cubs update

And now on to pressing matters of life and death...The Cubs are looking slightly less solid than they did a month or so ago, no longer possessing the best record in the league (thanks to the Angels, who just upgraded by adding a power bat no less) and leading the pesky Brewers by only two games. But at least they're wasting the Brew Crew 6-0 in the seventh as I type and they are still tops record-wise in the NL anyway.

Speaking of, it's long overdue for someone to remind the Brewers that small-market teams are supposed to pull a Baltimore and fade quickly after spring is over. But I must admit, as much as I like the Cubs, it's hard to root against Milwaukee. Who doesn't like to see unknown teams come from nowhere and shake up the big clubs? (They did go out and grab Sabathia, though, so they're not exactly a quiet "other" team.) A Brewers-Rays series would be cool. But a Cubs-Rays series would be a dream, as not only would that fulfill the "perfect Series" requirements for both a small-market team and a team named the Cubs being involved, but I could easily hook up boarding arrangements near both cities to get in on the once-in-a-lifetime action.

Anyway, I suppose it's a good thing I've been getting in a little more overtime recently, because those Wrigley World Series tix aren't gonna come cheap!

africa follow-up

On a topic related to that of the recent South Africa post, Vox shares his thoughts concerning the troubles of Ethiopia:

Leave Africa to the Africans. It's their problem, so let them sort it out. What is more racist than to insist that an entire continent of human beings are totally incapable of addressing their own problems?

I really like how he brings in the racism trump card with such force against those who always try to claim it as their own. I'm not sure I agree with him entirely though. He's right on as far as government aid is concerned, but I hope and suspect Vox would agree there is a place for missionary activity and other charitable efforts that aim to change the culture from the ground up and not just throw money and "regime change" at surface issues. But that's another topic.

Again, the point of leaving people capable of governing themselves alone to govern themselves is a good one to take away. Either they're capable of self-rule and that right ought to be respected by those of other continents, or they're not capable of it and we need to quit pretending they are by supporting puppet governments or assuming the next strong-arm leader will be better than the last one. Come to think of it, maybe the perpetual influx of Western money and resources into the hands of those who use it only to continue the madness is part of the problem. Methinks Western leaders have been inexcusably slow in learning how governments unlike their own really operate--or at least how they don't operate.

if only there were more like her

Shockingly, I find myself in agreement with feminazis on something, though I'm convinced it's just a freak accident of two opposite worldviews coincidentally overlapping on the same bit of truth rather than evidence that said belief systems are other than opposite. It seems that some women would be very capable of at least setting a good example in society's highest leadership roles for others of their sex--though I concede one will much sooner find solid supporting evidence in history than in contemporary times. Consider, for example, the following:

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were women to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.

-- Queen Victoria, 1870

A prophetess, no? Methinks "the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings" is quite an accurate description of the hordes of feminazis roaming the lands of Western civilization and devoting all their energy to destroying the foundations of their own world. What a shame too few folks heeded the Queen's common-sense warning. The world needed a lot more Queen Victoria's back in the day. Were that the case then maybe, just maybe, today's world would be a lot less twisted than it is. The poor woman has certainly been spinning in her grave for many decades now.

today's history 101 lesson: south africa

As if to elaborate on the pessimism of the previous post, here is an outstanding article a friend recently passed along to me. I would grab a few quotes from it, but the whole thing is that good so you just need to go read it all. Scary stuff, I tell you, and not in the least because some of what the author suspected would happen in the U.S. has already happened since she wrote the piece. Either she's a total quack making a bunch of doomsday predictions and trying to stir up fury, or she's at least partially right on some of that.

I, of course, believe the latter to be the case. The article has tremendous insight and reads like it was written by someone watching a predictable series of events from afar. And as I said, she has already been proven to be a prophet of sorts on many issues. This is very ungood for those who would like to see the States continue to be a beacon of civilization.

I figure it must seem like watching a movie you've seen before--you don't know or remember exactly how every detail will work out until just as it happens, but you know the basic plot line. You are happy to see the characters do things that will work in their favor and wince as they make bad moves, because you know what's coming. Especially important, you know how it ends. Even if some twists catch you by surprise, you know the arc the storyline is on and getting from here to there is only a matter of filling in the intermediate details. I submit that world events parallel history in such fashion more often than we may realize, and that the scenario outlined in the article will eventually be just more supporting evidence.

As I told the guy who sent the link to me, I hope I'm wrong but I suspect it's too late to change the onslaught of stupidity and ignorance that is gaining ground faster than ever in this country. A lot of that has been building for too long and would take at least a generation, likely more, to change. We won't have that kind of time if things continue as they do, and hoping for people to suddenly wake up to what's going on and/or get the courage to stand up and resist it is a sucker bet too.

The topic of South Africa is an interesting one in itself. I don't know much about its recent history, but I remember seeing the headlines and hearing about it constantly back in the day when apartheid was being dismantled and Mandela was getting released from prison and being celebrated as a worldwide hero and all. I always figured things worked out going forward. After all, we just kinda quit hearing anything about it from the "news" peddlers, so it's safe to assume things must have gone okay, right? After all, since when did the news media turn its back on a story wrought with destruction, violence, despair, and all those things that sell so well to the tube-watching public? Oh, right, when events at hand didn't fit their paradigm of how they wish the world to be...gotcha.

I'm suddenly quite curious as to what the real story of South Africa is, as well as that of Mandela, et al. Were things ever really as they were made out to be? What's it really like over there now? Hopefully the article paints a grimmer picture of reality than what it really is, as there are always many sides to the same story, but I wonder how much of what went on and is going on was/is considered "unreportable" by the powers that be and simply not passed along to the masses.

Oh well, in the end it's a good thing to know that God performs miracles and that what we see happening around us is all but irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. We may just need one or two or several to get out of the mess we're in. And if we end up on the low road? As they say, God has a habit of refining his church every now and then...

another fredism

Nobody these days captures truth in bite-size chunks quite like Fred. Here's a great analogy about America and its economic prowess that isn't quite what it used to be:

The country seems to be in an economic decline and hasn’t figured it out, sort of like a fifty-year–old man who thinks he’s nineteen.

I like that, though I'd like it more if it weren't true. The populace and especially the gummint seems to be humming right along as if things will just magically keep falling into place like they always have for us Americans. Take a look at the world, folks. Or just wait and see...

reminder of the times

Here's a hard kick in the crotch, courtesy of the Campaign for Liberty:

Congratulations, dear reader. Cost of Government Day was last Wednesday, July 16th. This means that after slaving away for over half the year to pay state, local and federal taxes, you’re finally working for yourself.

This year’s Cost of Government Day fell four days later than last year’s, and sixteen days later than in 2000. Ironically, the biggest increases in government spending took place during the “conservative” administrations of George Bush 41 & 43.

Ain't gummint great?

Actually, I just realized I'm forced to retract my earlier claim that there should be no holidays. We most definitely need a Cost of Government Day if for no other reason than to keep the wildly out-of-control freight train that is the income tax system on people's minds as they observe the holiday coming around later every year. And why shouldn't the ones working to foot the bill for everyone else get a day off after their more than half a year of unpaid labor?

quite a heist for the 'phins

WHAT!?!? What the heck are the Deadskins thinking? Trading a second-rounder and a sixth-rounder for a 34-year-old dude who skipped an entire mini-camp worth of workouts and is gonna have to play out of position anyway? Okay, so he's put up decent numbers recently, but the guy ain't immortal and everyone knows defensive linemen take heavy abuse. My prediction is he has a respectable but role-player-ish several games until an injury forces him out mid-season.

Off the top of my head I'm not coming up with another NFL move in recent years to match that level of boneheadedness. I mean, this level of insanity and dealing of overpaid has-been's is reserved for the NBA--or so I thought. I guess the Deadskins were that unhappy with their reserve linemen. (In their defense, they did lose two of them to injury on the same day.) Or maybe that's why they're the Deadskins. And maybe that's one reason Bill Parcells is Bill Parcells. Perhaps he can work the front office as well as he did the sidelines back in the day.

bad parenting: not just a u.s. problem

Read a somewhat disturbing blurb in the recent WEEK issue that also had a few lines that made me laugh. It's worth posting in its entirety:

Ireland is swarming with unfit parents, said Ian O'Doherty in the Dublin Irish Independent. You can't walk down a street in Dublin without hearing some woman screeching at her child to "fooken shut up." Recently I was waiting in line at a shop when the tot behind me told its mother it had to "do me toilet." Rather than take the child to the bathroom and lose her place in line, the woman yelled "hold on to your bleedin' kidneys." My colleague overheard a mother tell her kid that if he didn't quiet down, she would stab him. You may say that rearing children is a private matter, but that doesn't wash in the Ireland of today. These abused kids are surely the "muggers, junkies, and murderers of tomorrow." The state is "negligent in its duty of care toward children when it allows people like these to raise anything more evolved than a chicken." It is indefensible that "you need a license to have a dog or television, yet any drooling halfwit can drop as many kids as they want and the state will pay them for it." As a society, "we need to develop the balls to say enough is enough--having kids is a responsibility, not a right."

Despite his apparent nanny-state leanings, the guy makes a point that applies in this country, too. There are too many idiots out there who, for various reasons, are raising their kids so poorly that the children have little chance of ever knowing how to go about life being anything other than a bum or a criminal. My first response is there must be something that can be done about this, but I wonder if it's too late to fix the problem, at least within a generation or so (and fixing it after that would require the previous generation waking up to its own stupidity, so that would certainly appear to be a sucker bet as well). What kind of law or government intervention can fix it at this point? Any such meddling would be the sort of social engineering that has been wrought with failure throughout history. The government can't be expected to solve a problem it's incapable of solving.

The problem is tied up in the greater issue of the moral decay of society as a whole. And that has been a long time coming. Parenting is the sort of thing that requires a strong sense of personal responsibility and care for others, combined with an acceptance that one's life is not one's own. These character traits among the populace are derived, of course, from a solid moral underpinning of society, not from the newest government fix-it fad. So I don't suppose it should surprise anyone that we who are supposedly highly advanced and "progressive" find ourselves without the necessary means to combat the problem. Thus we keep crying to the government to "do something" on our behalf, while government continues to demonstrate again and again that it is utterly inept at confronting such issues and will only fail no matter how much money or how many policies it throws at them. Oh well, civilizations as well as individuals reap what they sow.

Just for good measure, I'll throw in the Best Quote Ever by Any American Political Figure: "Our constitution is intended to govern a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." That can be said of any political system, really. Without some higher sense of duty (religious or otherwise, but that's a discussion for another time) that promotes altruism and is followed by enough people such that it has the effect of a stabilizer and compass for the society, government just becomes a game of strong-arm tactics and who can tickle the people's ears the most. And, well, look how well that's worked throughout history. The path we're on has been well-traveled for sure. (As a side note, I think that historical bit is covered in some detail in Vox's The Irrational Atheist, which I really need to get around to reading.)

completely unsurprising fact of the day

Just took the Autism Quotient Test via a link from Vox's. The result? A 33 (out of 50), which puts me in this category:

32-50 very high (Most people with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism score about 35)

The "average" range is 11-22, with average scores being 15 for men and 17 for women. So I'm much more anti-social than most people and probably have at least a mild case of AS. Um...duh? Didn't need a test to tell me that.

Also, I think Vox is trying to test his hypothesis that atheists generally score much higher on the autism charts and tend to be more anti-social than theists or the population at large. That should go without saying methinks. After all, the stereotype of scientists being (disproportionately) atheist and some combination of arrogant, weird, and generally unable to interact well or at least pleasantly with other people certainly comes from somewhere, and my experience throughout college tells me that stereotype tends to align with reality quite well. But from looking at the scores in the comments thread, I'd say there are a few of us theists skewing his results considerably. Sorry, Vox.

question for the ages

Thomas Friedman asks one that's worth asking:

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power?

Plenty of folks, including me, dislike (and rightly so IMO) this country's spoiled over-indulgence, its squandering of resources in relentless attempts to police the entire globe and magically transform entire cultures overnight, its ever-increasing government nannyism, its people's ignorance of anything not served up by the boob tube, etc., but as Friedman points out, at least the U.S. is still willing to show some courage and stand for something on an international stage. That's worth a lot and is important to remember. And it's more than can be said of most (all?) current, and especially emerging, powers. Like it or not, we may soon find out what a world dominated by governments with even less of a moral compass than that of the U.S. is like. As they say, be careful what you wish for...

sorry, but i see more humor than tragedy here

I can't say I didn't find this pretty funny. Not to kick them while they're down, but it's times like these when you gotta wonder a little about that Catholic theology. Thankfully the whole world didn't come to a grinding halt when that kid made off with a snack. I definitely don't agree with the vagrant's pathetic cause or how he went about it, and sure it's a little uncouth to derive humor at the misfortunes of innocents, but I must admit laughing as I read that one.

Quotes...

"It is hurtful," said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. "Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family."

Dude...I'm not Catholic or anything, but comparing a loser snatching some bread, blessed or not, to the kidnapping of a family member? Isn't that overplaying this whole thing a little bit?

Gonzalez said intentionally abusing the Eucharist is classified as a mortal sin in the Catholic church, the most severe possible.

Huh? Did somebody say something about idolatry?

and i thought he was one of the good guys

I always figured Matt Jones was a decent, upstanding guy. He certainly seemed to be when he was with Arkansas, even if he did come off as apathetic at times. And with Jax I never heard any criticism other than his lack of intensity that's haunted him as long as I've known of him.

Well, either I was wrong or things have changed. But seeing his name in the blotter for not a little bit of cocaine does not bode well. Methinks his NFL career is over for the time being; it's not like Jax was all that high on him (sorry, no pun intended) last year and this offseason anyway, so they aren't exactly gonna be eager to cut him some slack. Yet another case of a guy "making it" but refusing to leave the past behind and keep himself out of tight spots.

Hopefully that's not as bad as it looks, but I'm guessing it is. After all, given the Hogs' track record of keeping guys out of trouble, nobody can claim to be totally surprised. I hate to say it but facts and history don't lie...

the vacation of a lifetime?

One of the reasons I changed jobs was to be able to do a little bit more traveling, perhaps (especially?) even big-time stuff that's pricey but potentially life-changing in a lot of ways. Well, a trip advertised in the WORLD magazine I was reading a few nights ago might just be that kind of thing. The Calvin 500 Commemorative Tour, a celebration of the quincentenary (or 500th anniversary for us commoners) of John Calvin's birth, sure looks like all that and more. A week and a half in some of the most historic and beautiful parts of Europe...with fellow Reformed Christians to hang and chat with...and time to do cool stuff in cool places...and, last but not least, two Calvin conferences and an all-star lineup of speakers. I mean, this thing is a Who's Who of contemporary theologians. Think of it as the Ligonier annual conference but far grander in just about every way.

There is, of course, the expected drawback: it ain't cheap. No, it really, really ain't cheap. As in, $3,669 per person for starters, before flight tickets, upgrades (single room, other hotel, whatever), some meals, spending money, and other stuff that's expensive in those distant realms. In other words, we're talking several thousand dollars here, and that's before the mandatory pre- or post-conference Europe sightseeing that would most certainly have to be part of the package. OUCH? Yeah, I think that price tag would sting for a while.

But still, seriously, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more awesome combination of history, scenery, fellow travelers, and interesting topics all rolled into one. Two full days in Paris, one in Strasbourg, travel through the Alps in between, and a week in Geneva to take in the local sights while getting fed at two--yes, two--international symposia throughout the week? Oh, and throw in Ferguson, Thomas, Beeke, Duncan, Ryken, and a whole bunch of other dudes I haven't heard of but I'm sure would be awesome to listen to. It might be another 500 years before that sort of opportunity presents itself. And chances are I wouldn't still be around then even if it did.

I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't on the same level as the Cubs in the World Series: an event that would leave no decision to be made, only action to be taken. Expensive or not, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is certainly at hand. I suppose the real question to grapple with might be whether or not I could get over not being there if I don't go...

holidays: who needs 'em?

I have long thought that most holidays were overhyped and more or less a useless day off. In general, holidays come and go for me, without any special meaning or advance thinking/planning attached save for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and occasionally Easter. In some ways I'd actually prefer to see them given less emphasis, or at least less formal/institutional emphasis. Now there are surely some good reasons for them as well, such as a need for days of remembrance of some sort, especially in this day and age in which the powers that be are constantly trying to forget, reshape, or rewrite the past to suit their silly utopian aims. Also, I'm sure they hold some sentimental or traditional value for folks who always gather with family or otherwise do the same thing year to year on specific holiday weekends. But these aren't things that necessitate mandated days off for so much of the population. I'm convinced life would be better if we didn't have these periodic common days off.

For one, paid holidays on a job aren't much good except for creating a forced vacation day. And for me, not getting paid holidays now means they're only a forced day off and nothing more. In other words, in my world of work they're a detriment in that they force me to work around them in ways that might interfere with other plans. Now I'm not saying that the paid time off that comes with holidays should be eliminated altogether, but rather that it shouldn't be tied to specific days on the calendar.

Think about it. Rather than 15 vacation days and 10 holidays per year (for those lucky enough to actually get 10 holidays, i.e. those working for the gummint), who wouldn't want 25 vacation days instead? If you would rather have the holidays off, assign 10 of your leave days to holidays and call it done. The whole holiday concept strikes me as a holdover from a past era in which hourly workers were forced to work extremely long hours and weeks year-round such that periodic days off were the only way to ensure they got a few extra breaks here and there, but my knowledge of history is insufficient to back up that claim. In any case, I don't see that being the case for a lot of folks today, and where it is an issue there are much better ways to work around it than just assigning everybody the same off days.

This might create some headaches for employers in that they now have more time off scattered throughout the year that they have to plan around instead of having everyone off on common days, but this would be at least partially offset by the added flexibility and savings for holiday pay. For example, many employers have to pay extra for holiday work hours. My former employer had even taken several holidays off of its "official" calendar, such that I had 19 days of vacation per year instead of 15, for the primary purpose of having a more flexible and less expensive operating calendar. I wish they had just done the same with the rest of the holidays on the books. And for others, the idea of losing entire workgroups for an extra day one week brings on another set of problems that must be resolved in advance. Just because people aren't at work doesn't mean the world stops or project demands and requirements get put on hold.

This leads into another strike against the holiday calendar. The main reason I'd rather not have specific holidays off is that it's harder to do anything on those days. Why? Because everyone else wants to do something. Weekends are bad enough as it is. Holiday weekends? Forget it, not worth the hassle and extra cost to attempt much of anything. For some unfounded reason unknown to me, people all want to get out and do their fun stuff on holiday weekends despite the huge added burden of overcrowding and the delays and hassles that come with it. So most holidays on my calendar are basically "dead days" on which it's not worth the trouble to do anything except stay at home or work because dealing with all the special-outing types is just too cumbersome. And I know from discussions at my old workplace that I'm far from the only person with this mindset.

Case in point: here it is, Independence Day evening, and I'm doing...what? Sitting at home pecking at a keyboard. I'd rather be downtown watching some fireworks, listening to music, wandering around, or otherwise occupying myself with entertaining activities, but today is off the list of good days to do stuff on. The drawbacks of the crowds (especially the slow, gawking, oblivious type crowds--grrr) outweigh any benefits to be had by doing something cool. I wouldn't dream of going to Cape Cod or attending special events downtown today or tomorrow just due to the inevitable logistical nightmare it would quickly turn into. Again, most holidays are similar for me, and my only consistent travel day over the past few years has been Thanksgiving, and only then because I wanted to make at least one trip home and figured a weekend with two mandatory vacation days piled up against it was too long to do nothing but not a good candidate to plan anything for due to it being a holiday weekend. In other words, I'd have rather had those days off to spend some other time on a trip home over a non-holiday weekend.

Wouldn't it be so much easier if we all had that paid day off to assign to whatever Friday or Monday we wanted it to be on? Wouldn't this be better for the tourism industry because there would be more people out on off-weekends and crowds would be more balanced? Wouldn't families rather be able to get together on their own schedules instead of trying to beat the crowds at parks, campgrounds, hotels, events, whatever? Sure seems to me that the solution here is obvious: more vacation days and less holidays equals more freedom. And freedom is good.

There's another way holidays cause trouble: a lot of regular places of business or closed. Admittedly that's a selfish reason, but wouldn't more businesses choose to stay open if this were a regular day? Again, it'd bring more flexibility, as discussed above. And if stores want to close anyway due to the day of remembrance then they can do so. But I'm guessing most wouldn't if so many other workplaces weren't closed to begin with.

This one is particularly fresh on my mind because I just went out to grab some grub. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I don't usually pay much attention to holidays, and this includes at times forgetting that the present day is even a holiday--as was the case today. Well, my memory was jogged when I noticed on my way to the mall that there were very few cars parked anywhere. And when I got to the mall, it was closed. I am 99% sure this is the first time in my life I've been to a mall and found the doors locked. Not that I go to malls often enough to be an authority on such matters--they're entirely useless and dreadful except for the food court, which itself is very handy when you're hungry for a dinner other than soup or boxed food but can't decide what to go for--but I was quite shocked to actually discover one closed; until a couple of hours ago I would have sworn those things never closed early on any day of the year. Thankfully, the trusty D'Angelo sub shop that I frequent every weekend was open and willing to help a hungry guy out, so the story had a good ending. But still, there was some unexpected and unplanned-for trouble there that can be attributed to the holiday schedule.

Of course, as I said before, not everybody values the lesser holidays (i.e. those not directly inspired by Christianity, sorry to any trendy types out there but them's the facts) as little as I do. I'm sure for some folks, those days mean family reunions or special outings or parties with friends or what-have-you. In my case, I really didn't grow up with all that so it's never been a big deal. A holiday was a day off of school or a chance to stay up late, then it became a chance to make a quick trip home and/or catch up on sleep--and on rare occasions, studies--during college, then it turned into the equivalent of a forced vacation day, and now it's only a day off without pay. Okay, I remember doing family reunions every now and then back in the day, but those were often as much chaos as enjoyment, with me, being the introvert I always was, seeking solitude or time with one or two folks whenever and wherever I could find it. And those reunions were infrequent anyway. The point is, they were far from a tradition that was kept every year and that I'd feel obligated to keep up with.

This kinda brings up another drawback of getting rid of holidays. For schools, it's almost a necessity for days off to be coordinated among all students. But there's an easy remedy to that for children: homeschool or send kids to private schools which offer more flexibility and resemble more an institution of learning than a day care and indoctrination compound. That's far from the only or most significant advantage of homeschooling or private schooling, but that's another topic for another day. And in college, how many professors actually decreased their courseload to account for holidays? If you had the ones I had, not a lot. More often, it just resulted in more being crammed in during the prior and following weeks to make up for the lost class time. So why not just keep the class schedule normal? If students want a weekend off then they can skip class for a couple of days anyway.

The bottom line is, there are a lot of reasons a holiday-free calendar would be easier for all of us. And it'd probably be more meaningful too, with folks getting to spend those days how they want and thus having more options to actually do what they want. The drawbacks that would come from a lack of common off-days could easily be worked around, so easily that I don't see why they're not already worked around. Who wouldn't benefit from more freedom to choose their days off?

larry's first law

As stated by--who else--Larry, in a comment at Dr. Helen's:

Larry's First Law: "Laziness is the foundation of efficiency. Give a job to a lazy guy and he'll find the simpliest, fastest, and easiest way to get the job done right the first time. Anything else is extra work."

Words to live by, folks!

how to go bankrupt athlete style

Just finished reading a short but very cool Rick Reilly article at ESPN.com. He gives the new crop of NBA rookies an easy 10-step plan to put them on the fast track to financial ruin. (I'm guessing a lot of them don't need any pointers, but Rick is such a nice guy he gave them some anyway.) A few great quotes...

Filing for bankruptcy is a long-standing tradition for NBA players, 60% of whom, according to the Toronto Star, are broke five years after they retire.

Wow. What can be said? Just sit and gawk at that statistic for a while. Looks like the NBA brass needs to be giving personal finance lessons in addition to the classes on how to behave like an adult.

In going from $300 million up to $27 million down...

Another stat worthy of gazing in wonder at--a $327 million turnaround, by one person, in a fraction of a lifetime. Any guesses as to the proud owner of that financial planning feat? That's right, nobody squanders that dough like Iron Mike!

It'll be years before you'll realize they call it a support system because you're the only one supporting it. They're all on full-ride scholarships at the University of You.

Two great one-liners back to back. Hey, anyone seen Mike Vick lately? Right...that support system really worked out great!