A little whimsy

I'm still feeling the strain of putting together a two-day piano festival coming up in three weeks. So rather than fill today's post with what undoubtedly would be gibberish, I'll give you something fun.
Here are a couple of things I ran into while looking for the money tree clip I posted earlier. Apparently, there are people out there who are being creative with money--and I don't mean financiers and their bizarre investment creations.
Here's an example of what people can do who look at a dollar and see it for what it really is--a piece of paper.




Or how about these fantastical fish? It's so satisfying about seeing dollar bills tamed and brought into submission to make something beautiful.



Then there's always this idea for a home decor replacement of the piggy bank. It's fun, once you get past cheesy production values.



We've had a lot of ups and downs the past couple of weeks. But the garden has been one thing that definitely lifted our spirits in spite of hard times elsewhere. To see a bigger post on that, check out Mike & Roxie's Vegetable Paradise here.

They look a little green yet

Reading economic stories has been a bit surreal this week. Take the New York Times. One day, people over 50 are worried that they've been involuntarily consigned by their layoffs to an old age of cardboard shoes and shopping carts.
The next day, experts tell us the Great Recession is officially over. (But the "non experts" in real life say hell no, it isn't.)
I should feel vindicated that someone is saying the same thing I've been saying since the recession started--that it feels like people in their 50s have been dropped off on a desert island while the party cruise line goes on without us. We'll have less income to put our youngest kids through school, less to take care of our own parents and less in our pension funds to support us though we'll live longer (unless the rampant age discrimination makes us all so depressed we just decide to end it all.)
And then, the second story about how on paper, the recession is already over, yet most people are still so miserable they don't see it that way.
That should make me feel good, right? Someone agrees with me. You can't say the recession is over until people start getting their jobs back.
But it doesn't. It doesn't make me feel good or optimistic at all.So instead of fixating on those two downers, I'm looking at a bright and happy film that was promoted today on my web browser home page today.
It is a film about a money tree.
Filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal and friends hung $100 of folding money in a little tree in downtown Chicago and then filmed the reaction. Here is the clip from YouTube:





As you see, an amazing number of people walked on by without noticing. I blame this on the fact that many were talking on cell phones. Damned electronic devices. What we need is a phone with an app that is like a money alarm. It would detect the loose $20 blowing in the wind and alert you with a happy song. Like maybe this one from Looney Tunes. (Just ignore those guys in hats. I have no idea who they are.)




But I digress.
Amy's project took place just last summer, when people were plenty hard up for cash. So I can only assume Chicago must be the land of plenty and we should load up our possessions on the old pickup truck and move there.
But wait! Apparently Amy was not the first to come up with this idea. Someone in Australia did it too, and then used it for a commercial.
Here's theirs:




I can't help noticing that the Aussies put their money on a little more of a challenging tree, so people had to hop and climb to get it. Michelle Obama, there's an idea there for you and your efforts to curb obesity.
So could this become a film-making trend? Could it happen here in Kansas City? I'd like to end with a plea: Oh filmakers. Oh, behavioral scientists. Please, please come to our neighborhood with your magic money trees. (And not that Australian money, either, but real American dollars. )
I promise I'll look up. I promise I'll notice.
Until then, I'll just tend my apple and cherry trees, grape vines and home garden. It's not quite the same as picking a bushel of money.
But almost.

I wanna be a hundred-thousand-aire..So frickin' baad...

I've heard a lot of suggestions about how to be more happy. one of my grandmother's favorites was to "just keep busy."
I've been trying that one out in earnest this fall, by signing on to run an annual festival for piano students. The past week and a half has been spent almost entirely in front of the computer, entering, scheduling and re-entering 770 some students and 85 teachers to play and work shifts.
I don't know yet whether this has made me feel happier or more optimistic about things. But at least I can use it for an excuse for just now getting around to a post that should have been done a week ago.
The news was that--surprise--money can buy a little happiness. The study, done by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, explains income's effect on two kinds of happiness--day-to-day and the overall feeling that your life is working out.
Yes, people. The science is finally in. As to the former kind of happiness, the magic number is $75,000. The farther below that figure you make, the less happy you are day to day. And on the overall feeling that life is working out (which is how I'd describe optimism or positive attitude) well, money has an impact on that, too. If your income keeps going up above that $75,000, it turns out you have much more of that warm glow of satisfaction with your life. (Accounts of the study here and here.)
So if your life was chugging along fine before the recession, if your family was making at least $75,000 and you kept getting raises then...you were more happy. But if during the past year, you were driving along at highway speed and the car suddenly shifted into reverse? Hmmm.
A lot of people could have told us this a long time ago. I know we certainly can attest to the impact on happiness of a family income well below $75,000.
Somehow, though, it was a surprise to others, who apparently believed until this study the bromide that "Money can't buy you happiness." Wha...You mean it can?
I blame the mythology that's sprung up about the "Greatest Generation." According to a certain segment of pundits, the generation of the Great Depression and World War II all pulled together and sacrificed with smiles on their faces. They all just gritted their teeth and raised themselves up without any help. Not a soul secretly cheered on the Bonnies and Clydes of the day. They were truly saints.
If you ask some of them, it sounds true enough. My grandparents certainly had a lot of heart-warming stories about sharing and good deeds during the Depression. If you said, "Money can't buy happiness," Gram would have heartily agreed.
But I also notice they were both scared--scared to death--of even the slightest blip in the economy. When that cloth-coated Republican President Richard Nixon called for wage and price controls (yes, a Republican. Wage and price controls. You can Google it.) they were all for it.
Any thought that we might be about to return to the Depression brought visible shudders. Yes, there were a few good times.
But go back? Not on your life.

Who indeed?

Who is John Galt?
I've been thinking about that classic question, from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged quite a bit lately.
In the book, Galt is a super capitalist genius, a Gulliver sort of hero who is being tied down by small-minded parasites who want to redistribute his wealth for the public good. Contemporary conservatives started talking about this fictional hero shortly after the last election, and there was a lot written about how all the talented "John Galts" of the country would be tempted to just quit--go on strike--if they were going to be taxed and regulated.
Then how would people who were not captains of industry--all those mere employees--get along? Ha ha. They'd be barely able to feed and dress themselves.
Every so often, you'd see a sticker "Who is John Galt?" And there were plenty of people who would suggest that, of course, it is the nation's richest one percent, because obviously they have all the brains. No one had better tick them off, or we'd be in big trouble.
Because it will take a lot of creativity to get us out of the mess we're in.
So I've been thinking. Where are the creative ideas? As far as I see, this creme de la creme is not being tied down. They still have their jobs and incomes. No one's stopping them. Yet here we stay, in the same fix as ever.
I bring it up because of a piece in the New Yorker about the Koch brothers, whose Wichita company Koch Industries is one of the richest in the nation. (If you haven't already, drop what you're doing and read it here.)
If ever there were John Galt characters, it would be David and Charles Koch, who built up the family business inherited from their father, and now use their billions to thwart any attempt at business regulation.
But if you look a little deeper at the family itself, as portrayed in this article, it also says something about the state of creativity in this country.
Fred Koch, the family patriarch, started things pretty much from scratch. He was a chemical engineering graduate from MIT who invented a more efficient way to convert oil into gasoline, and the company was built around this invention.
The company was successful, but when his sons took it over, they boosted it into the stratosphere.
Note here, that the father was the one with the bright idea. He actually created something--a tangible product for sale. His sons have no inventions to their names, however. All their mental genius has been directed at business deals and at rebuffing attempts to regulate them.
In a way, I think that's why we're in all this trouble as a country. We're too many generations away from the inventors. They've never been hungry. They've never felt the sting of being rejected by a higher authority (Fred Koch's invention was not accepted by American oil companies. He had to get his start working with Joseph Stalin in the USSR.) All that one percent have done is create money--for themselves mostly.
This is why we're not seeing the expected answers to our problems. This top one percent have grown too soft and complacent.
It's too bad, because at the same time, we're also worrying about a "crisis in creativity," as written about in a recent Newsweek.
So the question begs to be answered. Who is John Galt?
Maybe it's us.