A couple of things:
1. The podcasts don't take very long to record, but they take a while to write (no, for the most, I'm not improvising). I'll try to get the next one up this coming week, hopefully by Saturday at the latest.
2. You can now download the Death and Taxes podcast on iTunes. If you go to the iTunes store and search for "death and taxes blog podcast," you can find it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how else you can find it -- there's no "legal" category in iTunes, so I'm stuck in the "business" category. Anyway, you can listen to or download individual episodes, or subscribe to the podcast.
April 23, 2008 Wednesday SECTION: Section B; Column 1; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 50 words HEADLINE: why variable-life policies require a closer look BYLINE: Arden Dale Consumers should take close look at variable-insurance ... via Insurance News Net
The bigger they are, the harder they (might) fall.
Get ready to jump into a new career, but be prepared to deal with some mistaken notions about older workers.
I recently finished reading Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, which is the first book in his Zuckerman trilogy (or trilogy and epilogue, as I guess it's now known, since it contains four books and Roth evidently doesn't like the word "quartet"). It's a short but engaging work about a young novelist (Nathan Zuckerman) who pays a visit to a very well-respected older novelist (E.I. Lonoff).
Interestingly enough, one of the central conflicts of the book involves a fight between Zuckerman and his father over one of Zuckerman's short stories, which focuses on a will contest. According to Zuckerman, the story was based on the following facts:
A great-aunt of mine, Meema Chaya, had left for the education of two fatherless grandsons the pot of money she had diligently hoarded away as a seamstress to Newark's upper crust. When Essie, the widowed mother of the twin boys, attempted to invade the trust to send them from college to medical school, her younger brother, Sidney, who was to inherit the money remaining in Meema Chaya's estate upon conclusion of the boys' higher education, had sued to stop her.
Zuckerman's father objects to the story, on the grounds that it airs the family's dirty laundry and (more importantly) portrays Jews in an unfavorable light.
Not to take the fun out of the novel, but the whole fight over Meema Chaya's estate could have been avoided if she had clearly defined "education" to include (or exclude) graduate and/or professional school.
