Category Archives: Short piece
The National Pastime
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th May 2025Wasting time. I know I’m stretching the title’s definition as it’s not agreeable, but it’s how we spend most of our waking hours. At least, those that don’t involve a screen. It’s waiting. And much of screen time is spent waiting for the desired screen to appear, receiving error messages, clicking on dead links, or…
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More on Error
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th May 2025I’ve written about my old friend error before. Regardless of whether I acknowledge her presence or pretend she’s somewhere else, she’s always by my side ready to hurl the qui vive? when I stray from the path of accuracy, which alas is embarrassingly often. She has billions of sisters who are spread into every corner…
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The New Pandemic – Very Unique Verbal Tics
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 5th January 2025There’s a current pandemic that no one seems to have noticed. Verbal tics and palsies have always been with us but they have grown to epidemic proportions since the recession of Covid. It has several variants, the most common of which is, you know. So pervasive is the you know variant that it has reached…
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Credit Rating Agencies – Folie à Trois
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th December 2024There are three credit agencies that provide consumer reports. They are Transunion, Experian, and Equifax. They’re all addled. Below are the factors that they say they use to determine an individual’s credit score. Below that is what they really do. Payment historyOn-time payments is the number one factor credit scoring agencies use to assign a…
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Joseph Schumpeter and a Broken Jar of Coffee
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd December 2024Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was an Austrian political economist. After a distinguished career in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1932. He taught at Harvard for the remaining 18 years of his life. In 1942 he published his best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. He is famous for creative destruction a term he borrowed to…
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Law, Lawyers, and Other Fables
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 9th September 2024“No one is above the law” is a bit of thick BS that usually comes from the mouth or pen of a person of malign intent whose goal is to deprive others of their liberty or property. Unspoken is their self-exemption from the principle which seems to have no real use save as a cudgel….
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Remembrance of Things Past – A Fragment
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st July 2024It didn’t take a bit of cake dipped in tea, rather it oozed from my memory like an elderly snake as I paused between steps halted by the accumulation of years. A piece of the past, it came back to me in all its vivid complexity. I was a minor officer for a large medical…
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Making Life Better
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 6th July 2024Those passionate about improving things but without the wit to do it are the most dangerous humans on the planet. One sees this everywhere. Its most virulent form is the complex system. Solitary pursuits are the least affected. Those most committed to improving whatever slice of life has seized their attention invariably turn to the…
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Invention and the Arts
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 25th June 2024Art, in all its guises, is of course an invention. Its evolution was governed by the internal manipulation common to any human endeavor. But it was also greatly altered and influenced by inventions not initially intended to relate to art. Consider the discovery of electricity, most famously by Benjamin Franklin but by others as well,…
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Lubbock – A Tale of Two Cities
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 7th May 2024There’s an article in The American Mind a publication of the Claremont Institute that in its first half describes life in the city of Lubbock where I have lived for the last 40 years. It describes a series of municipal characteristics that have escaped my notice over those four decades. They include leaving personal items…
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