E is for Earnings

While we look for harmonious balance, we are also creatures of change and achievement. We yearn also to count. Any youngster who approaches a pond with pebbles will toss them in and count the skips or try to hit the lily pad ten times. Or a crew rows by us on the river and we count the strokes. Well, maybe I just do because I was raised on Sesame Street. Remember The Count? Vun…doo…tree bats… ah.ah.ahh…

The river of time flows by, but we are compelled to stop and take reckoning every so and often, after a month, the year. What comes in, what goes out? Are we draining our resources or building a surplus?

Drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, “study of water passing and falling,” shown in kensycooperrider.com.

That’s the purpose of an Income Statement.

Continue reading “E is for Earnings”

Speaking of BS…

My father was a consummate BS artist.  He would tell stories about fellow soldiers pulling scams when he was in Germany in the 1950s or describe 45-minute solos taken by jazz musicians in the smoky nightclubs of Detroit. The exaggeration was part of the atmosphere. He could talk about going to the bakery at the Food Lion in Sarasota, and end up with a lengthy yarn which included fake southern accents and mishaps about Danish crates that fell off the delivery trucks.

See, right there, I’ve already lied.

What We Bloggers Do

Fellow blogger fivedotoh suggested a provocative question for today’s post:

How do you feel about people who always seem to exaggerate when relating a story? Do you equate embellishment with lying? As a blogger, when, if ever, is stretching the truth, other than when writing fiction, permissible?

Of course, I immediately thought of my dad. I also thought about a news story I read the other day about Duke University.  I was chewing over using it for this post but hesitating because maybe it would be too snarky. How about both?

My answer to this question is that there are Memoir Facts, Sarcasm/Snarky Facts, and then there are Fact Facts. As a blogger, I would feel entitled to use all three, yet in a way that the reader can clearly tell the difference.

I Only Lie 25%

At home, I occasionally find myself exaggerating, usually to win an argument with my spouse.  I will stop and correct myself, if I think it’s particularly unfair, although I’ve also been known to keep track and write down the number of indiscretions by the other person, which may win an argument but is not conducive to marital harmony. Now, if it’s a story about a particularly rude other person driving, everyone knows that you must exaggerate those stories because of the risk to your car and your very life. These are Memoir Facts which are highly likely to contain exaggeration. I went back and looked at some of my memoir blog posts, and I calculated. Continue reading “Speaking of BS…”

Fun with Tariffs

They’re in the news. They’re in our history. They’re causing massive churn in the stock market. They make my eyes want to roll back in my head. Like gremlins, those wacky, pesky tariffs are back to bother us again!

They even have funny names, like Smoot-Hawley, which has to be one of the more unfortunate names for a piece of legislation, or political theater, if that’s your preferred description for a tariff. The Tariff of Abominations from 1828 at least had a zing to it. Harmonized Systems sounds like something you listen to while floating in a hot tub, looking up at the stars. Even the possible origin of the word--Tarifa--might make you think of the sirocco whistling through an oasis of palm trees.

Smoot-Hawley was a name I could never remember, when I was a wee lass back in high school AP History. The Alien & Sedition Acts was a much easier moniker because that sounds like the title of sexy sci-fi thriller, doesn’t it?  Smoot-Hawley, nope; the long “o” and lazy “aw” sounds would make my eyelashes flutter faster than a hypnotist’s swaying watch. Filmmaker John Hughes understood this dynamic because he created one of the most famous teacher scenes ever filmed, in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Continue reading “Fun with Tariffs”