For the 2nd time in as many months, my windshield got rocked while driving in Louisiana. Granted, it could happen most anytime and anywhere, but is more likely when the roads are disintegrating in real time— as they are in Louisiana.
Everytime I drive from Texas to Louisiana, I can’t help but think of the Haiti/Dominican Republic comparison. One side of the island, settled by the Spanish, is thriving, while the French side is a third world country.
Sounds familiar.
I had a theme song before Prime made theme songs cool. So, I got myself a personalized license plate proclaiming my theme song far and wide.
(Can it really be a theme song if it requires explanation?)
For any of you heathens people who aren’t big Gillian Welch fans (she’s on the Grammy winning Oh, Brother! Soundtrack), here’s a sample of the lyrics:
Oh me oh my oh, look at Miss Ohio
She’s a running around with her rag-top down
She says I wanna do right but not right now
Gonna drive to Atlanta and live out this fantasy
Running around with the rag-top down
Yeah, I wanna do right but not right now
Texas musician Miranda Lambert cut a cover of it:
Although, I have to say that driving to Atlanta is hardly a fantasy after spending a couple of years motoring down CA HWY 1 between Monterey and Big Sur.
The older I get, the less I want (Mark’s jubilant shouts can probably be heard in Alpha Centauri), so reminders of the good times that are less than 1/4” thick are most precious.
Although, my desire for physical belongings has lessened, in the spirit of Christmas, I wish for peace on earth and goodwill to all humankind.
The first thing I remember after quitting Wall Street is having a “Come to Jesus” meeting with my boss to clear up any mis-understanding I had about which embalming fluid to apply to ensure a deer head to is stuffed to specifications and able to withstand any appraisal.
I made the mistake of complaining about some age-related ailment to my mother. Her ominous response:
Just wait.
Mark and I met a bunch of Louisiana ex-pats in the North Carolina mountains. They said there was a hiking club. I said: I can hike uphill, but downhill is more of a challenge….
Tim, who reminds me a great deal of Dale from King of the Hill, said:
Just wait … until you can’t go uphill OR downhill.
His delivery was serious. It was so deadpan that I couldn’t help but laugh. But I was the only one. Everyone else recognized the Truth as it was spoken.
Tim has 50 gallon drums of food storage stocked up in a barn somewhere, whereas I want to go in the 1st wave of the apocalypse. Not only do I not have the ammo necessary to shoot any brain-seeking zombies or the fortitude to wring chicken necks, I don’t want to make my own toilet paper or distill my own liquor after growing my own corn.
Self-sufficiency is admirable, but so is the division of labor.
Les feux follet or will o’ the wisp. They were featured in Disney’s Merida and I saw some last weekend in the Pisgah National Forest.
Mark and I went on a guided tour with lots of other people around, but the next day decided to see if there were some moist, dark forests closer to home.
Watching darkness fall and mists rise through the mountain laurels with no phone signal was pretty spooky. Then, the birds settled in and stopped chirping, the wind died down, and the forest was silent. The kind of silence that makes you pray that no panthers, bigfeet, chupacabras, or other cryptid predators were lurking nearby.
I couldn’t send Mark off to check, because 2 widowships is a bad look for someone my age. Not to mention that I’d have no way to safely drive myself off this mountain because I’m still in flatlander mode.
The good news is that not only did we survive the wilderness, but we spent an hour surrounded by magical blue fairies.
The bad news is that we’ve quit playing the lottery (and so will never win), because we are overflowing with luck to have the opportunity to spend our summers in the mountains while we’re healthy enough to enjoy all of the activities.
It’s that time of the year again. School’s out, temps are up, and the planet of communication has stopped all its retrograde nonsense, hopefully in time to keep me from crossing ALL the lines at work.
Also, post Derby Day mint juleps, I’ve officially switched to tequila (with the occasional key lime pie drink*) until Labor Day, the official the end date of white shoes and seersucker suit season.
Side Note while I’m thinking about it: As the Dalai Laura, official representative of the Lauritarian political action religion, I need to announce the addition of a 4th plank to our minimalist platform. As a reminder, here are our lofty ideals:
So, here you have it, my return to blogging. Stringing nouns, verbs, and adjectives together to form a coherent, if not cohesive, narrative.
Namaste.
Let’s just start off with the fact that it’s spring break and I’m broken. My right knee imploded last week, and I have the MRI to prove it. No resolution on the problem, but I have an appointment later this week.
There are some things I want to say about the Silicon Valley Bank situation and the perceived “bailout.” The FDIC is covering deposits and I think that’s a good thing. This situation is not a just a California, VC tech bro problem. It’s not a case where individuals are just sitting on piles of cash and are too dumb or unsophisticated to figure out how to invest in Treasuries or the CDARs system. It is the case of some very large businesses, Etsy for example, that owe money to many smaller businesses.
Companies like Etsy have millions of dollars a day flowing through their company would need to have thousands of checking accounts in order to stay below the $250k threshold, which is a terrible, if not impossible, business practice. Or they’d have to bank at one of the top 3 banks that are “too big to fail.”
I do not like the scenario where businesses would have only 2 or 3 choices for banking (Bank of America, Chase, Citibank). We call this kind of concentrated model a monopoly, which is bad for consumers (me).
However, Etsy also seems to be something of a monopoly, but one that has been revolutionary for small business owners and artists who want to broaden the scope of their sales. I like having a central marketplace with some assurances that the sellers are legitimate, and a larger company can provide that.
These pros & cons are called tradeoffs and we make them every day in our personal lives, just not to the scale that the Fed and the FDIC are doing now.
The last we heard from Coy he was unable to attend the secret meeting of the 43rd annual convention of the Grand Mystic Royal Order of the Nobles of the Alibaba Temple of the Shrine because his motorcycle was stuck on the high dive at the motel swimming pool.
I’m pretty sure I found said motel in Nashville, AR. It’s right next to this Western Sizzlin’.
It’s been over 40 years since the Coy was blackballed by the Ilustrious Potentate and had to turn in his tie tack for conduct unbecoming a pillar of the community, and I thought people of a certain generation (me, it’s me) might be wondering whatever happened to Coy.
Did he leave town in disgrace? Join the Hell’s Angels? Marry that wilding red-headed cocktail waitress, settle down, and have a passel of free-range young-uns?
What happened next? Inquiring minds want to know.
My sense of humor is AWOL. It may have absconded on the Generals’ Highway between King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Forests at about 6,666 feet (give or take a few inches.)
It could be that similar to the cartilage in my knees, my funny bone was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of trying to leverage accounting into the realm of, if not humorous, at least minimally soporific. Standup economics isn’t as easy as this guy makes it look.
My well of giggles and happiness may have dried up while moving during the 100+ degrees of east Texas summer, but I can’t say for certain. It wasn’t in any of the boxes we unpacked.
No group has come forward asking for ransom money in exchange for the return of my ability to laugh at life, so apparently (and much to my regret) I put it some place safe.
The 2022 ACFE Report to the Nations reports that 42% of occupational frauds are initially detected because of a tip (p. 22). They also report that fraudsters are collaborating more and at higher levels of authority. And they’re overwhelmingly men– 73%.
Some of my accounting academic colleagues do whistleblower research and many times it’s a case of Boiling the Frog Slowly. Suh et al., 2020, note in their abstract that: “Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives’ fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context (the influence of social actors and contextual characteristics) and individual motivations collectively molded executives’ vocabularies of fraud immersion.”
In other words, the execs were influenced by those around them and by others in their distal social circle, enabled by ambiguity in the rules, and motivated by both social and individual needs (Suh et al., 2020).
This might sound familiar if you’ve been following recent news stories, more particularly the news about the publisher masquerading as a platform that allowed the Taliban and Vladimir Putin to have accounts but not the sitting U.S. President. That blocked and labelled the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as misinformation, but allowed chirps from flat-earthers.
SO WHAT?
I don’t know, but if recent history is anything to go by, then probably nothing.
Laura Alford @ Old Hwy Six West 