During a Layover in "Lay" Country

Just read about the upcoming premiere at the Sundance film festival of the new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, based on the book of the same name (link here). Last November, during a brief layover in the Houston airport on the way to our honeymoon destination, I searched the bookstands for an "easy read" for the eleven hour leg of our flight from Texas to France. The Enron book caught my eye in an instant. The irony was too compelling. A book about Enron, once the most high profile, fastest growing, and politically connected energy company in Houston, being prominently displayed and sold in the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in that very same town not long after its epic collapse. I began reading my newly purchased copy soon after take off from Bush airport and was nearly halfway done by the time we landed at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Truth is stranger and oftentimes, more interesting than fiction. The Enron saga had it all. A true rags to riches story in the form of Kenneth Lay, the founder and longtime chief executive of Enron, who grew up in rural Missouri to a dirt poor family that barely managed to stay housed and fed. Love, hate, power, politics, betrayal, infidelity, ambition, greed, arrogance, deception, fraud, and near the end, a dramatic suicide. Danielle Steele could not have imagined a wilder story for one of her novels. Just hope the soon-to-be-released film is as interesting as the book's account of Enron and its litany of characters.

The Big Six-O

Last Saturday, we celebrated T's mother's sixtieth birthday at the Duck Club in Lafayette (link here). A very nice dinner for a very deserving mother. Koreans traditionally celebrate two birthdays above all others, the first and sixtieth. In earlier times, reaching the age of sixty was quite an accomplishment with average life expectancy hovering somewhere in the fifties. But why the number sixty? Any symbolic meaning? Here is Wikipedia's response to the search request "number 60": (1) in the measurement of time, the number of seconds in a minute, and the number of minutes in an hour; (2) in geometry, the number of seconds in a minute, and the number of minutes in a degree; (3) a common speed limit, in miles per hour, for freeways in many US states; (4) in years of marriage, the diamond wedding anniversary; (5) the maximum number of marbles (game pieces) in Chinese checkers. The last entry was an intriguing possibility. One could humorously proclaim, "I reached sixty and haven't lost any of my marbles". A more plausible explanation for the symbolic importance of sixty may involve the Chinese sexagesimal cycle (link here). Anyhow, three parents down, just one more to go.