by John Wilcock

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.”
— Andy Warhol

MERE MULTMILLIONAIRES DON’T even make Fortune’s list of America’s richest people. The list stops with its 390th entrant, the Wyoming stockbroker John “Joe” Ricketts, who’s listed as the custodian of a meager one and a half BILLION dollars, largely acquired via his ten percent ownership of the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Ricketts shares his place on Forbes list with five other billionaires (actually they’re at least $1.5 billionaires): Neal Patterson, the 64-year-old chairman of an electronic health system (whatever that is); eighty-one year old Bruce Nordstrom, the former chairman of the Nordstrom department store chain; Gary Michelson, 65, whose invention of various medical devices paid off big time when he pioneered spinal cages and a device to fuse vertebrae; and two youngsters, 44 year old Alan Auerbach, founder of cancer-drug companies, and Eric Lepkosky, 43, the one-time carpet salesman who entered the big time when he headed the Groupon company.

There are 390 other company heads on Fortune‘s Rich List of multi-billionaires beginning with such well-known charmers as 58-year-old Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who, with his wife Melinda, is described as having spent billions tacking such scourges as polio, malaria, the ebola outbreak, and the ever-constant scourge of the mosquito.

To be a billionaire you don’t necessarily have to be old. For example, look at 30-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, number 11 on Forbes’ list with an impressive $34billion. As Facebook‘s CEO he recently okayed paying five billion dollars to acquire mobile messaging app WhatsApp and a further two billion for the virtual-reality maker Oculus VR.

But far ahead of him in the league of billionaires, with assets of almost twice as much–$67billion–is Warren Buffet, 84, who has personally donated $23 billion to various charities. Much of his success has come from his savvy investment in companies he feels are undervalued, recent examples being Wells Fargo, Coca Cola and IBM.

Larry Ellison, Oracle‘s founder, clocks in at number three on Forbe’s rich list, followed by the Koch brothers, 78 year-old Charles and David, 72, who have spent $9billllion in the past year.

DISCOVERING A BOOK more than twenty years after it was first published doesn’t make it any the less interesting. The book I’m referring to is “a thematic dictionary” called Descriptionary which, in its fascinating subtitle, is described as “the book for when you know what it is, but not what it’s called”. It could be as simple as describing the silence that might occur during a radio broadcast [“dead air”] or how to describe a word that becomes another word when it’s spelled backwards—”live” becomes “evil”, for example. That can be called a reversal. In his introduction, Marc McCutcheon points to the ease, for example, in finding the phrase for the leeward side of a mountain (rain shadow) and even a name for the light that bathes a peak at sunset (alpenglow). By sort of working backwards, Descriptionary is able to produce the exact word you were unable to look for in a dictionary.

To my regular readers: this is my first return to writing my column in several months.
—JW

Bakewell (part 2), its mayor, and its pudding…

National Weed (1974, issue #3)

it’s here…