A Thousand Times No

I’m left truly speechless by the following paragraph, from a Los Angeles Times profile of Clint Eastwood prompted by the upcoming release of a new “Dirty Harry” DVD box set.

People ask him to autograph rifles, but Eastwood is no Charlton Heston. A vegan, he was distressed to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton boast recently about bagging a bird. “I was thinking: ‘The poor duck, what the hell did she do that for?’ I don’t go for hunting. I just don’t like killing creatures. Unless they’re trying to kill me. Then that would be fine.”

[sits with mouth agape]

There’s a new interactive game that manages to combine several of the things I’ve been writing about recently (superheroes, taxes, animation, fudge), all together in one place.

Budget Hero asks you to try to balance the federal budget, scoring you against your most important priorities and allowing you to compare your final budget with those of other players.  It’s an engaging, eye-opening way to learn more about what happens to all your dearly departed tax dollars, and to think through how things might be done differently in the future.

(Cape and theme music strictly optional.)

I stumbled across this howler today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a piece entitled “Diamonds losing luster in a tough economy“:

Theodore Johnson of Pennsauken said he had been collecting coins all of his life. Now 75, with children uninterested in his trove, he went to the Cherry Hill event and received $14 apiece for one-ounce silver ingots for which he had paid “maybe $3 apiece.”

“So getting more than four times the value which I paid is a good investment,” Johnson said with a smile. He said he would return to sell more of his collection of about 150 ingots.

Huh? Just how good an investment those silver ingots were depends on when the lifelong collector picked them up. If Mr. Johnson bought the ingots ten years ago, a quadrupling of his investment would represent a pretty healthy return. However, if he picked them up back when Nixon was in office, the returns would scarcely have kept pace with inflation.

I know this from checking against an online inflation calculator, but I could also guess just as much by running a back-of-the-napkin calculation, thanks in great part to one magic number: 72.

The so-called “Rule of 72” provides a fast-and-dirty method for calculating how quickly an investment will double in value. Take an annual rate of return, divide 72 by that number, and you’ll get the approximate number of years it would take for something to double. For example, if I assume a steady 8% annual return, I can expect my investment to double in about 72/8 (nine) years. In another nine years, it would double again, giving me four times my initial investment over 18 years.

Sliced another way: if the cost of living increases by 3% annually, I can expect things to double in price over the course of 72/3 (twenty-four) years. It never ceases to astonish me how many online retirement calculators overlook this key element in their computations. “You can have a million dollars when you retire!” Yeah, that’ll be mighty helpful if you have to drop $10 for a loaf of bread by the time you get there.

The Rule of 72 also crunches out some scary figures when it comes to credit cards. If you pay 18% interest on your credit card, any unpaid debt you’re carrying doubles over the course of 72/18 (four) years. Yikes — we don’t even turn over U.S. senators that quickly.

We see examples every day of symbols being used to provide warnings to people who are illiterate. What would things look like if we did the same for people who were having a little trouble getting their heads around numbers?

This morning I called the Internal Revenue Service to follow up on a discrepancy in my taxes (I had arrived at one number, while the IRS arrived at another). Get this: the customer service was great!

Here are some of the ways they made things run smoothly:

• Strong, web-based self-service
  I’ve gotta say, the IRS was way, way out in front when they started providing downloadable, fillable PDFs years before that become common practice in the commercial sector. So I should have guessed that I could simply use a secure login to immediately obtain a detailed description (down to the line item) of where the government’s calculations diverged from mine. But I was still pleasantly surprised anyway.
• Clear contact instructions
  There it was, plain as day: “Call this toll-free number, this extension, between these hours. Keep the following code handy.” No hiding behind an obfuscating web form or a torturous chat interface.
• Accurate wait estimate
  I was placed in a phone queue when I called, and told up front how long I could expect to wait (while listening to “Swan Lake”). The estimated wait time of 15 minutes was extremely close to my actual wait time; I simply activated the speakerphone on my handset and read the morning news. Being told what to expect made the time fly far faster than being placed on hold for much shorter periods of time with no guidance.
• Highly professional staff
  Pleasant, patient, extremely knowledgeable, answered every one of my questions without missing a beat.

I have to say, this puts a whole new spin on the phrase “Good enough for government work.” Uncle Sam just left the majority of my regular billers in the dust.

I returned to work today after a long holiday weekend to learn that the separate apartments of two colleagues had been hit by the same three-alarm fire in the city on Friday night. One colleague had his apartment door kicked in by a fire crew as they rescued his soot-covered, frightened, but still-healthy cat. The other lost everything.

Okay, all you lurkers who rent. You know what to do. If you’re local, I’ll even help you place the call.

Okay, so I made a huge batch of fudge last week with an experimental new recipe. Six simple ingredients: butter, cocoa, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, walnuts, and…Velveeta, which is described as “pasteurized prepared cheese product” on the box. It sounded so completely crazy (and borderline revolting) that I had to try it.

Of course, it worked like a charm. No dummies they, the food scientists at Kraft! Fudge relies on the smooth integration of milk solids and sugar crystals, and the infamous “Velveeta Fudge” recipe allows cooks to bypass the delicate temperature calibration required to make fudge through more traditional means. The milk solids in Velveeta have been so thoroughly homogenized that they can morph into cheese fondue or chocolate fudge on command. (”No way!” “Whey!”)

In the end, it’s not so difficult to wrap your head around the concept. Just open your mouth and say “Ah…”

Confession: I’m a gear junkie. If something is vaguely gadget-like, there’s already a reasonable chance that I might covet it. Should that item actually serve some functional purpose, my resistance is virtually nil. (Witness this past Friday.)

I’m not sure, then, how I managed to live until now without owning a pair of arm warmers. They’re used by cyclists to supplement short-sleeve jerseys — essentially, they’re a traveling pair of close-fitting long sleeves. Last month I bought a set that was being cleared out from a local sporting goods store at half price. “These will come in handy some day,” said the Tiny Rationalizing Voice in my head.

That day was today. Despite our warm and sunny afternoons, the mornings and evenings here are still crisply cool. After biking across town this afternoon to visit friends and have dinner, I needed to pedal back home around sundown. My blood had made a post-prandial beeline for my stomach, and I would be riding in along a heavily shaded creek bed for much of the route. I would feel quite chilly in short sleeves. Ding-ding-ding: Gear alert!

I broke out the arm warmers, which are solid black in color. Unlike the loose-fitting knitted leg warmers of the “Flashdance” era, today’s arm warmers are spun from nylon and Lycra. I felt a mix of purposefulness, self-consciousness, and excitement as I pulled them on.

Then I looked down at my hands. The black arm warmers flowed right down over a pair of black, knuckle-length biking gloves that I was wearing. I couldn’t help but laugh, because between the limb getup and my Fat Cyclist jersey I looked like a leftover superhero: Pudgy Ninja! Fighting the forces of ectomorphism!

Fortunately, this did mean I had the power to stay warm on my return trip. Armed with the technical gear (and the adipose), I had it covered.

“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” — Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking with the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Well, actually, we don’t all remember. Many of us are able to retrieve this piece of information as a historical fact, the way that we know the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. But almost no one in this country under the age of 45 has a vivid personal recollection of the tragic events of that time: where they were when they heard the news, how the public and the press responded, the subsequent national mourning and grief.

“Even as our generation grows older,” one of my friends remarked when we were in college, “people still think of us as young because we don’t remember the assassinations of the 60’s. We missed the signal events of the last several decades.” These days, I work at a university, and some of our students now have parents who are too young to recall the day when RFK died.

If, for the sake of argument, we use the widely accepted definition of the Baby Boom as our guide and say that anyone born on or after January 1, 1965 would be considered too young to clearly remember the events of June 1968, here are some people we could expect to have a “junior moment”:

• Economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt
• Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling
• CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper
• Current James Bond star Daniel Craig
• D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee
• Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal
• Top-grossing independent film director Tyler Perry
• The founders of Google, Yahoo!, and eBay

Every one of these individuals is too young to personally remember Bobby Kennedy’s untimely demise at the age of 42 — because they’re all no older than 42 themselves.

It may be difficult for us to imagine at the moment, but someday there will be voters who have no personal recollection of where they were on September 11, 2001. Watch for them starting in 2016, just two presidential terms from now.

After kicking off her holiday weekend by whiling away the latter part of the afternoon happily shopping and noshing with me, my friend was trying to figure out the best way to catch the next train out of the city to her neighborhood. On a hunch, I called PhillyCarShare to ask if the new Smart Car I had spotted this morning on my way to work was available. About 15 minutes later, my friend and I found ourselves peeking out from the inside of the ne plus ultra of hypercompact vehicles.

“It feels really…, uh, open,” my friend commented with a hint of nervousness as we first rolled out into traffic. “I’m feeling a little vulnerable here,” she added.

By contrast, the wide peripheral view in the car felt completely comfortable to me. In part, this was because I was the driver, so the car was responding to my steering and I could anticipate how the vehicle was going to maneuver. But I think it’s also a reflection of how much time I spend in city traffic as a cyclist, separated from autos, trucks, and buses by mere inches, without the insulation provided by an enclosing wall or window.

My experience as a cyclist came in handy driving the Smart Car, because it responds to the street like a bicycle. Every ripple in the road, every seam, every expansion joint, can be felt pulsing up through the car’s wheels. Potholes that would be smoothed over by a kinder, gentler suspension actually pitched the Smart into the air several times. (Yes, it smarted.)

“I know someone who tried it out and said it felt like driving a car while you’re taped to the front bumper,” another friend commented.

More like being the captain (front rider) on a tandem with a sluggish stoker (back rider) who didn’t get a good night’s sleep or eat a balanced breakfast, and who audibly groans each time you need to roll up a steep hill — only shorter, and with smaller wheels. As with a tandem, expect points, stares, and smiles.

This evening I ran into an old college classmate whom I hadn’t seen in well over a decade. She used to live around the corner from me in our dorm, turning her room into a shrine to Billy Idol and sporting a hot pink satin jacket with “Girls’ School Death Squad” emblazoned across the back. It turns out that we live in the same neighborhood in the city, though we hadn’t spotted each other around town. (Perhaps some pink satin would have made it easier? Or if I wore my bunny-head earmuffs from that era?)

These days she is a director of…[wait for it!]…risk management.

I told her that I was literally reading about her this morning in our alumnae magazine, looking at photo of her next standing to a great-looking foreign sports car. I confessed to her that this all took place in my bathroom, and then I regaled her husband with tales of how she was entrusted with the task of taping the latest student government minutes to the inside of the bathroom stall doors in the dorm.

“We were a captive audience,” I told him. “Once she started doing that, everyone stayed well-informed.”

Considering how prophetic all this Chamber of Secrets reading is turning out to be, I should probably start stocking my bathroom with more materials on lottery numbers and world peace.