I just read a quick news blurb about 2 young men (22 and 18) who were trying to sue their billionaire dad for back child support from the period from 1998 to 2002.
14 years, by my accounting.
Outrageous, right? The man didn't pay child support for 14 YEARS! Of course these boys should get SOME remuneration, I mean, he's their DAD, and should have taken care of them! Shameful!
Except...the article goes on to say that their Mom, an ex-girlfriend of the filthy rich gentleman, received approximately 3 million dollars from her loaded lover over that period.
This is not chicken feed. My calculations indicate that 3 million dollars divided by 14 (number of years) divided by 12 (number of months in a year) = about $17,600 a MONTH. If things averaged out, she get about 215K dollars a year from Daddy Warbucks.
NOT chicken feed. In fact, it's far more than I make on a GROSS basis a year, and yet I'm still paying the bills. If she wasn't taxed on this money, then she would have been living very high on the hog indeed.
So, the jury threw out the case.
And lo, I did chortle.
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Took a look into the heart of the felled giant tree yesterday evening. The heart is a black empty space, quite literally, as a great majority of the ground level trunk was completely absent!
It's clear that some sort of bird or bat colony has been living in there, as the walls of the 'cave' are covered with what I'm assuming is poo. Must have been a nice snug haven for them.
Also? There's a tiny tree growing in the rich compost in the center of the downed Goliath's heart. A TREE, growing inside a tree!
Awesome.
(Just think of the odds of that happening, a seed falling inside a tree's rotten core, then getting enough air and sunlight to be able to grow. Nearly impossible, is what I'm thinking, but 'nearly' means there's a chance for success, right? I call it 'daggone astounding.')
Maybe at some point I'll shut up about the stupid tree, but this process fascinates me, especially since in a year or 10 nobody's going to know it was ever there. I counted the rings on a main offshoot of the trunk, a branch that's only about 2 feet across, and I got up to 85 rings. Just imagine how old the entire tree was, with a trunk fully 6 feet across. That tree had been around before our town was born - perhaps before the school down the street (Wake Forest College) was just a few log cabins and Raleigh was a day's ride away. If my estimate of 170 years is even close, then it saw a LOT of history in its time.
Forget the walls, I'd love for that gnarled up husk of a trunk to talk.
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Tiff out.
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