Legendary Service

The other day I needed to buy a gift and saw that TD Bank sells gift Visa cards. I like TD — they are open 7 days a week and someone always asks you how they can help you when you walk in there, and it always looks pretty empty.

They obviously don’t sell a lot of gift cards because it took about fifteen minutes to complete the transaction — someone had to find the keys to the vault to retrieve their stash of cards. Nevertheless, I bought one and after I got home, read the fine print.

It turns out, if you don’t spend it within a year, they start to use pay you negative interest each month until it disappears. Cheapo phone cards do this to you month by month, but now banks too. It is a stimulus. Sometimes a great notion.

Legendary People

Koestler on Newton

“What he achieved was rather like an explosion in reverse. When a projectile blows up, its shiny smooth symmetrical body is shattered into jagged, irregular fragments. Newton found fragments and made them fly together into a simple, seamless, compact body, so simple that it appears as self-evident, so compact that any grammar-schoolboy can handle it.”

Koestler on Descartes

“Descartes’ wide-open mind boggled in horror at the idea of ghost arms clutching through the void- as unprejudiced intelligence was bound to do, until ‘universal gravity’ or ‘electromagnetic field’ became verbal fetishes which hypnotized it into quiescence, disguising the fact that they are metaphysical concepts dressed in the mathematical language of physics”

Like Stefan Zweig, Koestler, I just discovered, committed joint suicide with his wife.