“Benjamin Franklin And the Birth of a Paper Money Economy,” Plus Birds

This was a lecture given by Professor Farley Grubb on March 30, 2006, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The Reserve Bank and The Library Company of Philadelphia co-sponsored this lecture as one of many events held in the city of Philadelphia to mark the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin.

I never expected currency in the colonies and economist Farley Grubb would have played a role in the research for The American Slave Coast. I wonder if my amigo L and / or her husband are familiar with Grubb as he comes out of the U of Chicago School of Economics, and so does L's. husband.

W College's B&G's have not yet cleared away the tree and branches fallen into the back yard from the last storm. Despite the fog and sog, the temperature today is considerably higher than it's been in days. The birds love that broken tree and the branches. There's a surprising number of different birds -- surprising to me, anyway. Maybe the fall made sleeping insects / pupae? in the bark more accessible to them? I can see the birds very clearly through the kitchen windows since the trees are bare and the bushes flattened by the storm haven't stood up again. (I suppose the new glasses also help.)

As you can see from the county's Bird List, the county and the Eastern Shore are haven and home to enormous number of and kinds of birds, not only shore and water fowl. Jays, robins, chickadees, nuthatches, wrens, finches, sparrows, juncos, cardinals and bluebirds are our common backyard birds.

What's also enjoyable to watch from the kitchen windows in winter are the squirrels dance-springing in the aerial acrobatics from tree-to-tree, fenced yard-to-yard. The cats also lost most of their invisibility, with the loss of foliage and the arrival of snow. You see them making their usual rounds along their usual paths now, where usually these passages are hidden. Through the windows I also contemplate the still unsolved mystery of certain tracks in the snow, and what unseen creature it is that makes them.

Elsewhere it was not a good day.  From Texas to Michigan, they're buffeted by 50 MPH winds, ice and rain, and then feet of snow.  In Egypt it was a really bad day for the Egyptians; it was not that good of a day for journalists either, but that's their job.  Zunguzungu has a great deal of well-informed commentary about Egypt, with good linkage.