Category: Fourre-tout

Batten down the hatches! Prepare for stormy weather… After a multitude of hurricanes battered the American soil insurances companies are readying to cover… themselves.

Today, you would not dream to live without insurance. Health, car, fire, flood, travel, pet insurance… Name it, there is an insurance for it. But what exactly is ”insurance”? According to various dictionaries, it is defined as follows:

“A practice or arrangement by which a company or government agency provides a guarantee of compensation for specified loss, damage, illness, or death in return for payment of a premium.”

 Everything looks great on paper, until disaster hits. That’s when you discover the notorious “fine print” tucked at the end of a lengthy document… it tells why you won’t be compensated fairly and squarely.

No matter how long and how much you paid, the insurance company will find plenty of reasons for denying coverage or raising your premium.

I have been with the same car insurance company for 31 years. I never had an accident. Two years ago, while pulling out of our mutual parking spots, my neighbor and I rear-ended each other. A casual fender bender. Despite my long stretch of accident-free years, my premium immediately jumped up.
What about all those accident-free years? Isn’t worth something? Sorry mate, it does not count!

To me, an insurance policy is like a Ponzi scheme, where the operator constantly collects money from new investors to pay old investors.
It is a calculated gamble. The insurance company gambles that it won’t have to pay you anything for a long time (preferably forever) while pocketing your money.
But if coerced to pay, it will find be a multitude of reasons to penalize you.

My heart goes out to the residents of Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico who lost practically everything in successive storms. Despite solemn promises, it will take a very long time (if ever) for victims to be compensated.

When you look carefully at your insurance policies, you realize that what they protect best is the insurance company.

But to be able to sleep at night, you need to continually feed the hungry beast. If you dare to stop, you will lose everything. All the money that you have already paid and some eventual coverage.

But cheer up… If you are lucky, POTUS might toss you a few rolls of toilet paper.

Alain

Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration. Apuleius

Recently, numerous accounts of athletes refusing to stand for the National Anthem have grabbed the headlines.

I understand how this position can hurt the feelings of many Americans, especially the veterans of foreign wars. But personally, I believe that too much familiarity leads to disrespect. When the National Anthem is played too frequently, it loses its special aura.
To keep its cachet, it should only be performed on solemn occasions, not in every stadium, state fairs or rodeos.

Human beings have been conditioned to only show reverence for rarity. Playing The Star-Spangled Banner too often cheapens its value.

All objects lose by too familiar a view. John Dryden

There are many ways to voice political concern and shunning the National Anthem is not one of them. It is too divisive. It makes immediate enemies of people otherwise united by a common passion.

Politics is like religion. It does not belong at the dinner table, the bedroom or the arena. It is toxic and destructive.

If you are famous and want to express a political point of view, it is better to call a press conference. Spoiling a public event for thousands is not the way to rally people to your cause.

Politics should be excluded from sports, especially when brought to the fore by very well paid athletes. A jock is basically an actor, paid to entertain the public.

Can you image a thespian intoning:

“To be or not to be that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles…”

and kneeling for a few minutes before continuing his soliloquy? I can already hear the boos and catcalls…

Athletes should do what they are (very well) compensated for and leave the National Anthem and politics out of the entertainment sphere.

Alain

Mistress… Curiously this word rhymes with stress, underlining the fact that a liaison can indeed be very stressful.

I recently read in AARP magazine an article by Joe Queenan called “Men who don’t cheat”.

Here is an excerpt:

“Men like to plop down on the couch and watch sports and drink beer. Romance, by contrast, is labor-intensive; you have to shower, shave, put on something other than sweatpants, buy flowers, go to the movies, read a book every once in a while, engage in a conversation.
Cheating on your wife involves travel, dinner reservations, booking hotel rooms. Once a man has been married a few decades, the energy he would need to expend on an extramarital affair would be a life-threatening shock to his nervous system. That’s why so many older men wouldn’t even think of cheating on their wives. It is too exhausting.”

This is true. For some men (just like some dogs) the chase is way more exciting than the catch. Once they have caught their prey, they quickly lose interest in it.

“Next to the pleasure of finding a new mistress is that of being rid of an old one.”  William Wycherley

The pursuit is often a way to reassure an aging person that he is still a “player”; that he still can please and seduce.

But for a married man, keeping a mistress is a luxury that few can afford. It is time-consuming and costly. And with the advent of the tell-all smartphone, it has become increasingly difficult to keep an affair under wraps.

An older man falling prey to middle-aged lust is better off using the services of an “escort” (love those euphemisms) than making a Faustian pact.

Having a mistress is definitely a young man’s game. He has the energy and the naivety to propel him forward. The possibility of getting caught never crosses his mind. But caught he will be, because leading a double life is an exhausting enterprise, requiring superior fibbing capabilities and above average stamina.

When engaging in amorous pursuit, it is much wiser to stick with unattached people rather than diddling with tethered femmes fatales.

Alain

What is a Mistress? Something between a mister and a mattress. Jim Backus