Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

A man and his wife tried and tried to have a baby, but without success. Years went by and they went on trying, but no luck. They liked each other, so the work was always a pleasure, but they grew a bit sad along the way.
    Finally, she got pregnant, was very careful, and gave birth to a beautiful eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy. The couple were besides themselves with happiness. At the hospital that night, she told her husband to stop by the local newspaper and arrange for a birth announcement, to tell all their friends the good news.
    First think next morning, she asked if he'd done the errand.
    "Yes, I did," he said, "but I had no idea those little notices in the paper were so expensive."
    "Expensive?" she said. "How much was it?"
    "It was eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I have the receipt."
    "Eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars!" she cried. "But that's impossible. You must have made some mistake. Tell me exactly what happened."
    "There was a young lady behind a counter at the paper, who gave me the form to fill out," he said. "I put in your name and my name and little Teddy's name and weight, and when we'd be home again and ready to see friends. I handed it back to her and she counted up the words and said, 'How many insertions?' I said twice a week for fourteen years, and she gave me the bill. O.K.?"

Did you hear about the jurisprudence fetishist? He got off on a technicality.

About creativity: "18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently." Excerpt:

While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here is one of 18 things they do differently.
    They daydream.
    Creative types know, despite what their third-grade teachers may have said, that daydreaming is anything but a waste of time.
    According to Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, and psychologist Rebecca L. McMillan, who co-authored a paper titled "Ode To Positive Constructive Daydreaming," mind-wandering can aid in the process of "creative incubation." And of course, many of us know from experience that our best ideas come seemingly out of the blue when our minds are elsewhere.
    Although daydreaming may seem mindless, a 2012 study suggested it could actually involve a highly engaged brain state – daydreaming can lead to sudden connections and insights because it's related to our ability to recall information in the face of distractions. Neuroscientists have also found that daydreaming involves the same brain processes associated with imagination and creativity.

More economic analysis: Joseph E. Stiglitz's "Stagnation by Design." Excerpt:

The basic point that I raised a half-decade ago was that, in a fundamental sense, the US economy was sick even before the crisis: it was only an asset-price bubble, created through lax regulation and low interest rates, that had made the economy seem robust. Beneath the surface, numerous problems were festering: growing inequality; an unmet need for structural reform (moving from a manufacturing-based economy to services and adapting to changing global comparative advantages); persistent global imbalances; and a financial system more attuned to speculating than to making investments that would create jobs, increase productivity, and redeploy surpluses to maximize social returns.
    Policymakers’ response to the crisis failed to address these issues; worse, it exacerbated some of them and created new ones – and not just in the US. The result has been increased indebtedness in many countries, as the collapse of GDP undermined government revenues. Moreover, underinvestment in both the public and private sector has created a generation of young people who have spent years idle and increasingly alienated at a point in their lives when they should have been honing their skills and increasing their productivity....
    Median real income in the US is below its level in 1989, a quarter-century ago; median income for full-time male workers is lower now than it was more than 40 years ago.

The year was 1955:
    "Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging 4 cents just to mail a letter?"

"Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $50,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn't surprise me if someday they'll be making more than the President."

"I never thought I'd see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. They're even making electric typewriters now."

Well, Florida has done it again! Today's headline: "Lethal Justice: State Attorney Corey far outpaces Florida's prosecutors in sending people to Death Row." Angela Cory has put more people on death row than any other prosecutor and they're all from Duval County, where I live. YET crime has not decreased and the cost is staggering. There is something suspicious about this prosecutor, almost manic! Lawsuits from employees, allegations of favoritism, mishandling of evidence in trials. This is a dangerous place to live. A place where too many UNARMED people are shot by the police. People have begun to protest and it's about time!

Limerick of the Week:

As some of our singers have lately sung,
to enjoy your day you don't need to be young,
    you don't need to have money,
    or to be very funny,
just wear tight pants and be very well hung.

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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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