"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."
"Let’s talk about Michael J. Burry. Burry studied economics on his way to a pre-med decree at ULCA, and then got an M.D. at Vanderbilt. I think he got bored with medicine, and he decided investing was more fun than doing pathology, and 2000 started investing. Besides, I heard that when he did a report on a deceased patient that he put, “cause of death: autopsy” that people weren’t amused, but that joke still kills me.
By the end of 2004, he was managing $600,000,000 dollars, and had made returns of over 50% shorting the Tech Bubble when everyone still thought that Alta Vista® was worth more than a box of slightly melted Milk Duds®. In 2005, Burry started in reviewing the housing and, more importantly, the housing lending market. He saw it was all junk.
To be fair, I made the same observation at the time, but unlike Dr. Burry, I only made about $80,000 with a stop-loss on my own house from when I lived in Houston. In my case, it was a one-of-a-kind situation, worked like a charm, and it won’t happen to me again.
I made (or, in my case didn’t lose) $80,000. Burry made $100,000,000. Burry made that much personally. But, it really it took him a whole year to make that much. Burry also made his other investors more than $700,000,000 in profit at the same time Bernie Madoff was attempting to convince his investors that the money must be in his other suit. Or maybe he left it under the bed. Burry cleaned out the market, Madoff cleaned out his investors.
Also, Burry is a little ‘spergie like your ‘umble ‘ost, and also is a heavy metal fan. I think he and I would get along, except I’m sure his car costs more than my house. And The Mrs. has a shirt that she had autographed by Dimebag Darrell. I’m thinking I could convince her to sell it to Dr. Burry. For a particular car... Also, like me, he has correctly predicted seven of the last three recessions.
I’ll admit, I do tend to see the cracks. There’s a reason I say, “Better a year early than an hour too late” because I understand a fundamental principle of life as first noted by the stoic philosopher Seneca (and expounded upon by Ugo Bardi – LINK): things are only built slowly, but disappear quickly. A house might take weeks or months to build, but (I was advised by a firefighter) if my house has been burning for more than a few minutes, they show up to pull me, The Mrs., and Pugsley out and make sure that other houses next to mine don’t burn.
Destruction is more powerful than creation. This is a restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and just shows what any father knows – the lawn won’t mow itself. But, I digress. Burry sees the larger patterns in the world, and his autism is a superpower in pattern detection. And he doesn’t like what he sees. In fact, he just posted this Tweet®:
Well, I wonder what he meant by that? I’ll turn it over to the philosophers at /pol/ to explain using GrugTalk®:
I wonder what he meant by that? I don’t think we need Grug to translate. Sell. Burry is indicating he’s out. The first graph shows that the Fed™ rate is approaching levels not seen since before the Tech Bubble popped.
But I think it’s going to be much worse, because inflation is exploding. In 2001, life was better, and the real issue was the ludicrous level of optimism that caused money to flow into the tech sector. Of course, the solution from the Fed™ was to pump in tons of cash and free up lending. In the housing sector. So, this graph represents how Burry made a lot of money, essentially shorting the Fed™ as it poured dollars from the Tech Bubble directly into the Housing Bubble which led to the Great Recession.
This made Burry hundreds of millions of dollars as he profited from the tendency of the Fed™ to treat the symptoms and not the actual problems. However, given that our debt, inflation rate, and business risk are going up faster than a Chinese balloon. And then they’ll go down faster than a Chinese balloon.
Now, to be fair, Elon Musk has characterized Burry as a “stopped clock” who is right enough times to make him a few hundred million dollars. Elon might have a point – as Burry and I wait for the cracks to form and Seneca to be proven correct, there’s a world out there, growing and moving. You can live life, but living it always on the defensive will end up in a losing ground strategy.
I think Burry is right, and I wouldn’t bet against him. But I’m also not going to spend to my life living in fear. It’s a mistake, and has probably cost me additional growth on what I have squirreled away for the future. That’s on me, and I refuse to feel bad about it, though if I were 20 or 30 I would be all in online.
As we get older, we often worry far too much about the destruction part of Seneca’s lesson, and forget about the creation, which is the important part of the story. We will have failures. Economies will collapse. The world will recover. We will abide. But we cannot live in fear, nor in regret. Unlike Madonna’s face."
"In today's vlog we are at Sam's Club, and are noticing some major price increases on groceries! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and the empty shelves situation! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"Gerald Celente says the gamblers on Wall Street sent the market higher because they believe the Fed will take its foot off the gas...the rest of the U.S. economy is going down."
"44 Million Americans Are On The Brink Of Eviction
As They Can't Afford Rental Prices"
by Epic Economist
"If you’re a renter, are you also feeling the pinch of rent prices right now? With mortgage rates soaring and forcing many would-be homebuyers to back out of the housing market over the past year, demand for rentals is at the highest level on record, according to data from Realtor.com. As of January 27, less than 6% of rental units were sitting vacant in the U.S. rental market. And along with demand, rent prices are still at historic highs despite recent declines seen around the country that ranged from 2% to 6%. In fact, one new study found that expensive rental costs are now burdening 44 million Americans from all over the nation. For the bottom 10% of income earners, rents are unaffordable in virtually every state of the country. Meanwhile, eviction rates are rising fast, and this time around, there are no policies in place to prevent an eviction tsunami. Advocates alert that the rent crisis is threatening to spark a national catastrophe. That’s why today, we decided to analyze some incredibly shocking statistics about rental affordability in the United States that everyone should know.
While rent prices are breaking records, wage growth is currently flat. The latest numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that weekly earnings for both men and women in the middle class were standing at $1,085 per week as of January 15. Before taxes, that’s about $4,340 of income per month, which means that middle-class households bringing in that amount would pay more than 41% of their income on rent. Official housing agencies say that anyone spending more than 30% of their income on rent is considered “cost-burdened,”. That’s to say, those workers may struggle to afford necessities such as food and transportation.
This also means that low-income workers are in extreme financial distress due to rent price increases, given that they need to spend about 55% of their income to pay for a one-bedroom rental currently listed on the market, according to estimates from the National Housing Coalition. In January, the average monthly rent affordable to a family of four with a household income at the poverty line was $694. In contrast, the average Fair Market Rent for a one-bedroom rental home was $1,492 U.S. dollars per month during that same period.
For the bottom 10%, rent prices are out of their reach in virtually all of the states in the country. The National Housing Coalition highlights that people need to earn $24.90 per hour to afford a rental home without spending more than 30% of their income. Believe it or not, there was a time when a single, full-time income could financially provide for families. But nowadays, most families are working harder than ever and still need at least two incomes to make financial ends meet.
Eviction filings have already returned to pre-pandemic levels and, in some places, even exceeded them. While illegal evictions certainly make the housing insecurity and homelessness crisis worse; the real culprit is the combination of an undersupply of affordable housing, poor wage growth, and a persistent lack of federal and state assistance to help both landlords and low-income tenants. Now, the rental affordability crisis and the growing threat of evictions in America paint a dire picture for millions of renters, putting them at risk of financial instability, and losing their homes, and also further exacerbating an already dire situation."
“It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way.
The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, pictured above in scientifically mapped colors to bring up contrast, is about 10 light-years across and part of a much larger complex of stars and shells. The Bubble Nebula can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).”
“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them. “This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.” “This desert, all deserts, any deserts.” “On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.” “Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.” “All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”
“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.” “Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”
“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.” “The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.” “In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…” “The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.” “…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.” “Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.” “Californicating.” “To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.” “Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?” “I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.” “Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.” “Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.” “In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.” “There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.” “A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.” “Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.” “In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…” “New life will be built upon these things.” “…an unrequited and excessive love.” “It is this.” “That’s why.”
Excerpt: "The complete and utter devastation that we are seeing in Turkey right now should break all of our hearts. Hundreds of buildings have collapsed, and thousands upon thousands of dead and injured people are trapped under the rubble. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit Turkey early on Monday is the largest earthquake that the region has experienced in a century. Sadly, that giant quake was followed by a relentless series of aftershocks that included another giant quake. The shaking continues even as I write this article, and there are some parts of Turkey that will never be the same again after this.
Back on January 4th, I warned that 2023 would be “a year of great natural disasters”, and unfortunately that is exactly what is happening. Our planet continues to become even more unstable, and we have been witnessing large earthquakes and major volcanic eruptions occur with a frequency that is quite alarming.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that just struck Turkey is the most deadly seismic event that we have seen so far this year. It is being reported that it could actually be felt all the way in Greenland…"Tremors from the powerful earthquake that rocked Turkey and neighboring Syria on Monday were felt as far away as Greenland, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said. “The large earthquakes in Turkey were clearly registered on the seismographs in Denmark and Greenland,” seismologist Tine Larsen told AFP." I was stunned when I first read that.
As buildings fell down all around them, some people in Turkey actually believed that “judgement day” had arrived. As I write this article, we are being told that “at least 3,500 people” have died, but that number will inevitably grow much larger as more bodies are pulled from the rubble…"At least 3,500 people in both countries are known to have been killed – 2,316 of these in Turkey, more than 700 people in opposition-controlled Syria and 538 in government-held areas of Syria, reports Sky. In Turkey entire apartment blocks crashed to the ground in a matter of seconds following the quakes, trapping families inside and killing thousands.
According to reports from the region, the magnitude 7.8 earthquake caused approximately 90 seconds of shaking, and social media is filled with videos of tall buildings collapsing into heaps in just moments."
"It's almost impossible, but Turkish rescue teams reacted to hysterics after they pulled the #earthquake victims alive under the rubble. In one footage, several small children and an adult man managed to get out safely which was greeted with joy and emotion."
Revolt in France and the problem with cradle to grave Ponzi schemes...
by Bill Bonner
"Since the creation of the Fed, the dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power. This more than one-hundred year trend is something you ignore at your own risk."
~ John Dienner
Youghal, Ireland - "We were in France last week. The big issue there is pension reform. Everybody talks about it. Everyone has an opinion. The Macron government wants to raise the retirement age, generally, from 62 to 64. The idea is to ‘save the system.’
The French took to the streets in protest, photo above. Many of the protestors were so young, they had barely entered the system. It probably wasn’t the pension reform itself that got them riled up, but the idea that the government mightn’t take care of them, cradle to grave. We have machines to do the physical work – and immigrants to operate them. And now AI can do the thinking, right? Many young people must wonder why they have to work at all.
Most western countries are in the same boat. Fewer people working. More people retired. All of these programs were set up as variations of Ponzi schemes, where the first to get in would do very well. Later, the systems would run out of money.
Tough Choices: What to do? There are only three possible solutions – raise taxes, lower payments to retirees, or raise the age of retirement. The Macron team chose the third option.
Points of view on it fall into two broad categories, pro and con. For an introduction to the ‘con’ side of the argument, we turn to one of our favorite columnists, J. Neilson, who writes, in English, for the Buenos Aires Times: "By the time men and women now in their 20s reach 64, they will live in a society which will be as different from the one they grew up in as today’s is from those of the final decades of the 20th century, when for every retiree there were over two workers who contributed to the system. In France there are now less than 1.7 and their number is rapidly dwindling.
Unsurprisingly, many feel let down by their political leaders who – like their counterparts throughout the democratic world – pretend they have “solutions” to the problems which are besetting voters but rarely manage to make things better.
The alluring sales pitch behind public pension schemes was that the typical contributor would get more out than he put in. That was the case for many years. But now, with fewer young people entering the system…and growth rates falling…politicians can still promise. But they can’t deliver. So, the ‘con’ argument is very simple; like it or not, the benefits must be scaled back. At the very least, tough choices will have to be made."
Unjust and Unaffordable: But wait. The other side of the retirement debate was taken up this weekend by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. Mr. Kuper is reliably on the wrong side of almost all issues, so we can assume that he is wrong again.“The French have led the world in creating a glorious new life-stage,” he writes: “the first decade of retirement. Can’t afford it? Nonsense. “Their system remains just about affordable. Everyone ought to learn from them.
The typical Frenchman can now retire at 62 and enjoy another 20 years of life. The first 10 years of it should be great, he says, as retirees’ health initially improves (perhaps because they have more time to exercise?)…and… French pensioners enjoy higher median living standards than working people,” writes Kuper, “if you take into account the fact that retirees typically aren’t funding children or mortgages.”
How to stop the losses in the French pension system? Mr. Kuper: “Make the top 10 percent of earners work until, say 67. Since they are the highest taxpayers, that should help replenish the system. Let ordinary people have fun while they still can.”
The Last to Go: Which would you favor, dear reader – pro or con? Set the retirement age at 60…70…75? Make the rich work longer so the not-so-rich can frolic at 60? What fun it must be to organize the lives of others – millions of them. Tell them when they should work…and when they should rest? Sure, why not?
But wait… Is retirement anyone’s business but your own? Of course it is! In the modern world, pension systems are collectivized…and compulsory. And now that they have become hard to finance, we can expect to see more cuts, more compromises, and more claptrap. Government budgets are limited. So, if you want to retire at 62, for example, you might have to give up other great government programs…such as windmills, welfare, weapons or war.
Given the choice, the common citizen would readily take pension and medical benefits, and give the rest the heave-ho. But he doesn’t run the government. The elite do. And since the elite get their grift money from welfare and warfare boondoggles, where the dollars can dissolve into corporate profits, think tank financing, speaking fees and sinecures…they’ll be the last to go. Pensions, which go to ‘The People,’ will have to be reduced."
"There's a little animal in all of us and maybe that's something to celebrate. Our animal instinct is what makes us seek comfort, warmth, a pack to run with. We may feel caged, we may feel trapped, but still as humans we can find ways to feel free. We are each other's keepers, we are the guardians of our own humanity and even though there's a beast inside all of us, what sets us apart from the animals is that we can think, feel, dream and love. And against all odds, against all instinct, we evolve."
"It is funny that Janet Yellen steps forward and says that there is no way we are in a recession. All you have to do is look at America and see all the business closures right now. Everything is bad when it comes to big business."
"Empty Shelves At Meijer! Shopping Fail! This Is Crazy!"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer, and are noticing Empty Shelves Everywhere! We are also noticing more price increases, and frozen food shortages! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"Something BIG Is Happening In Ukraine And NATO Is Scared"
"NATO members over the past few days have started beating the drum that Ukraine is collapsing and are talking about next steps including putting western NATO forces into the battle. Putin just issued his strongest warning yet to NATO. Stay out or else."
"On The Edge Of Essentially All Out War With Russia"
"Your home for analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United states and the world. Geopolitics. No ego descriptions. No small talk. Straight to the point. Calls with the relevant analysis only."
"Modern-day retail is at an inflection point as retailers face struggling physical storefronts, massive debt, and inefficient operations, among other issues. The pandemic initially compounded these issues and accelerated the fall of several retailers, which had faced dwindling sales and growing debt in the years prior as consumer preferences changed.
Department stores proved to be the most vulnerable, with the pandemic felling iconic names such as Neiman Marcus and JCPenney. Malls saw declining foot traffic even pre-pandemic, but stay-at-home orders further shifted shoppers to online shopping and spending cash on essential goods instead.
Following 2020, retail experienced a significant rebound as consumers returned to stores. While there were 52 retail bankruptcies in 2020, 2021 saw just 21 — a 60% drop year-over-year, according to Axios. In 2022, only a handful of companies went under. But this doesn’t mean that retail is out of the woods just yet. With retailers facing old challenges in addition to combating newly rising prices and a pullback in consumer spending, some reports indicate that retail bankruptcies may flare up once again in 2023.
We live in such troubled times, and things are only going to get more difficult in 2023 and beyond. Meanwhile, there are a couple of long-term trends that won’t be going away any time soon that are squeezing the life out of the industry from both sides. If those long-term trends cannot be reversed, we will soon see a lot more decaying buildings with boarded up windows where thriving retail establishments once existed. The health of the retail industry is critical to the health of the overall U.S. economy, and right now the outlook for the future of the industry is not good.
So I would encourage you to enjoy your favorite retail stores while you still can. Because as conditions continue to get even harsher for our retailers, many of them will soon be forced to close their doors for the last time."
“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Click image for larger size.
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”
"The ancient Greek aphorism, attributed to Socrates and others. Good advice, I'm sure. If only we knew what it means. Is it the same as the "examination of conscience" we were asked to perform as young Catholics? "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." Well, yes, it is good to ask ourselves if we have lived up to our highest moral aspirations. But surely "Know thyself" means more than that.
Does it mean to be aware of our self-awareness? That is to say, not to act impulsively, but reflectively. Thoreau's "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Or perhaps it means to apply the method of scientia to the problem of consciousness, treat the mind like a fish that can be dissected at the lab bench, watch the brain flickering on the display of a scanning machine as the subject is stimulated with love, sex, fear, music, pain. Neuroscience. Daniel Dennet's book audaciously titled "Consciousness Explained." There is a line from a poem by Jane Hirshfield, in which she questions herself: "A knife cannot cut itself open/ yet you ask me both to be you and to know you."
Is it hopeless then? Is there an essential absurdity in a thing knowing itself? Does knowing necessarily imply a knower more complex than the thing known? Is it possible that we might fully understand, say, the neurology of the sea slug Aplysia, that favorite subject of experimental neurobiologists with only 20,000 central nerve cells, big nerve cells, ten times bigger than human neurons, but not the workings of the human brain, with its 100 billion nerve cells, each one connected to thousands of others?
Hirshfield's poem is titled "Instant Glimpsable Only For An Instant." Perhaps that is the best we can do. To know ourselves in those fleeting moments of recognition than come now and then, often unbidden, sometimes as the result of a chance encounter with beauty or with ugliness, sometimes bidden out of the silence and solitude of meditation - a flash upon one's inward eye that is, perhaps, all the ancients were asking for when they asked us to "know ourselves."
“On the first day God created the dog. God said, “Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. I will give you a life span of twenty years.” The dog said, “That’s too long to be barking. Give me ten years and I’ll give you back the other ten.” So God agreed.
On the second day God created the monkey. God said, “Entertain people, do monkey tricks and make them laugh. I’ll give you a twenty-year life span.” The monkey said, “Monkey tricks for twenty years? I don’t think so. Dog gave you back ten, so that’s what I’ll do too, okay?” And God agreed.
On the third day God created the cow. “You must go to the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves, and give milk to support the farmer. I will give you a life span of sixty years.” The cow said, “That’s kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty years. Let me have twenty and I’ll give back the other forty.” And God agreed again.
On the fourth day God created man. God said, “Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. I’ll give you twenty years.” Man said, “What? Only twenty years? Tell you what, I’ll take my twenty, and the forty the cow gave back, and the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back, that makes eighty, okay?” “Okay,” said God, “You’ve got a deal.”
So that is why the first twenty years we eat, sleep, play, and enjoy ourselves; the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family; the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren; and the last ten years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.”
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