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The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

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Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#221
post #175
post #161

> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body. But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.

I always find fun these "generalizations". Like: "Eggs are fine". If you are a 50kg person that eats 20 eggs for breakfast each day I doubt it would be fine. We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per week)

With the help of a stochastic parrot I've determined the following: Consuming an LD50 quantity of eggs (400–500 eggs) would amount to about 29% of a 70 kg person's body volume. This suggests that such an amount would be physically impractical to ingest in one sitting, even before metabolic toxicity becomes an issue.

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#222
post #164
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.

The street wisdom was that eggs gave you high cholesterol due to the yolk having loads of cholesterol (which doesn't get absorbed, we need to produce our own cholesterol).

There were a bunch of studies saying high cholesterol was bad and would give you a heart attack. Then also ones saying low cholesterol would make you crazy [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4215473/].

And also ones saying food high in cholesterol was bad. Then ones saying food high in ‘bad’ cholesterol were bad, and one’s high in ‘good’ cholesterol were good.

Then eventually we figured out that dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels except in a tiny portion of the population.

Fun times eh?

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#225
post #161

> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body. But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.

[dead]

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#226
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not renting vs owning that's the problem, its renting vs mortgage where mortgage is improperly considered synonymous with ownership. but that's because its so rare to be able to own the home near the places you can rent. so sure, renting vs buying a home in cash will give the cash ownership a leg up. but then it shifts over to people that would love to espouse about the 'time value of money' and leverage, where p…

> if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that renting will be a better deal for you for over 10 years straight, before the mortgage pays dividends. How do mortgages pay dividends? In any case, it's all about opportunity costs, and yields. To give an extreme example: if the house costs 100x the yearly rent, you are probably better off putting your money in the stock market instead of buying the property, and pa…

When i paid off my house and calculated my total payments, it came out to 6.8 years of the rent we had been paying when we bought it, (which was of course going up annually so it's probably better than 6x)

100x is just bad decision making

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#227
Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end) would've been excellent.

Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#228

(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...

https://archive.ph/LmhBD What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles: >He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek…

>Is he a horrible name dropper? Does he really know Marvin Davis?

This paragraph threw me off. The author goes on to quote Davis about Link - so I suppose the second sentence is to meant to be rhetorical and for effect, as in "is the sky blue?"

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#229
post #163
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.

Egg consumption was considered to lead to high cholesterol levels and thus linked to cardiovascular disease. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19... https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/

The idea that granola would be healthier is rather strange

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#230
what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being there, you were there, a small part of the story. the starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a fixture. he was a part of the story.

maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now.

the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor.

the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.

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