Salty Weekend Reading August 23, 2002February 21, 2017 SALTED GRAPEFRUIT Mark Kennet: ‘You might also try salt plus chili powder on slightly under-ripe mangos. That’s how they eat them in Thailand, and it’s really surprisingly good! Here in Peru, I’m so happy to have a zillion different types of fresh fruit every day that I don’t bother to put anything on it – I can’t imagine anything improving a cherimoya.’ John Calkins: ‘Your “Grapefruit” column described exorbitant room service charges at a four-star Beverly Hills hotel, while “Pressing Matters” states that the grapefruit in question was delivered to your hotel room in San Francisco. Jet lag, perhaps, or did you inhale too much steam in Des Moines?’ ☞ Oops. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION Tim Bonham: ‘Have you seen ecomponline.com? It uses SEC reports to give you the compensation of the top executives of companies. Very interesting. Looking up ones like Enron, etc. can be infuriating! I just wish they had included a line at the bottom giving the total reported profit (or loss) for the company for that year.’ ☞ Neat. YOU CAN CUT/PASTE FROM MYM12 IN WIN ’98 OR XP! Michael Rutkaus: ‘For XP Home: Click over little icon at upper left of MYM12 Screen in XP. Select Edit. Now you can mark (you do this to select what to copy) cut, paste almost like in Windows. You also have a better Find than in MYM12. Also if you don’t have the nice MYM12 Icon on your Windows XP desktop, but have a DOS looking icon, you can right click on that, select Program, then select change icon and then Browse in the MYM12 folder to find the icon. For Win98/Me and even Win95, the key, running it inside a window, not ‘full screen.’ (Right-click on the MYM icon on your desktop and select Properties and then Screen. Then tell Windows you want to run MYM in a window, and that you want to Display Toolbar. Next time you start MYM12 it will have a modicum of a toolbar at the top.’ ☞ Now they tell me. VARIABLE UNIVERSAL LIFE INSURANCE Steven: ‘An advisor wants me to buy a low load, commission-free VUL. What do you think of this product?’ ☞ If there’s a load, low as it may be, how can there be no commission? If you mean he/she gets absolutely no commission for recommending this product, that would be a reason at least to listen. But do you need life insurance? (From Steven’s e-mail address, I’m guessing he may not.) If not, don’t buy. And even if you do, why not buy inexpensive term life insurance, that’s easy to shop for, and do your stock market investing separately (and/or use the money to fund a Roth IRA)? WEEKEND READING FROM GEORGE SOROS Click here.