2011 Road Trip Day 5 — Asheville to Charlottesville

Roads: US-19 North to I-26/US-23 N to I-81 N to I-64 E to US-29 North Miles: 362 Time: 5.5 hours The morn­ing was cold and clear after the front moved through dur­ing the night. The car doors were par­tially frozen shut, noth­ing that a lit­tle force couldn’t fix but still well below freez­ing. I had stayed


2011 Road Trip Day 4 — Knoxville to Asheville

Roads: I-40 Miles: 150 Time: 3 hours Today the front def­i­nitely caught up with me, phys­i­cally and men­tally. The tem­per­a­ture dropped sig­nif­i­cantly and the wind switched out of the north. When I left Knoxville it was rain­ing and it didn’t stop until about 7 PM. The drive through the Smok­ies was prob­a­bly very pretty but most


2011 Road Trip Day 3 — Bumming around Knoxville

The front I out­ran on Sun­day in Louisiana finally caught up to me in Knoxville and the weather turned rainy. Thank­fully, it hadn’t got­ten cold yet so walk­ing around wasn’t bad but all out­door activ­i­ties had to get shelved which is too bad since Knoxville is largely an out­door kind of place. The first stop


2011 Road Trip Day 2 — Birmingham to Knoxville

Roads: Inter­state 59 N — Inter­state 75 N Miles: 265 Time: 4 hours We’re elim­i­nat­ing the “Stayed” por­tion of our sum­mary because frankly, this place isn’t worth men­tion­ing. I started the day at the Birm­ing­ham Botan­i­cal Gar­dens. It’s a neat lit­tle botan­i­cal gar­dens, walk­a­ble in about 2 hours dur­ing the win­ter when there isn’t much to


2011 Road Trip Day 1 — Wylie To Birmingham

Roads: Texas high­way 205-Interstate 20 Miles: 652 Time: 10 hours Stayed: The Red­mont Hotel I left Wylie at 7:30 on Sun­day morn­ing in a pour­ing rain for the first leg of this trip. Even though the fancy new GPS told me to take 75, I drove the back roads to 205, tak­ing it into Ter­rell. At


Why the MF Global Bankruptcy Is Important To You

The priv­i­leged have reg­u­larly invited their own destruc­tion with their greed. — John Ken­neth Gal­braith If you fol­low the finan­cial news on a semi-regular basis, you know that MF Global, a futures fund run by Jon Corzine, for­mer gov­er­nor of New Jer­sey, went bank­rupt last week. If you don’t read the finan­cial news, well God


A Bedtime Story To Haunt Your Sleep

Imag­ine if you will a friend–perhaps imag­i­nary, per­haps not–who spends money as if it grew on trees. He buys things con­stantly, upgrad­ing to the lat­est and great­est, always dri­ves a new car. None of this is a prob­lem if he’s inde­pen­dently wealthy but let’s say he’s not. Let’s say he makes $40,000 a year but


An Exogenous Event

Last week, it appeared that some­thing of a plan, how­ever roughly sketched out, had been drawn up in the great Euro­pean debt cri­sis. Mar­kets around the world rejoiced with some­thing bor­der­ing on aban­don even though astute observers ques­tioned the lack of details in the plan. The plan revolved around bond­hold­ers tak­ing an approx­i­mate 50% hair­cut


What Occupy Wall Street Is Really About

The Repub­li­can response to the Occupy Wall Street move­ment is one of shal­low­ness and mis­un­der­stand­ing. It’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal in nature. Instead of seiz­ing on the anger that is clearly dri­ving OWS as well as the Tea Party, con­ser­v­a­tives are malign­ing the motives of indi­vid­u­als and miss­ing the entire point which is that peo­ple are sick and


Fall Tomatoes

I never get them planted early enough it seems and this year was no dif­fer­ent. They need to be in the ground by June 30th and while I was two weeks ear­lier than last year, I still didn’t get them planted until right around the mid­dle of July this year. The bru­tal sum­mer stunted some