Saturday 3 December 2011

Cashing in early for Christmas in Connecticut

Just back from a week in the USA seeing clients. I arrived last Saturday in NYC in the middle of Thanksgiving weekend. It was unseasonably warm and people just poured on to the streets. I took a stroll down 5th Avenue and was almost crushed to a pulp. The whole Christmas accelerator is pushed up to max  - one lady pepper-sprayed her way to the front of a sale queue at Walmart in LA. I mean you know that Americans love to spend but this is ridiculous. You can't walk anywhere and there's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells et al blasting out. Salvation Army everywhere. Actually I love their kerbside bands but.... Even in the delis where I prefer to get my supper to paying over the odds in the hotel, carols are pumping out in dreary sequence even though half the deli owners don't even celebrate Christmas, except when they're tallying up the day's sales. Three fund managers from Connecticut made the news by winning $254m in the lottery, with over $100m cash up front. This happened to be more than their business had under management so quite a change of life for them. No one was quite sure if it was really their ticket or they were collecting on behalf of someone else who wanted to remain anonymous. I've often thought it makes sense for a money man to win the lottery because he has the best clue about what to do with the cash. The QSL is from WPOP Hartford, Connecticut on 1410 kHz - a low-powered AM station heard in Cape Town in 1968 and still going strong today.


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