Food for Thought

So here is Honest Tea included among “100 of the most notable beverage brands of the past 100 years,” according to Beverage World. Others include Coca-Cola, Perrier, Snapple, Evian, Bud Light, 7-Up, Jack Daniel’s, Gatorade, Starbucks and Absolut. How come Welch’s made it and V-8 didn’t? Yoo-hoo but not Dom Perignon? Jolt Cola but not Colt 45? So, OK, it’s a little capricious. But it’s nice, after 17 months in business, to be named a brand of the century.

Alicia Rasley: “About 12 years ago my husband and I bought universal life insurance policies, thinking the cash value would fund our children’s college tuition. (Well, that’s what the insurance agent told us!) I think we paid $7000 for $150K in coverage. (Single premium.) The cash value was supposed to increase rapidly, based on the interest rate then — you know 10-12%. Anyway, the latest statement shows the cash value is now around $7400. At least we’re back up around what we put in! And we have had life insurance all that time. But, as you might imagine, we’ve found other ways to save for college. This is a live-and-learn experience, and it’s no big loss financially. But I’m glad we never depended on it for college cash.”

The same term life insurance coverage might have cost $250 a year, and $7,000 invested in the Dow Jones 12 years ago would be worth — what? — maybe $40,000 today.

One of the randomly-rotating “quotes of the day,” at left, is from ex-Harvard Treasurer Paul Cabot: “I don’t understand a goddam thing about insurance, except that I don’t want to have any.” To which Steven Gilbert adds: “At a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting several years ago, a shareholder asked Warren Buffett whether the firm had key man insurance on his life. Buffett replied, ‘We sell insurance, we don’t buy insurance.'”

J. Raymond: “[With respect to Cooking Like a Guy™], fresh blueberries freeze well too. As a more acquired taste, you can peel a banana, cut it into relatively thin slices (similar in size to what you would probably use if you were putting them on your morning cereal) and stack these in a plastic container in the freezer. The stacking takes a bit of trial and error only because the banana slice surfaces tend to freeze to each other so you should “offset” them as much as possible to make them easier to remove (a fork works!) from the container after they freeze. It sounds a bit odd but if you’re a fan of Ben and Jerry’s ‘Chunky Monkey’ you might like this too. The blueberries are easier.”

Don’t miss Anna and the King. I didn’t expect to like it, but it’s wonderful. About love and justice — just like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, come to think of it. (But I invite the Thai scholars in the crowd to let me know just how egregiously it departed from historical fact.)