Meepie Christmas to You!
by meep
Seventeen years ago, my husband-to-be gave me this domain for Christmas.
I’m going to knock off the pension stuff til next week and share with you a few Christmas-y things I enjoy. I put most of these together years ago, so just a little bit of copy & paste will do. ;)
HOW MANY GIFTS?
From my defunct Youtube series, Meep’s Math Matters – when I was ill just like now – I recorded a video on counting up all the Christmas gifts:
The state of the art has moved on since 2009. I may circle back to doing videos again, but will likely be about pensions, which isn’t such a crowded market.
HOURS OF CHRISTMAS MUSIC!
Last time I checked, this Christmas music playlist had about 7 hours of material. To be sure, I put a few hour-long concerts in there, but here are a few key picks from the list.
My favorite secular Christmas song, which from Slade:
A fun Christmas light display:
An odd Christmas song:
And a lovely Ave Maria, which isn’t strictly Christmas, but I don’t care:
It’s always time for a beautiful Ave!
DID I MENTION I LOVE DICKENS?
I’m a big Dickens fan. Maybe not as big as GK Chesterton (I am definitely not going to try to best him), but I’ve read all of his novels multiple times (except Oliver Twist — I’ve read it only once, and I plan keeping it so.)
Right before Stu got STUMP up and running for me, I did a series on the 12 Days of Dickens:
- Death of the Rag and Bottle Man – the creepiest scene in all of Dickens (and that takes a lot)
- The most entertaining villain – Quilp
- My fave Dickens novel: Our Mutual Friend
- GK Chesterton on A Christmas Carol – the ultimate Dickensian
- Dickens’ first Christmas carol – from Pickwick
- The most terrifying villain – a respectable headmaster
- The Dickens character I most identify with – see if you can guess it! (yes, I’m going clickbait-y with this one)
- Societal impact of Dickens’ novels
- The grotesque in Dickens
- On Dickens and Jews
- On the dignity of labor – a speech by Tom Pinch of Our Mutual Friend
- Dickens on Business Fraud – an article I wrote for an actuarial newsletter
How do we prevent new frauds and asset bubbles? One may take a technical approach, but at the heart is human nature—how people behave, how people have particular goals, and how some will try to get what they want fraudulently. Many of these frauds are successful due to the perpetrator’s own knowledge of human nature. It’s hilarious how often we hear “This time it’s different!”…. and it turns out people’s greed, envy, pride, and pretty much all the mortal sins, come into the mix in the same old way.
Fiction takes us away from particular concrete facts and asks us to look and think more broadly. If you want to catch the next fraud, don’t look at the particular tools necessarily, but how people and societies behave. These two novels of Dickens [Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend] help give a little piece of that puzzle, and reading more broadly may provide you with more such pieces.
I also did a 12 Days of Learning series in 2012, and many of those links should still be good.
Where I can be found online….not quite active on some of those any more
MEEPIE CHRISTMAS THROUGH THE YEARS
from 2003:
from 2010:
from 2013:
thanks to the friend who photoshopped me in…. ;)
and finally, from 1982:
I should be easy to spot. I’m the know-it-all.
Merry Christmas, all y’all!
