Source: Wikipedia

Dear Diary,

Things are slowing down. This is Thanksgiving week. People are leaving work early, trying to beat the holiday traffic rush.

US stocks and gold were flat yesterday.

We're still in New York, taking care of business. Tomorrow, we'll get an early start and head back down to Maryland.

We have a lot of young men coming for the holiday – friends of our sons. Your correspondent does not like to see young men with idle hands.

A strong back is a terrible thing to waste! So, he has a project: to save an old tobacco barn, using the soft hands of these future lawyers and financial managers.

The trouble with most young people, we've observed, is they don't know how to use their hands. They've spent their entire lives in school and on laptops and smartphones. Few have had any contact with tools or hard work.

Our plan – for the benefit of readers interested in tobacco barn preservation – is to turn an old-fashioned oak-frame barn into a pole barn.

The sill is rotten, as are many of the main supporting posts. We will dig holes, plant treated 12-inch poles in concrete and bolt them to the uprising posts above the rot. And we will hope that the barn doesn't fall on our heads when we start banging on it.

“You're gonna do this with a bunch of college boys?” asks Tommy, a much weathered local man who has spent his whole life “movin' dirt.”

“You're gonna put a hurtin' on ‘em.”

Yes. That's the plan.

We'll let you know how it works out.

Fantasy World

Meanwhile, as Chris pointed out yesterday, in politics and economics we live in a fantasy world.

The feds claim to improve our economy. We pretend to believe it.

Did a central bank ever add one single centime, one peseta, one zloty or one fraction of a mill to the world's wealth?

Not that we are aware of.