Springing ahead this Sunday morning. And it’s π Day. Go on, have a piece of π.
Marvelous Marvin Hagler has died. He fought some amazing fights. He was our guy in the ring.
Stimulus checks are coming and Americans are in a spending mood. The textbooks say that when there’s money to be spent and a shortage of things that people want to spend it on, you get inflation. Optimists say the textbooks are wrong or that if it does happens we can manage it. I remember how long it took and how hard it was to rein in the Great Inflation of the late seventies so I wouldn’t take the threat too lightly. Maybe we need a Paul Volcker on standby.
Rick Steves, stuck at home, is hosting weekly virtual travel video nights. He does them on Monday evenings. Tomorrow, with appropriate timing, he’ll talk us through his guide to Saint Patrick’s Ireland.
I’ve always enjoyed and admired Graham Greene‘s writing. This essay by Scott Bradfield is a reminder to pull one his novels down from the shelf to re-read this spring.
And Lou Ottens, who invented the cassette tape, died recently. Those tapes were a big thing for my generation. It was how we compiled and shared music. But I wasn’t sad to see them go. As a medium they were inconsistent and quirky. The best thing I can say about cassette tapes is that they were slightly better than 8-tracks.