It’s the first week of April, and, if you’re a fan, you know that means it has been 155 days since the end of the World Series. I was going to entitle this “The Crack of the Bat” and talk about how the smell of freshly mowed lawns and hot dogs reminds one of baseball. About how doing yardwork is better while listening to an afternoon game on the radio. About MY team’s savvy trades in the offseason, or how my favorite player’s scooter had once again been stolen (#HunterGate2). But it does occur to me that not everyone likes baseball, which puts me in a quandary. Perhaps I need to explain baseball. But suppose you don’t like sports it all? It might be necessary to explain Why Sport? in the first place.
Sports premise number one. You are more likely to enjoy a sport if your local team wins, if your local team won when you were a child, if your college had winning sports teams, or if you or a family member played. If you are unlucky enough that there’s never been a good local sports team near where you live, and your parents/college didn’t follow sports, and you never played any, then it is possible — just possible — you are not fond of sport, any sport. The libraries and museums are just waiting to receive you. Note also an important corollary: If you love a sport, it does not follow that your spouse will love it. Spouses can often find better ways to use their time. Continue reading “‘Splaining Sports”
According to Infoplease, one convincing explanation was provided by Joseph Boskin, a Professor of History at Boston University. He linked the practice to the Roman emperor Constantine, when a group of court jesters told Constantine that they didn’t get enough respect and could do a better job ruling the land. The emperor decided to appoint a jester named Kugel as king for the day, and Kugel took the opportunity to pass an edict created an annual absurdity day. When Boskin’s story was widely reported in 1983, it sounded convincing. But, as it turned out, he was just being feisty with an Associated Press reporter who wouldn’t take “I dunno” for an answer to “Where’d the tradition start, professor smartypants?” So as a joke he’d made up the story and used the reference to “kugel” because the reporter was in New York and he thought, well, everyone in New York eats kugel, don’t they?… When the AP fellow asked him to spell “kugel,” he wondered if the joke would be taken seriously. It was.
Let’s tackle wealth first; it’s easier. The Millionaire made a very strong impression on me when I first read it 15 years ago. Since many have asked me how I have figured out how to leave the corporate world early, I would point to these principles. The book was based on large scale studies of affluent families and found that people accumulating wealth would probably not be recognized as such. They drive older cars, spend on few luxuries, and save the fruits of their hard-earned labor. They don’t tend to play the lottery but do understand the “miracle of compound interest.” They do take financial risk in keeping with appropriate rewards – save money, leverage money, but don’t gamble money. A key theme is to ignore “keeping up with the Joneses”: affluent people don’t purchase things because their neighbor has them.