The key is to build a cylindrical tower using a base of radiating carrot sticks balanced on the bowl rim. “The foundations are very important, so choose dry and strong material,” Shen advises. Then build walls of cucumber slices or fruit blocks, before filling the inside of the tower with any food items you want.
Hey, it’s salad, so it’s good for you!
Thirteen ways of looking at a tanked economy
When did the financial crisis start? Who caused it? What were the key mistakes? What led so many people to make bad decisions — and what, exactly, were the bad decisions in the first place? These are basic questions, and if we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess, we’ll need to know the answers.
Unfortunately, according to Andrew Lo, an economist who directs the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, we don’t know them yet. Lo has reviewed 21 books about the financial crisis for the Journal of Economic Literature — 10 by academic economists, 10 by journalists, and one by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The experience, he writes, was like watching Akira Kurosawa’s classic film “Rashomon”:
We’re left with several mutually inconclusive narratives, none of which completely satisfies our need for redemption and closure . . . .Even the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — a prestigious bipartisan committee of 10 experts with subpoena power who deliberated for 18 months, interviewed over 700 witnesses, and held 19 days of public hearings — presented three different conclusions in its final report. Apparently, it’s complicated.
What’s most disconcerting to Lo is “the fact that we can’t even agree on all the facts,” even basic ones like whether or not CEOs took too much risk, how much of a role over-leveraging played, or how much the Fed’s low interest rates mattered.
