It’s 1972. Richard Nixon is reelected president. Watergate is broken into by a bunch White House operatives. Sanford & Son premieres on NBC. The last military draft is held even though the US is beginning withdrawal from Viet Nam. Mark Spitz wins 7 gold medals at the summer Olympics in Munich only to bested later…
Category Archives: UnCommon Cents
Adventures Traveling Around the World – Americans Don’t Travel
Among the stereotypes of Americans out there this one may be true. Who’s the last person you know that visited Tunisia, Paraguay or for that matter Japan (OK, my niece Taylor did this past summer but she was the exception). Americans don’t travel overseas like the Germans, Japanese, Brits, Scandinavians or the Dutch. When we…
Adventures Traveling Around the World – Americans Aren’t as Ignorant as You Might Think
How often have you heard or read people allude to the notion that Americans don’t know much about the rest of the world? Jay Leno would do his “Jay walking” routine and ask questions that made the individual answering appear to have just landed their space ship from another planet. Leno: In what country would…
Adventures Traveling Around the World – People don’t hate Americans
They actually love us. As Gary Arndt says, “If anything, people are fascinated by Americans and want to know more about the US.” They may take exception to our government and policies but, they find Americans as individuals fascinating. Much of the crude anti-Americanism we hear of today takes the form of allegations about American…
Adventures Traveling Around the World – The World is Boring
If the country hasn’t been the scene of near economic meltdown (Greece), a natural disaster (Haiti) or an armed conflict (Afghanistan) more than likely it won’t have been mentioned in the news. This observation gives rise to Mr. Arndt’s third item: “The World is Boring” When is the last time you heard anything about…
Adventures Traveling Around the World – The Media Lies
A second postulate of Gary Arndt’s 3 years of travel around the world is something we have all suspected at one time or another: “The Media Lies“ If the nightly news were the only source of information about other countries one might be tempted to dig a whole, climb in and cover it to never…
Adventures Traveling Around the World – People Are Generally Good
More than three years ago in the spring of 2007, Gary Arndt handed over the keys to his house, put his possessions in storage and headed out to travel around the world with nothing but a backpack, his laptop and a camera. That takes real guts. In a series of articles we will attempt to…
Recovery? Double Dip? Who Cares? The Adventure is All Up to You!
Is this a recovery? The beginning of a double dip? Or just the continuation of a process called depression where excesses of the past are wrung out of the economy? No matter the setting, no matter how any of the pundits choose to define the current situation the result will depend only on what you…
How Bad Would it be if Stimulus Wasn’t Working?
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yesterday released its updated estimates of the Recovery Act’s impact on the economy. CBO estimates that the Recovery Act’s policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2010: * They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, * Lowered…
