Advertising is legalized lying.  -H.G. Wells



$5.53 for 10 tablets
caved-in and tried lemon-lime Airborne

http://abc.go.com/shows/v



about:  the pilot

ON BEING FIRED AGAIN
by Erin Belieu

I’ve known the pleasures of being
fired at least eleven times—

most notably by Larry who found my snood
unsuitable, another time by Jack,
whom I was sleeping with. Poor attitude,
tardiness, a contagious lack
of team spirit; I have been unmotivated

squirting perfume ont　 o little cards,
while stocking salad bars, when stripping
covers from romance novels, their heroines
slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love—

and always the same hard candy
of shame dissolving in my throat;

handing in my apron, returning the cash-
register key. And yet, how fine it feels,
the perversity of freedom which never signs
a rent check or explains anything to one　 ’s family.

I’ve arrived again, taking one　 more last
walk through another door, thinking “I am
what is wrong with America,” while outside
in the emptied, post-rushhour street,

the sun slouches in a tulip tree and the sound
of a neighborhood pool floats up on the heat.



Tom
Dick
Harry

Averages play two tricks: first, they put life’s lumps and bumps through the blender.  It might be bedlam out there but, onc　e averaged, the world turns smooth.  The average wage, average house prices, average life expectancy, the average crime rate, as well as less obvious averages like the rate of inflation . . . there are ups and downs mixed into them all.  Averages take the whole mess of human experience, some up, some down, some here, some there, some almost off the graph, and grind the data into a single number.  They flatten hills and raise hollows to tell you the height of the land—as if it were flat.

But it is not flat.  Forget the variety behind every average and you risk trouble, like the man who drowned in a river that rose, he heard, on average onl　y to his knees.  So trick one　 brings a problem: it stifles imagination about an awkward truth—that the world is a hodgepodge of uneven variety.

Trick two is that averages pass for typical when they may be odd.  They stand for what’s ordinary, but can be warped by what’s exceptional.  They look like everyman but can easily be no one　.  They sound like they’re in the middle, but may be nowhere near.

The way to see through an average is to picture the variety it blends together.  An image might help make the thought vivid: “White, on average,” is what we would see by mixing the light from a rainbow, then sharing it equally.  But it is a wretched summary of the view.  It bleeds from the original all that matters—the magical assortment of colors.  Whenever you see an average, think: “white rainbow,” and imagine the vibrancy it conceals.  -Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life



arrive 10 to 25 minutes before to crank out

The subject of personal finance has become almost entirely removed from the study of economics, both in theory and in application.  We’ve come to think that economics is a topic reserved for college professors and experts, even though the origin of the word itself speaks more of personal finance than it speaks of things like gross national product and supply and demand charts.

The word “economics” comes from the Greek words oikos (pronounced ee kos) meaning “home” or “house,” and nomos, meaning “name,” “organization,” or “management.”  To the Greeks, an “oikonomos” is a manager of a home.  Economics isn’t about charts, graphs, interest rates, and indexes.  It’s about what you do on a daily basis to create a profitable, thriving, and sustainable home life.  The science of economics, then, is much closer to home than many of us think.  Not onl　y is it highly relevant to your personal finance, but it’s also actually based on personal finance.  A national economy is nothing but the reflection of individual and family economics.  -Garrett B. Gunderson with Stephen Palmer, Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity



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