Money and Financial Business

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt

Short slideshow of small town libraries in Massachusetts. (From Information Junk)

“My mother and Norman Mailer were longtime friends. So it made sense that Betsy Mailer and I were roommates in our first year of college. On the big moving day, out of NYC to Princeton, Norman and Norris (Betsy's stepmother) and my mother Jean rented a car, packed us up and drove us the hour or so down the Jersey turnpike…”

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who." Vonnegut Tattoos: So it Goes. (Also there: Connect the dots)

How to Identify First Edition Pulitzer Prize Books. (Thank you, Tom K.)

Pulp fiction is perhaps the only genre as beloved for its cover art as for its prose

A Huge Depository of Unusual Literary Links Here

Tanya Rider, 33, spent more than a week trapped in a ravine off State Route 169. It's believed she ran off the road Sept. 20 while on her way home to Maple Valley from working overnight at a Bellevue Fred Meyer store

Missing for more than a week. Amazing she survived.

Tom Rider said that, though he has health insurance through work, his wife does not because she just recently started her jobs.

He has a job and health insurance.

She has a new job and no health insurance.

OK, what is missing here?

The Riders were working two jobs each to save money for a house.

Just another of the 45M or so who are uninsured.

People make decisions and choices. Sometimes it works in their favor, sometimes not.

Life is a gamble.

There's a Billy Joel song by the same title. "And so it goes." It's sort of a bittersweet song, one I identify with, corny as that may be, and a fitting way to ring out the year that has been bittersweet to say the least. At the beginning of the year I was a little cash poor and generally without a care, in June I hit a bus, a breakup and a turning point, in that order, in July I started this