“Calmly considered, I have no quarrel with intelligent people making use of the blog constructively.”
–John Simon, world’s meanest theater critic. This summer, the 85 year-old Simon, who has has written for newspapers and magazines for 50 years, called bloggers “the vermin of society.” But now–“like a giant tortoise from its shell,” to quote the tortoise himself–Simon has just launched his own blog, Uncensored.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, Brett Arends is looking at the possible repercussions the extension of the Bush-era Tax Cuts will have on an nation full of aging baby boomers. With the new Tax Deal expected to tack another $900 billion on to the national debt, the US Government may have to make big slashes in spending to keep its head above water. And whenever the words “big” and “spending” come up, the conversation immediately turns to Social Security.
If Social Security were axed, retiring Americans wanting to ensure that they won’t outlive their savings would have to purchase their own annual income annuities from private insurers to replace the monthly check they would typically receive from Uncle Sam.
A cool $128,000 can buy a 66-year-old man an annuity with a yearly income of $10,000. However, “only a third [of workers] have saved as much as $50,000,” which, if put into an annuity, would provide them with a salary of $54 a week.
Arends’s advice? Save up. “Starting about 20 years ago.”
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt.
“…[O]ne critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites.”
–Philosopher Francis Fukuyama, in an essay in the current issue of the “American Interest” re whether or not the U.S. is a plutocracy.
– Bernie Madoff is miffed that he spent all his stamps on that jar of toilet wine for nothing. (Gawker)
– “Precious Moments” figurines will always be the safest investment in Boca Raton. (CNN)
– Barbara Walters was only joking when she told Brian Williams that he’s feasting on her table scraps. (New York Post)
– Even Pat Roberston wants to tone down sentencing for marijuana possession. (Los Angeles Times)
– Billy the Kid may soon be just another fine, upstanding, law-abiding citizen. (Reuters)
– “Yes, Virginia’s great-great-granddaughter, there is still a Santa Claus.” (New York Times)
Stuff to talk about here. (New York Times)
In the current New York Review of Books, critic Helen Vendler has written a somewhat thorny review of “The Best of It,” the new collection from former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. But we get the full “After Zeno,” a lovely elegy that Ryan wrote for her father when she was twenty:
When he was
I was.
But I still am
And he is still.
–
Where is is
when is was?
I have an is
but where is his?
–
Now here–
no where:
such a little fatal pause.
–
There’s no sense
in past tense.
-Jimmy Carter goes with the “short answer” when discussing his biggest failures as president. (Big Think)
-Joshua Hammer airs out Nelson Mandela’s dirty Batik shirts. (The New Republic)
-Meghan Daum’s reality check on Larry King’s legacy. (Los Angeles Times)
-Early-detection Alzheimer’s tests are turning into a moral dilema for doctors. (New York Times)
-CNN and the Morgan Freeman death-tweet hoax. (New York Daily News)
-Scientists quit rehearsing their Yorrick monologues long enough identify the embalmed head of France’s King Henri IV. (Washington Post)
“Why would anyone be interested in wiggling?”
-My mother, on overhearing that my boyfriend is considering taking up whittling.
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
–Albert Einstein.
I wholeheartedly agree. At age 16, desperate to be liked by my peers, I was a bit of a goer, and managed to get myself kicked out of the boarding school, Hotchkiss, for party animalism. It took only a year or two more of maturation for me to crystallize many of my prejudices.
