Love you so....................................

Lightnin' Hopkins............................Baby Please Don't Go

 

Second paragraphs..............................

     Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep.  Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania.  You probably heard of it.   You've probably seen the ads, anyway.  They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence.  Like as if all you did at Pencey was play polo all the time.  I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place.  And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says, "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men."  Strictly for the birds.  They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school.  And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all.  Maybe two guys.  If that many. And they
probably came to Pency that way.
-J. D. Salinger,  The Catcher In The Rye

When I become king............................

Congress and their minions will be subject to all the same rules and regulations as all us other folks.  If it is good for the regulatee it must be good for the regulator........

"For months massive discontent over a potential rise in out-of-pocket premium expenses under Obamacare has haunted Capitol Hill. Currently, the federal government pays 75 percent of the health insurance premiums for congressional staffers. Senators and representatives feared they would lose staff if this heavy subsidy disappeared as it was scheduled to do under the ACA. The White House, reportedly including the President himself, has now directly intervened to solve this knotty problem—for congressional staff, anyway."

"So congressional staffers will still be forced onto the health insurance exchanges, but they will get a subsidy much higher than average Americans in a similar situation would get. It’s a lot easier to look at Obamacare as a brilliant piece of legislation when you get its benefits without paying its costs."

Quotes, and more on the story, from WRM - here

Fifty years ago.........................................

The Secrets.....................................The Boy Next Door

 

Ruggedness....................................

"Nations fail, Augustine argued, because peoples fail, and peoples fail because they love the wrong things. A people defines itself by what it loves, and false love produces a frail and fragile nation. America's exceptional history as the only nation in the world with two centuries of political continuity stems from its people's love for individual rights, which they hold to be inalienable because they are granted by a power that no human agency dare oppose. 

"Americans selected themselves out from among the nations of the world to enter into the political covenant that is the American constitutional state. It succeeded because it is "a country with the soul of a church," as G.K. Chesterton observed. Individualism founded on God-given rights has triumphed over the alternative-the collectivist premise for the state in its various manifestations: Rousseau's "will of the people", for example, or Marx's proletarian dictatorship, or the blood-and-soil nationalism that led Europe and Japan into the world wars of the twentieth century. The only form of collectivism still embraced by a large part of the world's population is integralist Islam, which dominates most Muslim-majority countries."

-David Goldman, as excerpted from here

33 Guidelines for investing in real estate

Guideline # 18:   Have a professional team.

Have a TEAM.   A serious minded investor values the talents of a quality support team.  Team members include an attorney, an accountant, an insurance broker, a maintenance/handy man, and of course, a real estate broker.  Your support team will help you avoid most troubles.  For those troubles that cannot be avoided, you will be happy to have their support.

Never really thought about it that way.....

thanks Eric

Came the day.................................................

Jimmy Dean.................................................Big Bad John

 

Persistence......................................

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” 
-Calvin Coolidge

Opening paragraphs................................

Around Moscow, the country rolls gently up from the rivers winding in silvery loops across the pleasant landscape.  Small lakes and patches of woods are sprinkled among the meadowlands.  Here and there, a village appears, topped by the onion dome of its church.  People are walking through the fields on dirt paths lined with weeds.  Along the riverbanks, they are fishing, swimming and lying in the sun.  It is a familiar Russian scene,  rooted in centuries.
-Robert K. Massie,  Peter The Great:  His Life and World

Fifty years ago.........................................

Joey Powers.........................................Midnight Mary

 

33 Guidelines for investing in real estate.....

Guideline #17:  What you do, or don't do, matters.

When you buy stocks, bonds, shares in a REIT, mutual funds, rare coins, commodities, gold, art, or collectibles, you have invested your money, which is a very good thing.  Congratulations!  If you have purchased wisely, you can make significant gains.  It the markets appreciate, you can make significant gains.  Other than deciding to sell, your role after making such investment is passive.  You are at the mercy of "the market," that mysterious force.  You get to watch and wait.

Real estate is different.   As with all other investments, if you have purchased wisely and/or if the market appreciates, you can make significant gains.  But......real estate is not passive.  What you do truly matters.  By refusing to fix things that need fixed, by not taking care of things that need taking care of, by ignoring the needs of your tenant - you can make the value of your investment decline.  By fixing things that need fixed, by taking care of things that need taking care of, by tending to the needs of your tenant - you can keep the value of your investment stable.  By upgrading the property, by maximizing its potential use, by upgrading tenants and/or rents - you can make the value of your investment go up.

A regular periodic review of the investment property matters.  Is the rent appropriate for market conditions?  Are the expenses in line?  Are both you and the tenant following the provisions of the lease?  Is the property in sound condition?  What improvements and repairs are on the horizon?  Is the neighborhood around the investment holding its own?  Am I comfortable with continuing to own this investment?  These are among the questions you, as the active investor, need to think about and answer to your own satisfaction.

What you do, or don't do, matters.

On the joy of context......................................

Probably a re-run, but.............................

God bless the mind of Scott Adams

Asimov..........................................

Asimov said a whole lot of interesting things.  To wit:

“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.” 

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” 

"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death."

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” 

"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” 

"All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary."

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” 

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.” 

Come..............................................

Spirit...........................................................Morning Will Come

The toughest question of all..........................

via

Opening paragraphs.......................

On a winter afternoon, diving an inland lake, south of Orlando, every small thing was going right, far better than I had anticipated, but then it all went suddenly wrong in ways I could not have imagined.
-Randy Wayne White,  Deep Shadow

Ultimately............................................

"Ultimately, the kind of government that makes having children or starting a business risky life decisions is a failed government."
-Walter Russell Mead, as excerpted from here

Fifty years ago...................................

Bobby Rydell...................................................Forget Him

 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall....

                      Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun, 
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
The work of hunters is another thing: 
I have come after them and made repair 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone, 
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; 
And on a day we meet to walk the line 
And set the wall between us once again. 
We keep the wall between us as we go. 
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
We have to use a spell to make them balance: 
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
Oh, just another kind of out-door game, 
One on a side. It comes to little more: 
There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
If I could put a notion in his head: 
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it 
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down."  I could say "Elves" to him, 
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 
He said it for himself.  I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 
He moves in darkness as it seems to me.
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 
He will not go behind his father's saying, 
And he likes having thought of it so well 
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

-Robert Frost