Word: wobegons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Financial pundits liked to refer to the recent expansion as the Goldilocks economy: everything from jobs to inflation was just right. But they could just as easily have named it for Lake Wobegon. For a while, investors acted as if every stock was above average. And companies that were in favor were wildly in favor. Just how giddy was it? Remember the name of 1999's buzzy, fast-selling financial Bible...
...Poetry on Lake Wobegon...
...exists only as bits, with no shipping or packaging required, the pricing is sweet. The Franken book on cassette, for instance, costs $12.57 plus shipping at Amazon.com But Audible's version costs only $6.95. Better still, you can buy a la carte stuff, such as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon monologues for 75[cents] each. The opportunity to cherry-pick content and exchange small sums of money online will become more and more attractive, to both consumers and authors. (I would happily read my columns to you if I got, say, a dime a download...
...programs, could use simplification. On my maiden voyage, I thought I had set up three Keillor monologues, a chunk of Franken and some Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But for reasons that are still unclear to me, though the program manager said I had downloaded 20 min. of Wobegon, all I got was the last few minutes of it. Oh, well--at least the Franken survived...
Despite all of these issues and complications, however, Wobegon Boy is still for the most part an entertaining and even warm-hearted read. Keillor's affection for his fellow Midwesterners, while still being able to poke great fun at them, is unmatched in his field. Conversations between elderly relatives is compared to a Samuel Beckett play, an uncle in politics claims that "bribery [is] simply a case of the free market at work simplifying the decision-making process," and the modern-day world always provides fodder for laughs. When one of John's aunts complains about her fatigue, another relative...