Barrons<\/a>, “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<\/em>.”\u00a0 [My emphasis added.]\u00a0 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?\u00a0 I know precisely why\u00a0 the market is volatile: because these people are playing with other people’s money<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \"Feels<\/a>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<\/a>).\u00a0 As\u00a0you see, the “feels like” temperature differs from the 3.7\u2009\u00b0 thermometer reading by seven units in the sixteenth decimal place, an astounding degree of precision.\u00a0 How did they find someone with such sensitive skin?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 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. \u2022 NFL coach-speak is an odd but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12247"}],"version-history":[{"count":73,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28282,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12247\/revisions\/28282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}