» Posted by Martin Weil on June 26, 2008

Barron's writes in their EconoDay

Consumer confidence is unusually low...But there is an expansion still underway and this is not a time of war, which makes the results difficult to figure.

Huh? Tip from The Big Picture.

» Posted by Martin Weil on April 02, 2008

In pictures

Seattle artist Chris Jordan's photo essay offers a remarkable visual portrait of our modern consumption. The image above is comprised of 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

» Posted by Martin Weil on January 07, 2008

A private banker told me last year about a New York real-estate magnate who asked his 11-year-old daughter what she wanted for her birthday.

Her answer: a ride on an American Airlines plane.

"But we have our own jet," the magnate replied.

"I know, but I want to ride on a big plane with other people," she said. "I want to see what an airport looks like on the inside."

From The Wealth Report

» Posted by Martin Weil on November 30, 2007

Click here for a great compendium of online "Best of 2007" lists. Best books, best music, best weblogs and best places to live are some of the more typical lists linked on the site. More eclectic are the top Japanese buzzwords and best UFO photos. In between, there are lists for just about every taste.

» Posted by Martin Weil on November 15, 2007

Maybe you've been there, too -- not the cheesy hotel, but in a car or plane with small children, clinging to the last threads of your sanity. And you shudder at the thought of going through it again this holiday travel season. Or maybe you're planning to travel with baby for the first time this year and you're lying awake at night in terror at the thought.

Tip #4: Team board. The airlines think they're doing you a favor by letting you jump the line with your small children. But you're just being forced to spend even more time trying to keep a squirming child calm in a seat. So if there are two adults in your party, send one in first with the carry-on bags to secure a spot for them in the overhead bins. The other can hang back, run around with the kids then corral them into the plane after everyone has boarded.

See the remaining 9 useful tips from Kiplinger's online.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 06, 2007

Presenting the improbable (because it is my blog and I can)

Medicine - Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."

Physics - L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology - Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.

Linguistics - Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature - Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace - The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.

Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation - Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Frankly, I think last year's winners were a far more impressive bunch.

» Posted by Martin Weil on September 25, 2007

Swimming pool in China. Photo from this site.

» Posted by Martin Weil on July 26, 2007

Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project says maybe. Check out her list of eight things to do with money that are sure to be more satisfying than buying a new big screen TV.

» Posted by Martin Weil on June 13, 2007

Looking for a last minute Father's Day gift idea?

» Posted by Martin Weil on May 28, 2007

John Moore/Getty Images; NY Times, 5.28.07