Two Kinds of Rich: Adventures with Milton S. Hershey and Bobby Flay

Hershey Park (an amusement park in Pennsylvania) and Bobby Flay's restaurant, the Mesa Grill, in New York City, may seem unrelated to you, but to me, they both made statements about the relationship between money and perception to me over the last week.

We did the small family vacation thing this year. We spent two days in Hershey, Pa. There's an amusement park and it is the home of the chocolate company, founded by Milton S. Hershey, way back. It's a cool place to go, just to see a good example of a business that built a town and to take the tour, replete with animatronic, talking cows, that explains how the chocolate is made. But, we are also a roller-coaster-loving family, and some of our faves are in the park.

1st Class Cabin, Titanic

Since we were going small, this year, we shelled out a pretty obscene amount of money to rent a cabana at the park. Doing this made every fiber of my musician/teacher's body tremble with Scroogiosity, but we had saved the money just for vacation, so...what the hay?

The cabana got us a shady place to sit when we needed a break. It also gave us instant access to "The Lazy River" -- no line waits. We got a refrigerator stocked with water. We got "free" towels (I figure they were more like, maybe, thirty dollars a piece). We got a tote bag for "free" towels and a little restaurant stand that was just for cabana people: no waits, and they would bring your food right to the cabana. We also got a "free" soda machine we could use with out "free" souvenir cups.

Greek Man Dies for Mythical Money

On Wednesday, I put up a post about my dad saying that if everyone in the world were like him, little children would be safe on the streets. It was little philosophical reductions like this, by my dad, when I was young, that probably set the machine of thought in motion for me.

One of his stories involves a time when he was watching TV with some friends during the Vietnam war. They were taking in a news report about the war, with film from the battlefield. My dad said, out loud: "Look at that."

"What?" a friend replied.

""People are actually shooting guns at each other."

Oblivious to my father's point about the absurdity of the human condition, one of the friends turned to another and said, "What the hell's the matter with this guy?"

I am a fan of reducing things to what, I hope, is their essence, as my dad was trying to do for a hopelessly indoctrinated audience. That's the only way we can get to truth, as far as I'm concerned.

So, how about this one: a man kills himself in Athens, Greece, over his financial woes, claiming, out loud, that he doesn't want to leave his kids in debt.

Over money. Money. There's another soul ground up by the machine's gears. Another result of our brilliant social/financial/political organizations that have developed over the centuries. A man ends his life over shiny metal -- or, worse, the paper that represents it...or the digital code that represents the paper that represents the gold...or, that is, represents the gold that is supposed to be in the coffers -- safe in some vault -- that is represented by the digital codes that represent the paper that should represent that gold, if it were, in fact, plentiful enough to actually support its representation by the paper that is now digital code for money that might or might not actually be there, depending who you talk to...

Be that as it may, a man is dead. Look what we've done. A life ends over bills. The worst thing about that is that, to many, it doesn't even sound absurd; the same way it didn't sound absurd to my father's friends when he stated the obviously horrific, so many years ago.

Big Food

Today, my students, in a class called "Literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy," began an annual project: "The Sci-fi Invention Project. " What they have to do is to come up with an invention -- a machine of some kind -- that solves a social problem. I've gotten glasses that prevent racism; I've gotten machines that stop drunks from driving; I've gotten anti-obesity devices, anti-stupidity hats, force-fields for preventing street violence and the like.

I've also gotten a lot of machines meant to end world hunger. These devices often have to do with syntheses that result in food.

"Ions" come into play, a lot. And various waves named with Greek letters.

Well, the gist of the assignment is that the year is 2038 and the inventor has to present his or her invention to the class, which plays the part of "NECSI" -- the Neo-Earth Committee for Societal Improvements. The inventor's goal is to convince NECSI to send the invention proposal to the President, in the Green House (the name was changed, for obvious reasons, some time in the 2020s).

If You Buy A Kid an Xbox

(A children's story in the tradition of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.)

If you buy a kid an Xbox (360), the guy at the store will tell you that the old XBox games will work on it.

If you bring the Xbox (360) home, you will find the old games only work if you buy a one-hundred and thirty dollar external hard drive.

If you are a high school teacher who doesn't want to spend one-hundred-thirty more dollars (after the $375 you already spent on the game system), you will decide to hook up the old Xbox along with the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. (This will require a degree in engineering or a lifetime of experience with cords and plugs, the latter of which you fortunately have.)

After you do this, you will find out that your TV room is too small for the "Kinect" that allows game play without remote controls. For a moment you will consider whether you really need the garage that lies beyond the confining wall. You will also wonder whether you could make a small doorway into the garage, so the kids will be able to back up far enough. Your kids will suggest standing on the couch to play. You'll consider this, as well, and then get a hold of yourself.

My Profound Ignorance

From time to time here at H&R, I have touched on something that fascinates me: that invisible bubble composed of circumstances, ideologies, experiences, prejudices, ignorance, suppositions and logical/semi-logical conclusions that surrounds us all and isolates our own lives into a fundamentally different experience from everyone else's. None of us ever has the same human experience, though we can see certain things in common. To me, that's astounding. No one operates with the exact internal program that I do -- or that you do. That, quite easily, can result in my being an ass in someone else's eyes and a genius in my own, or even the other way around.

Today, I gained an understanding that turned my guts to stone. Maybe, for a second, my own invisible bubble brushed up against people who suffer in a way I could never imagine.

The set up is this: A few weeks ago, my family and I went off to Florida. During our time away, hurricane Irene swept up the east coast of the U.S. By the time it reached New Jersey, it had become a tropical storm, but it was enough to cause flooding and power-outages. Our house lost power and the refrigerator died. We lost some food. Now it is fixed.

The Real/Un-Real World Wide Web

I will begin by saying I know nothing about economics, especially on a global scale. Apparently, this ignorance contributes to my slack-jawed, head-shaking amazement upon finding out that chaos theory applies to naked Frenchmen; for, it seems, just as a butterfly flapping its wings on a teensy hill in, say, Iowa, can, in an eventual and non-linear sense, cause a hurricane, it seems that a naked Frenchman chasing a maid through a hotel and (allegedly) sodomizing her could lead to a global financial snafu.

In case you haven't heard, I am referring to the case of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. As you might have guessed, I am not going to dig into the news, because in the rare cases I mention "what's going on" I tend to use it as a springboard for considering our human situation, in general. This case will be no different.

Engineering Doom

The Dark One sat in his element, face hidden in the infinite shadow of a hood. The other sat across from him, nose sharp, eyes blinking the cold twinkle of a knife in a candle's flicker.

Their fingertips traced the rims of guilded cups. Beyond the chamber door raged the tortured sounds of an innumerable human throng.

"And how shall we bring them to this doom, Master?"

"Slowly," the Dark One said. "Slowly. They shall erect their own cage. We'll need to do little.