Altruism

Why not. A little bit of optimism for your Thursday:

From Mitchell Hoffman, based on Holocaust data:

I find that (1) Richer countries had many more rescuers than poorer ones, and (2) Within countries, richer people were more likely to be rescuers than poorer people. The individual-level effect of income on being a rescuer remains significant after controlling for ease of rescue variables, such as the number of rooms in one's home, suggesting that the correlation of income and rescue is not solely driven by richer people having more resources for rescue. Given that richer people might be thought to have more to lose by rescuing, the evidence is consistent with the view that altruism increases in income.

Found here. Don't read the comments though. It's like looking up the real story of J.M. Barrie after watching Finding Neverland. I'd rather take both at Johnny Depp face value.

I Dribble All the Time

This tiny bib video my dad took on his phone went viral in my family last week, and my sister challenged me to find all the ways my grandma Franz is like a baby. I normally don't take challenges that seem so obvious because they make me suspicious. And especially not from my sister since the human airplane incident of '93 when she tied all my limbs together and told me I would be a hilarious person if I let her lift my body into the air with her feet. I wormed myself over to her, flew up in the air, and fell to the ground like a helpless log. But so help me, I can't resist her.

1.Tiny. My grandma is the smallest person I know. My brother Gentzy (see post below) has a theory of displacement, claiming that she's been granted such a long life from the universe for taking up so little of it.
2. Dribble
3. Bib
4. Adorable
5. Easily distracted by technological devices

Why do you set me up for failure?

*It's too bad the last 10 seconds of this video got cut off. She says, "This young, vibrant teenager says hello to old Maggie." She's so cute I want throw myself out a window. Oh, there it is.

Get a Room

Normally I refrain from any kind of public announcement of affection or appreciation, not because I don't like it, but because I'm not good at it. But I'm not one to let a tribute post found here go un-noted either (that was a tribute, right?). Torn into a million pieces.

My older brother Gentzy drove with me out to Washington, D.C. to help me move a couple of weeks ago. It had its ups and downs.

Up: Choosing to jog from site to site downtown in matching running tights that made me hate ourselves at first, but then finally appreciate it when a security guard started to reprimand Gentzy for going into the men's restroom. I'm just glad that in the instance where we are same-sex twins, my femininity outweighed the alternative. More than likely a close draw. But I'll take what I can get. (Don't you give this one to the tights.)
Down: See first phrase of "Up," or: Spending any amount of time in the possessed house I'm sitting for while the family is on vacation. It smells like garlic, and spirits of an undetermined evil nature live in its walls, but I try not to think about it. And sleep with the lights on.

But he drove everywhere (parallel parking like a surgeon), navigated the car during a snow storm, and watched an obscene amount of Mad Men with me. And sometimes all three of those things at once. And if it's any indication of how dependent I was/am on him for that stuff, it took me all of 30 minutes of driving on my own before I ran into a parked car.

Gentzy, you're no Don Draper, but you're at least the third funniest Franz I know. Thanks for helping me move, girl.

*This white-trash picture of us hiking in San Fran last year is about the only documentation I have that we even know each other. Let's work on that.

Thank You for Flying Me

I'm not a business flyer. I associate airports with holidays, school breaks, and naps. I don't have long legs, children, or a large carryon. I've flown internationally one time and one time only, I fly from the Salt Lake to the St. Louis airport almost exclusively, and I rank a tight.comfortable on the scale of relative poverty. Because of these combined, I almost always fly Southwest. And my trips are almost always the same:

After treating myself to airport sushi, I make my way back to whatever distant wing of the airport where they keep bovine, spare parts, and the Southwest gates. It's like home. Just not the kind of home you show new friends. (There's a reason Southwest tickets cost $12.75 and let you check whatever oversized garbage you and a dolly can carry out of the house.)

But even still, I always try to look nice for a SW flight. Because I want them to know I appreciate them. And also because your chances of flying with a high school junior varsity lacrosse team are very good. And what the best friend of the skies lacks in TVs and seat belts, it makes up for with jokes and fun carpet. And if I were 30% more inclined to carry cash, and 70% less involved with JV lacrosse at the moment, I might actually go tip each and every flight attendant on board.

Franzonomics

I like to go to dollar stores every now and then just to check out what's in there. I don't like the thought of dropping 11 dollars on olive oil when there could be a Dollar Tree somewhere distributing the same bottle, and I grossly overpay just because I didn't know or didn't remember. I like to know what's what. So a periodic revisit is the only way I can stay on top of the value of the American dollar. It's kind of like how my basis of U.S. capital knowledge relies so heavily on how frequently my friends and I quiz each other about them. Which usually relies solely on how frequently we take long hikes with nothing to talk about. Which is why hikers always win final Jeopardy. Always. And why I can never remember the capital of North Dakota in February.

So yesterday I'm taking inventory at Dollar Tree: great kitchen supplies, sub-par wrapping paper, mystery paper-grab bags that still call to me like the sirens of Titan, etc., and I don't see anything I need more than I want to wait in a line with no conveyor belt, so I leave and go to a real store.

At the real store, I fall right into the dollar-goggle trap and can't shed the idea that everything for sale is a dollar. Product quality goes up; price mentality remains at Washington. Wait a second. The only thing that saved me from buying everything in sight was being so stoked to have solved the economic crisis in a mere Monday evening. I checked my Supermarket Sweep mentality and came up with this equation: more dollar-store exposure = more real-store purchases = better economy. Dollar stores on every street corner! I call it the Dollar Tree stimulus package. I'm working on the name.

CMoS

I frequent the Chicago Manual of Style fairly often at work.

Today, under section 5.191 (you know the one), I came across this quote that they actually were hilarious enough to include in their official, peer-reviewed guidance on "Beginning a Sentence with a Conjunction." It comes from Charles Allen Lloyd, “Next to the groundless notion that it is incorrect to end an English sentence with a preposition, perhaps the most wide-spread of the many false beliefs about the use of our language is the equally groundless notion that it is incorrect to begin one with ‘but’ or ‘and.’ As in the case of the superstition about the prepositional ending, no textbook supports it, but apparently about half of our teachers of English go out of their way to handicap their pupils by inculcating it. One cannot help wondering whether those who teach such a monstrous doctrine ever read any English themselves.”

Well ok then.

I just love the keywords, “groundless notion,” “handicap,” and “monstrous” because Charles is berating me and not only do I deserve it, but I want his approval now more than ever. Take notes teacher roommates. The abuse cycle is the only way to educate.

Burgled!

Yesterday, sometime between 9 a.m., and 4 p.m. (or as I see it: Sometime between oatmeal o’clcok and pre-dinner grapefruit o’clock), our house was broken into. Viotlated. Robbed. Smashed. Wrecked. BLED ON. Panty raided.

My roommates’ laptop, laptop, and camera were stolen, and my laptop and tv had been taken. My underwear was strewn all across my floor, and at first I was flattered. But then after some heavy detective reasoning, and after finding an ugly earring on my floor, I deduced that the little pilferer in my room had been a tiny female. And then I just felt judged.

But then I felt flattered again when I heard Kristine describe my untouched and unscathed bike as being worth $2,000. I didn’t correct her. It is a beautiful bike.

My only fear from this experience is that I have become so critical of our thieves for being so sloppy (an earring?? Blood on my bed?? Come on, O.J.!) that I’ve given far too much thought on how to do it right. And no good can come of that.

But just for the record, I’d at least have a trademark. And that trademark would be stealing all the pencils in the house. And all those pencils would be kept in an unlocked safe in my house to confuse future burglars. And none of this would be disclosed on a public blog.