don't get me wrong, I love baseball

I hope I didn't give the wrong impression yesterday. Baseball has always been my favorite "team" sport, I've played it almost all my life (from 5 to 45 . . . then my arm went out). But I gave up on professional baseball after the first strike and about the time the O'Malley's sold the Dodgers. I became difficult to know what next year's team was going to be since free agency allowed for the continual breaking up of teams.
Now here's the catch to my love hate . . . . I enjoy high school and college baseball more than ever. There you have teams!!!

Now here are some things I think which might help pro Baseball get some fans back . . . . with respect to the World Series. Have the WS at a neutral site where they have good weather! And lastly . . . there's no need for every "non-baseball minute" to be filled with hystrionics, fireworks, cheerleaders, etc. It's okay to have some down time between batters and innings . . . . puleeez?

has Baseball lost it?

Now don't get me wrong, I still love baseball but . . . .

It hasn't been that long since the World Series was decided but here are some interesting observations, people won't even watch baseball in high definition from their family room couches anymore. This year's TV ratings for the final game were the worst ever and less than half of the ratings 15 years ago. There are way too many commercials.
Remember when you used to sneak your portable radio into class; put in your desk, keep the volume low and then put your head on the desk so you could pretend you were napping and listen to the World Series game? It didn't matter who was playing it was the best teams playing on the grandest of stages.
Remember when people cared so much about the World Series that the smallest paper in the land would devote a weeks worth of rich stories about games? Last Saturday's Louisville Courier-Journal, a venerable publication in a town that is only a 4 hour drive from St Louis covered the entire championsip in one small wire service story with only 6 paragraphs on the front page!

I'll follow up on this post with another tomrrow . . . .

"Mission accomplished!" GHW Bush . . . . huh?

let's see how many days since the "mission was accomplished"? . . . . well, we're approaching 1300 days. doesn't seem like much has been accomplished.

Thinking . . . . or not

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices." William James

Being something???

most people believe they must do something to have something to be something, that's not true. being something is totally up to you.

American's owning their homes

an interesting piece in Forbes compared some statistics over the last 40 years, the most interesting to me was the % of American's owning their own homes. I would have guess that today we are are some himalayan peak but not so . . . .

Home Ownership Percentage

1965 63%
1975 68%
1985 64%
1995 65%
2005 69%

Source: St. Louis Fed

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Silence

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.

Martin Luther King, Jr

Politics

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
- Plato

Whistling Straits

just got back from Kohler, Wisconsin. Herb Kohler handed a blank check to Pete Dye and said build me 4 great golf courses. the resort is called the American Golf Resort and the 4 courses are the Irish, the Meadows and Valley, the River and the Whistling Straits courses. the 2004 PGA Championship won by V J Singh was played there.

click here to visit the website and see all of the golf holes

Real Estate Bottom?? St Joe gives it up

Is this a sign of a bottom?

St. Joe (JOE: NYSE) announced last night that it is getting out of the homebuilding business. As the market turned lower, the company insisted everything was splendid and demand was strong. Guess those houses on the banks of the swamp (and even the beach) weren't as popular as they led us to believe.

The company had a tremendous run several years ago, but in this trying market, management has proven it is reactionary, not visionary. In an effort to pump up its declining asset value, management reclassified all of its timberland to land that can be developed, despite the fact that much of it won't be developed for years. Now, they are bailing on building homes.

Lots of gloom and doom in housing. Could this be the first sign of a bottom?

need to get out of a meeting?

then schedule a telephone at PopularityDialer.com Jenny LC Chowdhury and Cory Forsyth created PopularityDialer.com. It's a Web site that allows users to schedule a phone call from one of five recorded voices... providing a way out of boring meetings or uncomfortable situations.

new thinking on videos

How close are we to having a new concept of a "set-top box" that pulls videos from anywhere, anytime so that the concept of a "channel" being "broadcast" fades from memory?

Flipping Real Estate and how it's not working anymore

Do you know what the Ghost Housing Market is?

Here is the link to a sobering look at what's going on between developers and flippers . . . it used to be a good gamble to buy a house pre-construction and sell it before you had to take occupancy of it . . . that doesn't work anymore and flippers are taking baths on their "investments". Hopefully your not one them.

click here

Do you really need instant pleasure?

As much as you may think you need immediate pleasure, you don't. You can wait for a trade to come to fruition. If you wait calmly and follow your trading plan, you will increase your odds of success, and end up with a lot more profits later.

Has Patenting Gone Crazy??

Have you ever used a laser pointer to drive your pet crazy? You may soon have your day in court because you infringed on Patent No. 5443036, "Method of Exercising a Cat," including "any other animals with the chase instinct."

And if you, after reading this, think you better go back to having your dog fetch a plain old stick, beware. There's a patent for that, too. (No. 6360693, "Animal Toy.")

Have you ever sat on a swing suspended from a tree branch, making yourself swing from side to side by alternately pulling on the chains? You're toast, according to the laws protecting Patent No. 6368227, "Method of Swinging on a Swing."

And speaking of toast: You may want to eat your bread unheated from now on, lest you may be found guilty of violating Patent No. 6080436, "Bread Refreshing Method."

In Australia, John Keogh, a freelance patent lawyer striving to expose the faulty system, managed in 2001 to patent a "Circular Transportation Facilitation Device," a.k.a. the wheel.

Patent laws were originally designed to protect truly innovative ideas from being stolen by others, granting the owner 20 years of exclusive rights to his invention. So far, so good.

Golf

Paul Azinger pointed something very interesting . . . a round of golf consists of 90 seconds of motion and 4 1/2 hours of emotion.

Is the grice of gasoline too high?

a recent survey for the National Retil Federation found that 42% of households with incomes of less than $50K were dining out less frequetnly because of high gas prices and that 33% with higher incomes had cut back on eating at restaurants. less than 25% of the 7,388 people polled in May said that gas prices were having "no major impact," down from last year's 33.8% the pressure on houshold finances is showing up in higher credit card deliquencies, the ABA said. late payments to credit card companies rose to 4.4 % in the first 3 months of the year - a reversal fromthe six months of declines.

then there's my own "tell" . . . I don't see any evidence of people slowing down on freeways. trying to drive the speed limit in California will get you run off the road and until I see people slowing down (which is the most effective way of conserving gasoline) I won't believe that the price of gasoline is too high.

What does war mean to your wealth?

Many times in the past, shortly after war breaks out, markets rally . . . read more
click here

State of Califonia Tort Liability Index

State Tort Liability Index Rankings

Regular readers of this newsletter know that we like to look at how the State of California ranks against other states on matters of public policy. A recent study by the Pacific Research Institute assesses the condition of each state’s tort liability system relative to other states. The study uses a dynamic model of elements of each state’s tort system to come up with a ranking in relation to other states. In other words, it assesses the positive and negative aspects of each state’s laws and outcomes of court cases instead of relying on individual opinions.

The report, U.S. Tort Liability Index: 2006 measures which states have relatively high tort costs and which states have enacted more reforms to better position themselves for future economic prosperity.

According to this study, California ranks 35th out of 50 states We score the highest (meaning the worst) in the study’s monetary caps category. This means that we have very few caps on monetary awards. We score the best on the study’s monetary tort losses category, which measure the amount of loss that defendants experience in tort cases. States that do best on the overall scale are Texas and Colorado (where recent tort reforms have been adopted) and the worst are Rhode Island and Vermont (states that have few legal limits on tort cases).

The reason we need to examine where California lies in relation to other states is because it makes a difference on whether businesses open a new location, hire more people, or invest in new plants.

As stated by former Michigan Governor John Engler, who is now President of the National Association of Manufacturers, “the health of a state’s civil justice system is a key indicator of its economic vitality and potential for future growth. A fair, stable, and predictable legal environment is critical to a state’s ability to attract investment, draw new businesses, and generate new jobs.” I couldn’t agree more.

To view the Institute’s study you can go to:
http://www.pacificresearch.org

sorry I've been gone awhile but . . .

we bought a house and you know what type of work that takes. anyway, I'll be back after the fireworks on the 4th of July but if you haven't checked out www.checkout.google.com . . . do so