Who to marry: Esolen’s rules:

Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: The Rules

So then, whom could you marry? A long time ago we came up with something we called “Esolen’s Rules.” They’re only half facetious. But they are an attempt to get at the normal:

1. Don’t marry a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs.  You may marry a woman who doesn’t like either, or whose reason for not liking dogs is that one of them bit her when she was a toddler.  But a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs will be a Joan Crawford or Jane Wyman.  Ronald Reagan married Jane Wyman, and look how sorry he was about that.

2. Don’t marry a man who is neater than you are.  You may, however, marry a man who polishes his tools and puts them away after use….

3. Don’t marry anybody, man or woman, who says, “I’m going to call you at eight,” and then leaves you waiting by the phone for an hour.  Exceptions can be made for people who are kidnapped by Arabs, or who have epileptic seizures.

4. Don’t marry anybody who insists on a separate bank account, bed, bathroom, vacation, or zip code.  It makes no sense to be one flesh and two wallets.

5. Don’t marry a woman who spends more on makeup than she does on food.  In general, don’t marry a woman who engages in the sin of reverse gluttony.

6. Don’t marry a man who does not like dogs.  Such men do not like children.  Don’t marry a man who does not like children.  On the other hand, I have known at least one excellent man who thought he didn’t like children, until he had some; seven, I think, at last count.  Perhaps the rule may be rephrased: Don’t marry a man whom you cannot imagine rolling on the ground in a wrestling hold, with a Labrador retriever or three children, or hollering on a ferris wheel, with a Labrador retriever or three children.

7. Don’t marry a woman who exercises so frequently that you cannot tell if she is a woman or a very strange looking 13-year-old boy.  I’m going out on a line here, but the real purpose of the rule is to determine whether she will mind getting fat, as happens when you are going to have a child.  In other words, don’t marry a woman whom you cannot imagine having a child.  Do not marry a woman who does not like children.

8. Do not marry a man who treats his mother or his sisters discourteously.  As he treats his mother, so will he treat you.  But by all means do not marry a man who takes his direction from his mother, or who is ruled by his mother’s ambitions.  Mama’s boys are unhappy, and they make their wives unhappy too.  So are the mothers of mama’s boys, come to think of it.  Unhappy days are here again.

9. Do not marry a woman who sneers at innocent male pastimes, such as football.  Such women do not really enjoy the company of men, and after a period soon reached, do not enjoy the company of their own husbands.  They are also the most ignorant of what men are really like.  You may marry a tomboy, so long as she’s a girlish tomboy and doesn’t take the sport with dreadful seriousness.  You may marry a Daddy’s girl, so long as she is not spoiled when it comes to money.

10. Never marry anyone who is secretive about money.  Such people are also secretive about sex.

11. Never marry a man who lets you take the initiative in everything.  You want a jellyfish, maybe?  You want Burt Lancaster instead.

12. Never marry a woman who never lets you take the initiative in anything.  You want a porcupine, maybe?  You want Maureen O’Hara instead.

13. Never marry a woman who does not laugh at your jokes or your buffoonery.  That is one of the nicest ways in which men “serve” women, and women respond by taking delight in the antics.  That is why God made impersonators of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson.  It may in fact be the principal justification for the existence of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson.  This rule is simply an instance of the more general rule that you should never marry a woman who does not genuinely admire you, nor should a woman marry a man whom she does not admire.

14. Never marry anyone who delights in “exposing” you in public.  Teasing does not count; in fact, never marry a man who cannot be teased.  You can marry a woman who cannot be teased.

15. Never marry a man who is not admired by respectable male friends.  The people in the world who know a man best are the men he works and plays with.  They know well if he is a cheat, a thug, a loser.  You may marry a man who does not have female friends.  If anything, you should be suspicious of a man whose friends are principally female.  The men may be avoiding him, and there is a reason for that.

16. Never marry anyone who is not interested in looking at your fourth-grade yearbook.  This means: never marry anyone who seems unaware that he or she is marrying also a family, a hometown, a past, silly friends, comedies and tragedies.  Never marry anyone who does not want to meet your father and mother.  If your sister doesn’t like him, dump him.  If your sister doesn’t like her, dump her.  That is why God created sisters.  Their approval, however, is not a sufficient condition; they will occasionally like losers, but they almost never detest good marrying material.

17. Never marry a feminist of either sex.  That would be as bad as marrying someone with the soul (not the occupation, but the soul) of a lawyer.

18. Never marry anyone whom you catch in a lie, even a little one.  Trust us on this one.  People in love are about the most gullible creatures on God’s green earth.  In fact, beside the dictionary entry on “gullible” there’s a picture of a woman in love, eyes looking dreamily upward, hands holding her chin; and a picture of an indignant young man defending the honor of his beloved, who would never do such a thing, no sir!

19. Never marry a woman who does not like to feed people, or a man who does not like to help out with the removal of a junked car, regardless of how much he knows about junked cars.  By all means marry a woman who enjoys seeing men eat, or a man who looks at a mudslide and says, “I can make a really fine wall out of that.”

20. Never marry anyone, man or woman, who scoffs at virtue, who reduces “good” and “evil” to arbitrary counters in the war of all against all, whose humor is flippancy, who looks down upon janitors and maids, who cannot delight in making simple things (like a batting T or a thank-you note), who thinks tradition is old and shopworn (such people are followers of every fad that comes), and who is never, ever, just relaxed, grateful for a shady seat under the maple tree in fall.  That is another way of saying that you should never marry anyone who does not know who God is.

Drawing, by John Berger: “how has… [the face]… become the face it is”

All creation is in the art of seeing – Times Online

But now, because you asked me what drawing was to me . . . when you are drawing, anyway when you are drawing something which is alive, you are drawing the traces of what has happened to it until that moment at which you are looking at it. I mean, the traces of how it has physically become itself. 

For example, if it’s a face, how it has, by its experience or the soul behind it, become the face it is. So the drawing is, it seems to me, an observation of how the thing that you’re looking at has become itself. And that of course does have a lot to do with what we’re talking about — and storytelling.

False Dichotomies

Politicians love them.  This season’s false dichotomy is “change” versus “experience”.   In real life, of  course, everyone knows that experience is precisely what allows one to distinguish good change from bad change.

Haiku 1: Autumn

A great wind

bent the yellowed corn.

It’s still bent.

Dear Sarah: Challenge the premise.

Everybody else is giving Sarah Palin advice so I will too.  Mine is something you’d think would be covered on Day One of Politician School, but apparently the McCain people haven’t gotten around to it yet.  Drum roll, please: if you answer the question, you endorse the premise. And you’ll regret it in the follow-up.

That single principle will catapult Sarah Palin back into the stratosphere if she would just grasp it.  Watch her in the interviews and you can see her hyper-competitive nature has her thinking she must answer and achieve direct victory on every. single. question.  Which is like thinking the only way to fight is to march trumpets blaring into the enemy stronghold with one hand tied.

The examples are numerous and obvious.  Why accept the premise that she needs to have encyclopedic knowledge of McCain’s past legislative history, when the conversation is already about his recommendation on a present and pressing crisis?   Why accept the premise it is important to be familiar with “the Bush Doctrine”?  Just because the Washington press corp think these are important questions doesn’t mean they are.  They aren’t t to me, they would never be important, before they were asked, for 99% of all Americans, so they represent Trivial Pursuit for the few people who spend their days inside the Beltway trying not be bored.   I’m sure these questions represent  premises that are not important to Governor Palin.  Who cares if she loses the vote of the wonk class?

I know, I know, it is freshman-level logic.  But we apparently need to cover it.

The truth is, every question, in every conversation (not just “debates” or “interviews”) is,  first, a statement about what the questioner has decided is important about the subject.  There is no logical or moral compulsion to buy that prior decision.  In fact, to do so wastes everyone’s time.

Jesus seldom answered the question.  His reluctance to do so was not a “tactic”, not some coy maneuvering, but simply moral clarity.  He had the clarity to see what the question said about the questioner, and He wanted to talk about that, instead.

Note – this is not the common politician’s trick of changing the question to his talking point for the day.  That is a tactic the politicians learn from the PR flacks and it irritates us all.  I’m not talking about changing the subject.  I’m talking about engaging the subject by re-fashioning the premise.

Journalists hate this, because the assumption that their premises are sacred is the only leverage they have to control the conversation (any conversation that is controlled is a fake conversation).  They also hate this because it quickly makes the conversation personal, and they hate the thought that their premises have anything to do with their personal bias.  They enjoy, as an occupational handout,  the unique fiction that their premises are  what all rational people think.   Nice work if you can get it.

Sarah: if you answer the question, you endorse the premise.

Risk stories don’t sell

The Conglomerate Blog: Business, Law, Economics & Society

I would argue that at least given what we know now, the 2008 financial crisis is a risk story. Different individuals and firms underassessed the risk of certain financial transactions and products. Homebuyers underassessed their ability to refinance mortgages and the potential appreciation of their homes; mortgage lenders underassessed the potential appreciation of collateral and credit risk; mortgage asset-backed security buyers underassessed the risk of those products; financial firms entering into credit default swaps to hedge the risk of those products underassessed counterparty risk; and so on. Although the system was meant to reduce overall risk of mortgage lending, the system could not withstand the shock to its system when housing prices fell. (Think of it as all the nation’s insurers selling hurricane insurance, and then several hurricanes hitting at once. And, unfortunately, those insurers weren’t regulated and required to maintain reserves.) If this is just a risk story, then regulation just needs to backstop the risk for these “perfect storm” “once in a century” types of shocks. Some risk stories don’t even need regulation — think of the “take or pay” cases from the 1980s between pipelines and producers of natural gas who never envisioned that demand would be less than supply of natural gas.

But of course, risk stories don’t sell. They don’t sell to the media, the regulators, the investors or the voting public. Surely mispricing of risk couldn’t cause this collapse, could it? If we’re going to put $700 billion into fixing the system, then the problem has to be as big as the cure. In other words, the bailout only sells if there is a fraud story. Our markets are efficient, and efficient markets price risk well, if not perfectly. If there was mispricing of risk, that must have been because there was fraud in the system. So, enter the FBI. The FBI is now investing not only Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but also Lehman Brothers and AIG for “misstatements.” According to one unnamed government official “it was ‘logical to assume’ that those four companies would come under investigation because of the many questions surrounding their recent collapse.” If there is one thing that we may have learned from the “Enron debacle,” it’s that federal prosecutors tend to find what they are looking for. Although, Attorney General Mukasey has said there will be no “2008 Financial Crisis” task force, a la the 2002 Corporate Fraud Task Force. Stay tuned.

Sabi

What Is Wabi-Sabi?

Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time.” It connotes natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, rust-the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled. It’s the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word’s meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, “to be desolate,” to the more neutral “to grow old.” By the thirteenth century, sabi’s meaning had evolved into taking pleasure in things that were old and faded. A proverb emerged: “Time is kind to things, but unkind to man.”

Sabi things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the yielding gray of weathered wood, the elegant withering of a bereft autumn bough. An old car left in a field to rust, as it transforms from an eyesore into a part of the landscape, could be considered America’s contribution to the evolution of sabi. An abandoned barn, as it collapses in on itself, holds this mystique.

There’s an aching poetry in things that carry this patina, and it transcends the Japanese. We Americans are ineffably drawn to old European towns with their crooked cobblestone streets and chipping plaster, to places battle scarred with history much deeper than our own. We seek sabi in antiques and even try to manufacture it in distressed furnishings. True sabi cannot be acquired, however. It is a gift of time.

Bush’s “neglect”: from November 2003

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

NYT editors, send everyone home, your work is done.

The Daily Gut

SARAH PALIN’S MURDEROUS WEB OF DEATH

Edited from the Gibson interview: “…an unladen swallow..”

This portion of the transcript was found on the floor at ABC news by a night janitor:

Q:  “So, silly girl, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

A:  “In what respect, Charlie — an African swallow or a European swallow?”

Then there was a jotted note in Gibson’s handwriting — “I guess she dodged that bird (sic) but does she weigh more or less than a duck?  We’ll see how smart that witch is.”

H.T. Chris Muir, see strip for Sep 14

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/