Gambling With Insurance

Let us ponder the concept of insurance.

The way I figure it, humans long ago figured out life isn’t fair. A guy spends a whole season cultivating his crop, and then it gets washed away by a flood just before harvest time. Lightning strikes a thatched roof and a family’s home burns to cinders — but the house across the lane, made of exactly the same stuff, is untouched.

After a few millennia of this kind of thing, somebody came up with an idea for easing the random cruelties of fate. Maybe this person addressed a council of tribal elders, or maybe he went door to door explaining his plan. “We don’t know where lightning will strike next,” he may have said, “but if everybody puts one guilder in this strongbox, we’ll have enough money to build a new house for the one who gets hit. Just think, it could be you! Wanta buy in?”

I Miss Mexico

It’s been there all my life, just across the Rio Grande. A good day’s drive from any town I’ve lived in, but a heck of a lot closer than New York or Washington, D.C.

Come to think of it, I’ve never been to D.C., and all I’ve seen of New York is the inside of an airport. But I’ve been to Mexico lots of times.

I’ve shopped and dined in border towns, built sand castles on a Yucatan beach, explored pyramids at Chichen Itza, ridden a train into the Copper Canyon, visited a Tarahumari village, taken my car on the hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, and hung out in a cantina in Boquillas del Carmen, next door to Big Bend National Park. Have you heard Robert Earl Keen’s song, “Gringo Honeymoon”?  That’s exactly how it was.

Texas Politics Makes NY Times

I'm still not ready to ruminate on the meaning and possible effects of last week's election. But Health Beat has had a few things to say. Today's post is about Texas! ... as described in the New York Times ... which reprinted a story from our own Texas Tribune. Ah, the Internet!

Here's a link to the original article.

Coming Into Los Angeles

Here in America, the election is over. In general, it seems that the loudest and shrillest voices won. I haven't begun to make sense of it all. So just for today, I'm sharing a piece that's not at all controversial, and is, I hope, just fun to read. Enjoy.

My spouse thinks he’s in an Arlo Guthrie song. He has never been to southern California, and I let him sit by the window so he can see the huge expanse of the city and its unending suburbs as we come down from the sky. I’m not a fan of big cities. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live here. But still, it’s something to see. I remember the first time I flew into this town, some twenty-five years ago. It was twilight. Strings of light crisscrossed the landscape like gold necklaces. Then we dropped a little lower, and I saw that each of those gold chains was a twelve-lane freeway.

There’s no such view for my husband’s first visit. Los Angeles is socked in, and we see nothing but clouds. Reasonably clean clouds, from the look of them. Maybe this is honest weather, and not just smog.