Last week I finally got around to doing something that I’ve been meaning to do for about 45 years. I cracked open a novel by Mickey Spillane, a writer in the pulp-fiction end of the private-eye genre. Spillane was born March 9, 1918, so the 100th anniversary of his birth has just...

You probably think I’m shallow just because I get my philosophy from bumper stickers and country-western songs. However, I also get my wisdom from slogans printed on T-shirts. Here’s something I saw on a shirt recently: “OK, but first, coffee.” Well, those were the words, at...

I recently ran into an old chum from my hometown. We hadn’t seen each other in over 30 years. All those years have to go somewhere. For most of us they go into work. With this in mind, I ‘m going to reel in the years, stow away the time, and ponder my decades of working in the...

The term “cost-benefit analysis,” once the purview of textbooks in economics and finance, is a common term these days. As the name suggests, it basically means making a decision by weighing its downsides (costs) against its upsides (benefits). This might seem like a childishly...