reading _Richistan_

[walkitout]

And it occurred to me to wonder what the current economic situation (deleveraging) is doing to Richistanis. Off to Frank's blog to see what's up. The expected cutbacks in use of private jets. Blah, blah. Then, _right_ when I'm laughing my ass off about how none of this has anything to do with me, I suddenly remember that I chartered a plane from Nashua to Albany a little over a year ago for R. and T. to go to M.'s graduation party (huge scheduling hassle associated with a wedding I was in the next day and this seemed like the easiest way to solve it).

The whole thing was so irritating on so many levels, that I'd honest to god lost track of having chartered a plane. Not that it was that expensive. But still.

That was very, very silly of me. One wonders what _else_ I do that is quite so silly.

ETA: Oh, I think I've just figured out at least one other thing I've done that is about as silly. I bought the local library a through-wall bookdrop.

ETA2: Hey, I bought rattles for both kids from that store in Parsippany. Does that count as silly? I figure the ceramic pig bank from the same store does not count, as it was a gift from someone else therefore I have no responsibility for it whatsoever.

Comments

pregnancy? or just my basic nature?

[walkitout]

It can be difficult to say, at this point, why I have the responses I do to some things.

I was reading Frank's Wealth Report blog over at the WSJ (because I got curious about how the Richistanis are doing in a deleveraging environment, and then I just got hooked because this is some seriously funny stuff), when I encountered this:

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/05/08/renting-the-lifestyles-of-the-rich/

First, _handbags_ are the primary planned rental? I mean, this is right up there with the amount of money spent annually by Richistanis on watches and spa services. Just incomprehensible. I mean, I _knew_ people were renting It bags. Whatever.

Here are some problems with this post.

The picture is labeled parenthetically in the text as "rentable Lieber Princess bag". You know me, I googled. First, it's Leiber, not Lieber. Second, it's properly speaking the Princess Box, not the Princess bag. It is indeed rentable, and retails through (presumably among others) Neiman Marcus for a little under $2K.

My questions lies here: why does it bother me that details like this are wrong? And can I safely generalize anything at all from the fact that this particular pair of errors (name of maker, name of bag model) has survived for months on the blog? Hopefully, the answer to the first question is hormones, and the answer to the second is, not so much.

Oh, and in case you suffer from the same confusion I did, Robert Frank != Thomas Frank. The author of _Richistan_ appears to have nothing in particular to do with the author of _What's the Matter with Kansas_ or _One Market Under God_. Altho there are moments when it's easy to confuse the two in terms of tone.

ETA: Okay, Frank cannot spell Dutch or German names. Possibly he can't spell at all, but the spellchecker catches everything except the names.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/03/26/tom-perkins-puts-superyacht-on-market/

In this case, the photo credit in the post is "photo courtesy of Merjin de Waard". Excuse me? Does that spelling make _sense_ to anyone? I did confirm elsewhere. Indeed, it should be Merijn. Which _does_ make sense.

The ji/ij confusion is particularly conspicuous because the former virtually never occurs and the latter is common. Think "sh" or "ch". You rarely, if ever, see "hs" or "hc"; it's a two letter representation of a phoneme.