“If you’re lucky

enough to travel,

you’re lucky enough!”

Lilli Burrow

on the plane to the UK.

The London Canal Museum

Simon’s Weekly Maxim

“You despair when you recall how much you’ve forgotten.”

James Lileks

National Review Columist

The Hasting Drive-in circa 1970 at the corner of Halstead and Rosemead

The Matchbook Museum is not a place.  It is a website where the curator/owner James Lileks shows matchbooks from his extensive collection along with some witty and illuminating commentary.

The idea of a Matchbook Museum is interesting to me for a few reasons:

• Online Museums are a new and very good idea that may earn some diligent curators an independent living.
• Nurit and I have been collecting match books and boxes for a few decades.  We saw Carole B’s collection and started one of our own.  Carole gave me a Piggly Wiggly matchbook fron the 1960′s.
• Matches are vanishing faster than cigarette smokers.  In the past I have pondered what will replace them as a giveaway

So we have bit of American history that illustrates a potential money making opportunity for someone enterprising who collects something.  It would have to be something that interests tens of thousands of people.  Like nail polish or lipstick.  Or maybe Disneyobelia.  Or postcards?  What about the International Bridge Museum?

The revenue stream is ads for resellers or tourism related companies on the museum site.

“Age doesn’t matter, unless you’re a cheese.”

Attributed to:

Billie Burke an American Actress

and others

According to the 2010 census of the 15 richest counties in America, ten are in the Washington DC area.  The money is flowing toward where favors can be bought.  Ten years ago only five of the richest fifteen were in the DC area.  This data point is further evidence that we are suffering from the mercantilism that Hernando De Soto warned about in his 1989 book The Other Path.  If you have to have permission to do things, creativity will be stymied and bureaucracy will grow.   The first objective of any bureaucracy is to feed itself, well.

The Tenth Amendment was written to keep this from happening.  It was gutted, by misapplication of the commerce clause, during the depression and the federal government has been growing exponentially ever since.  It’s time to right size the federal government.  Send education, healthcare and welfare back to the states where they belong.  Stop all federal grants of money for mandates.

The second paragraph above was just a rant.  My advise to young people: move to the DC area.  It is where the money is and I can’t see it changing very fast.  Remember you don’t make the weather.  Adapt and be happy.

The text of the tenth amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

We went to London

expecting rain and

gloom. It was sunny

and bright.

“The key to happiness

is low expectations”

London Weather Forecast

Spring in England

President Obama said that if he loses in 2012 it could herald

“A New Era of Painful Self-Reliance”

I say: “Bring it on!”

A bit more self-reliance is exactly what we need.

It will only be painful to the bureaucrats who have less customers.

Here’s ABC News, reporting on the speech the president gave in Fog City: “At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.”

Link to the ABC story (so you can see I’m not making this up)

The1972 Stanford Marshmallow Test has been in the news lately.  It has been 40 years since 600 preschoolers first participated in this test of deferred gratification.  The tests and the subsequent followups are important because they are relevant to the national debate about saving, home ownership and education expense.

The experiment worked like this: “The children were led into a room, empty of distractions, where a treat of their choice was placed by a chair.  The children could eat the marshmallow, the researchers said, but if they waited for fifteen minutes without giving in to the temptation, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow.”  A third of the children held out for the second treat.

Follow-up studies have shown that there is an unexpected correlation between the results of the marshmallow test, and the success of the children many years later.  The children who could defer gratification for fifteen minutes ended up with more successful lives by almost any measure.

So self-restraint and deferred gratification are important to the success of individuals.  How about for countries?  I would say yes and so are the lenders to European countries.

The lesson also applies to saving, home ownership and education. These three, used to be symbols of middle class success.  They were what people with self-restraint who were willing to defer gratification used to earn as a reward.  Now the government is trying to give the reward to everyone.  And as a result we get the housing crisis and the coming student debt crisis. See my earlier story Degrees and Sneakers

The Marshmallow Test and it followups show the link between the cultural expectations of the people and the way government operates.  Arguing about how to lower the deficit is a fools game until we all start exercising a little self-restraint and accepting a little more deferred gratification.

Thanks to Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute for an article in the WSJ were I first heard about the Marshmallow Test.

I confess.  I really dislike double wide strollers. 

They clog any aisle or sidewalk they enter.  They are a product built for the convenience of a few at a cost to us all.  So I was very pleased to see this sign on the door at one of the exhibits at the Huntington Library:

Note to the Huntington: It is a risk to offend the inconsiderate.  Good Luck.

Note to self:  Maybe someone could invent a stroller that is a “Double Decker”

Note to Hilary Rosen:

A sincere apology never has a “but”!

(Rosen is the Democrat operative who foolishly said Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life”)