“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Soon enough, though, the darkness sets in. George’s brother, Harry (Todd Karns), almost drowns in a childhood accident; Mr. Gower, a pharmacist, nearly poisons a sick child; and then George, a head taller than everyone else, becomes the pathetic older sibling creepily hanging around Harry’s high school graduation party. That night George humiliates his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed), by forcing her to hide behind a bush naked, and the evening ends with his father’s sudden death.

Disappointments pile up. George can’t go to college because of his obligation to run the Bailey Building and Loan, and instead sends Harry. But Harry returns a slick, self-obsessed jerk, cannily getting out of his responsibility to help with the family business, by marrying a woman whose dad gives him a job. George again treats Mary cruelly, this time by chewing her out and bringing her to tears before kissing her. It is hard to understand precisely what she sees in him.

George is further emasculated when his bad hearing keeps him out of World War II, and then it’s Christmas Eve 1945. These scenes — rather than the subsequent Bizarro-world alternate reality — have always been the film’s defining moments for me. All the decades of anger boil to the surface.

With all the craziness of work, 2 small kids, getting ready for Christmas, and all those things entail, I had not done much more than read the headlines on the Madoff ponzi scheme scandal.  Today, in between a couple of continuing education classes in beautiful Plymouth Meeting, PA (actually, the Double Tree was very nice), I had a chance to read through some of the Weekend Wall Street Journal's stories.  Specifically, I read the article featuring the situation of Burt Ross, former mayor of Fort Lee, NJ.  [I went to create a link to the story, but apparently it's behind the subscriber wall, so I won't link to it - sorry.]

I have sympathy for Mr. Ross, his family, and all those who were apparently bilked by Madoff and potentially others.  But I found myself having questions about what Ross has been doing with his finances when I read through it.

From the story, we learn that the Ross's have lived in their Victorian home in NJ for 33 years.  Ross went to work in 1965 as a stockbroker, was elected mayor of Fort Lee in 1971, and in 1975 he quit the brokerage business to run a commercial real-estate company.  The story describes Ross's assets as being "tied up in 13 commercial buildings he owned and managed."  Then in 2003 "he decided to sell 11 of the buildings to invest the proceeds of more than $5 million."

Later, we get a reference to Ross having planned on using the funds invested with Madoff as a source of funds to draw on to pay down the mortgage on his home, and that he hopes that they won't have to move out of their Englewood, NJ, home.

Ok, we do get information on the fact that Ross apparently has a $50,000 per year cost for property taxes and expenses for the home, so maybe that's what's driving the concern.  But it's a little cryptic on whether there's apparently mortgage payments as part of this number.

I'm just surprised that, after 33 years, and the apparent financial success the guy was having, that there would still be any significant mortgage on his home.

I realize property taxes in NJ are ridiculous, and I probably don't even want to know how high they are in Englewood as opposed to our own pricey little village of Lawrenceville, but I would have expected that the danger of having to move, given the overall picture painted, would be pretty remote.

Very strange, and very sad.

One other part of the story that caught my interest, and I'll be curious to see how it plays out with other Madoff investors, was a reference to Ross looking into the issue of refunds on taxes paid on the Madoff investments.  Should be very interesting to see how that all plays out if everybody was paying taxes on income that didn't exist.

What a mess.

"The Princess Bride" is one of our family's favorite movies.  I remember seeing it when it came out with my roommate.  Hilarious then and now.

I bought the DVD several years ago, figuring that eventually the kids would watch and enjoy it.

Apparently that time has come.  In a big way.

As my parents pretty much always have Princess Bride in their in-car DVD system, the kids watch it whenever they visit and we take their car as the whole family transport vehicle.

So on Sunday, after Gammy and Papa's latest visit, my son, who is 4 going on 5 in February, sat down at lunch, picked up his green plastic cup of milk, turned to me, and said, "So, dad, is down to you, and it is down to me.  You drink from your cup, and I drink from mine."

Then he and his big sister decided to act out the rest of the scene, commenting on how they switched cups when each other's backs were turned, then they laughed until they suddenly "dropped dead."

It won't always be so easy for them to amuse us so greatly.  It's nice that they do it so naturally now.  We're blessed.

While I am disappointed that the Empire State has not rallied around the best and most obvious choice to fill it's vacant Senate seat (which of course would be my law school classmate and native New Yorker, Chuck), I think the emergence of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg into the discussion merits consideration of another potential candidate.

I'm thinking there's another New Yorker whose move from NYC to Washington would fill the residents of the five burroughs with more joy than even last year's Giants' Super Bowl win, and has all of Kennedy Schlossberg's qualifications beat, hands down.

Minority - check
Youngish for the Senate - check
Years of experience blowing through other people's money - check
Domineering, disfunctional, though widely revered by many father-type figure - check
No discernible ability to earn a living on his/her own - check

Come on now, say it with me:

ISIAH THOMAS FOR SENATE!!!!!

At least Zeke brings NCAA and NBA titles to the mix, which is a lot more than that skinny chick can say.  Plus he'd be a natural for the incoming president's pick-up hoops get-togethers, which would give Thomas the kind of access to the White House that surely would benefit his constituents.

If it can't be Chuck, it must be Zeke.  T-shirts coming soon....

Clearly, this is a case where we must work hard to remember that there is a presumption of innocence until guilt is proven:

Postmaster General being investigated for possible VIP mortgage with Countrywide

I hope they didn't interrupt his golf game to notify him of the investigation.

There's news out of Chicago on the potential sale of the sports world's most inept and disappointing professional franchise, the Cubs:

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban remains as interested as ever in buying the Chicago Cubs, dismissing a report that Major League Baseball might not want him as an owner.

According to a Chicago Sun-Times report that cited a baseball source, there was "zero chance" of Cuban taking over the Cubs.

The Sun-Times source said the Internet billionaire would meet with resistance in trying to get approval from Major League Baseball.

Things I know, or think I know, about Mark Cuban:  1) he went to IU; 2) he has made a gazillion dollars in the high tech world; 3) he now owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise; 4) he has spent a lot of money on amenities for the Dallas Mavericks players; 5) he has been somewhat controversial with his unusually intimate involvement in games, perceived bad calls, and interactions with fans both live and online; and 6) the Mavericks have not won an NBA title despite all the money Cuban has thrown at them.

Things I know about the Chicago Cubs:  1) they have not won a World Series Title in 100 years, and counting.

That said, do I want Mark Cuban to be the new Cubs owner?  I don’t know.  The MLB owners are private citizens, running privately held businesses, and apparently they can make whatever decision they want on whether to allow a person, group, entity, or combination thereof to take over an available MLB franchise.  I can’t begin to name the owners of all the MLB teams, but certain owners come to mind, like Steinbrenner, Selig (Yeah, I know, he’s technically the commissioner and his daughter owns the team.  Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not.  Who  knows, and who really cares?), Peter Angelos, maybe Ted Turner if he still owns the Braves (can’t remember - he may have sold the team but still hangs around).

Are the four guys I can name off the top of my head somehow in a different class than Mark Cuban?  I doubt it.  I can’t say I’d want to spend 5 minutes with any of them.  Well, maybe Steinbrenner just to be sniggering in my head thinking of Larry David’s Steinbrenner the entire time I’m listening to the real thing.

But the Cubs could do a lot worse than having an owner who’s freakishly wealthy, freakishly involved in the team's operation, and freakishly willing to try to throw money at the team to make it into a winner, and maybe even a place where winning players want to be.

I’m just saying, the past 100 seasons without a title don’t exactly recommend the approach the owners have been taking.  Of course, as I noted above, Cuban’s Mavericks haven’t managed to win a title either.  So it’s a crap shoot.  But I would love to know what the criteria are that the other MLB owners use to evaluate a potential new owner.  A really good investigative reporter would get that story for the public.  Cubs fans need to know.

I've been saying, at least to myself, for some time that eventually we'll reach a point where a person can officially declare that he (or she, if we must be politically correct) is marrying himself/herself so that he/she is not being discriminated against based on marital status, the right to marry, etc.  It will be weird and nonsensical.  But it will happen.

And this story moves us just a little bit closer to that world.

If the guy in Japan gets the right to marry a cartoon character, the possibilities start to get pretty interesting.  Want to marry a movie star's character from one of your favorite films?  Why not?  Meet my wife, Christie Brinkley as the hot girl from National Lampoon's Vacation!  Shoot, my cousin could finally "marry" his ideal of feminine beauty, Grace Kelly.  If we're not limited to three dimensional, sentient human beings, the sky's the limit.  And eventually, we can just invent marriage partners, multiple marriage partners, and then legally "marry" ourselves.

Thankfully, I'm already married to a babe, so this won't apply to me.  Though maybe I better make sure she isn't making plans for an alternate marriage reality....

An interesting human interest story at Fox News this morning:

Millvina Dean was just two months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the deck of the sinking RMS Titanic.

Now, more than 95 years later, Dean, the last living survivor of the disaster, is hoping to help pay her nursing home fees by selling artifacts of her rescue — a suitcase and other mementos expected to auction for about $5,200.

What a sad story.  I can’t imagine that $5,200 will go very far toward nursing home fees for Ms. Dean.  Perhaps it’s my increasing cynicism over the pending elections that makes me wonder why some of the liberal blowhards in Hollywood, who profited immensely from a little movie a few years ago that had something to do with the sinking of RMS Titanic, didn’t do something gracious like make an anonymous contribution to a trust fund established for the benefit of the very few survivors of the sinking alive at the time the film was made.

And it’s probably just my increasingly warped sense of humor that makes me wonder if perhaps the Seinfeld cast should do something similar for survivors of the Andrea Dorea / Stockholm accident.

In any event, good luck to Ms. Dean, and may she have many more healthy and happy days ahead.

A news story at Bloomberg.com contains the following interesting update on scientific research:

The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” from 1977 has 103 beats a minute, close to the number of chest compressions needed for cardiopulmonary resuscitation to work, according to a study at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.  Students who listened to the tune while practicing CPR on a dummy learned to give the right number of pumps, an abstract of the research in the Annals of Emergency Medicine said.

And later notes:

The results will be presented at a meeting of the Dallas-based group later this month, in Chicago.

So disco music may somehow wind up being involved in helping mankind.  Who would have thought?

It’s especially nice that this research is being presented in Chicago, where disco music has a somewhat less glorious history:

Disco Demolition Night was a promotional event that took place on July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago.  It was held during a scheduled twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. During the event, rowdy fans surged onto the field, and a near riot ensued.

If you follow the link above for the background information on Disco Demolition Night, and a more complete description of the event, in which approximately 75,000 fans staged the “near riot” between the doubleheader games, resulting in forfeiture of the second game, you won’t be disappointed.  I remember Disco Demolition Night dimly from my youth, but know the story well from having heard the radio hosts involved in the promotion, Steve Dahl and Gary Meier, for years afterward on Chicago radio.

I don't think Steve and Gary are on the air anymore.  If they are, it would be a nice touch for them to get press passes for the medical conference so they can provide full coverage of this latest "threat" of the return of disco.

Growing up as a fan of the Cubs and Bears in the 70s and 80s, I saw a lot of bad teams and awful players.  But I was fortunate enough to still be in high school and then college when da Bears put together a juggernaut team under Mike Ditka and won a Super Bowl.  An actual world championship for a Chicago team in my lifetime!  Amazing!

Of course, at the same time that Bears team was rising to prominence in the NFC, the Cubs exploded into a contender in 1984 with a team put together masterfully by Dallas Green.  Cubs fans well remember the meltdown that fall in San Diego, but it seemed going into the playoffs the Cubs had a legitimate shot to go to the World Series at last.  Sure, it would have been tough facing the Tigers that year, but anything can happen.  The sense was very real that the 1984 Cubs team was something special that might finally break through and win it all.

In 2003, the year of the Bartman incident, there seemed to be a similar vibe about the Cubs.  They looked like a team that was pretty well put together with pitching, defense and hitting.  They were a handful of outs from the World Series.  Still, it didn't happen.

Other Cubs playoff teams of the past 25 years seem, at least in retrospect, to be more like this year's model.  Good regular season clubs that fell apart in a hurry in the post-season.  They never managed to take the fans to the edge of getting to the World Series, and so the disappointment in their failing is somewhat muted.

Perhaps the 1989 squad's collapse against the Giants was a bit more painful than 1998 or the past 2 years, as the '89 team seemed to have some toughness, character and leadership that the later teams never did.  In '89 there was Sandberg, Dawson, Maddux, Sutcliffe, and a young Mark Grace playing their hardest for Don Zimmer.

The '98 team 'won' the wild card behind a steroid fueled Sammy Sosa and flamed out for Jim Riggleman.

I was actually excited when the Cubs hired Dusty Baker as manager.  While he never won a World Series, he seemed to get the most out of his teams in San Francisco, so I thought he might be the kind of guy who could somehow catch lightning in a bottle on the North Side, and he almost did in 2003.

Now having seen Lou Piniella preside over six consecutive post-season thumpings, and that the team exercised its option to pick up an additional year on Lou's contract just before the playoffs began, it's hard to see how Lou ever gets even as close to the World Series with the Cubs as Baker did.

Maybe I'll be surprised and the Cubs will find a way to again be competitive in the NL Central (ugh, how I hate all these new divisional groups), but given the way teams so often have difficulty in winning year after year, I think it's more realistic to think that injuries, disappointment, and the rise of other teams will combine to bring another season of misery to Chicago next summer.  It may even be so ugly that Piniella is no longer managing the team by the end of the year.

I can't imagine who the Cubs ownership, whoever it may be by then, would try to bring in to right the ship if that's the case.  Conventional wisdom is that baseball teams alternate between tough guys who ride their teams hard and are hated by the players and "players' managers" who make almost everyone on the roster happy and are beloved by the team.

I've lost track of where the Cubs are on this supposed cycle.  Regardless whether it's Lou or someone else who next manages to take the Cubs to the post-season, I'll be curious to see how the team is put together.  On paper, this year's squad seemed like it should have captured my heart and had me believing that, yes, after 100 years everything had finally come full circle and we were on the verge of a World Series title.

But I never believed in this team.  More to the point, I never loved this team.  There was never anyone on the team that made me think they would do anything to win a title.  The '84 squad had those kinds of players, and I loved them for it.

It's probably more my perception than anything, but with the possible exception of Mark DeRosa, I don't see any "gamers" on the current Cubs roster.  They have plenty of solid players on paper.  But none that seem to exude leadership or appear to be great teammates that you would love to have in your locker room to make a pennant run.

So we end another baseball season with that familiar, optimistic cheer:  "Go Bears!"

Weird news from SI.com:

The University of Wisconsin marching band has been suspended indefinitely while allegations of hazing, alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct are investigated.

Apparently Michelle Flaherty was unavailable for comment.

Reactions?  First, it's a marching band / college campus story.  One thing it is NOT is a sports story, even though the marching band does appear during half-time of college football games.  I guess Sports Illustrated chose to run it because it's titillating (yeah, I know), but this is really a poor choice of story to even pick up, much less to link at the SI homepage.

Second, is there anyone in the U.S. who is surprised, much less interested, that there is alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct on college campuses?  Isn't this the ultimate dog-bites-man "news" story?

Finally, hazing?  From reading the story it sounds like there were some inappropriate things going on, like "making" female band members kiss other female band members before they could use a bathroom on the bus.  I suppose in the world of college educators this is hazing.  I hope that if my daughter ever finds herself a band geek on a college campus and she is told to do something like this she has the good sense to respond the way Jim McMahon did as a rookie with da Bears when the veterans told him he had to sing his college fight song at meals.  The Punky QB reportedly gave them a two word answer beginning with the letters "F" and "O" and went about eating his meal.

News out of the Windy City on problems that have arisen with the site chosen for the proposed Olympic Village that is a critical component of Chicago's efforts to land the 2016 Summer Games:

Faced with soaring demolition and environmental cleanup costs and a recalcitrant property owner, the Daley administration has broken off talks aimed at moving the $1.1 billion Olympic Village to the campus of Michael Reese Hospital.

Hmmm.  Seems to me that if the Chicago political machine of the corruptocrat Daley family wants something done, it will find a way to get it done.  And isn't there somebody with Chicago political machine connections who's in the news about now?  And didn't he have an observation about the recent Olympic Games held in Peiping?  Why, yes there is, and yes he did:

Obama, yesterday [8/21/08]: "Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics, Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business, you're starting to think, 'Beijing looks like a pretty good option.'"

Obama's comments on Chinese infrastructure drew some criticism from people who still have a grasp on reality (meaning the mainstream media arm of the Democrat Party ignored it).  Summarizing three news stories from China in 2008 prior to the Olympic Games, National Review's Jim Geraghty noted:

Yes, their power outages, crowds at train stations, and outbreaks of air rage are vastly superior to ours.

Even more appropriate in light of the environmental remediation snafu that has now cropped up in Chicago, Hugh Hewitt noted the following with respect to Obama's analysis:

Obama's praise for China's Olympics building binge ignores how those structures were assembled, the source and conditions of the labor, the lack of pollution controls in Beijing and throughout China, the many complaints that Chinese infrastructure outside the Olympics zone remains shoddy, the recent record of Chinese manufacturing scandals, including the heparin fiasco which killed many Americans, and of course the catastrophe brought about by Chinese building standards in the region rocked by the recent earthquake.

Can someone with a press pass please get an answer from Obama on why Chicago shouldn't just take the Chinese approach to getting the Olympic Village done and ignore environmental cleanup laws, labor and construction standards, and personal property rights?  If it was so wonderful when the Chinese did it, shouldn't Obama be urging the Cook County construction industry to get on board with the same approach?

Listening to PGA Tour radio last week, I heard a couple of facts that surprised me, but in retrospect they shouldn't have.  I remember years ago hearing that Tom Kite had managed to make it to the top of the Tour lifetime money list, so I understand that you can be a good player, but not a legend, and in today's world of ever-higher prize money you wind up looking like potentially the best golfer of all time.

But I was still surprised to hear that Jack Nicklaus, winner of 18 professional majors and runner-up in another 19 (I think), along with winning many other tournaments and championships over the course of his career, earned "only" $5.7 million on Tour in winnings.  Over the long trajectory of his career, that's not as much as I would have guessed given his success.  I realize the dollars available on Tour have exploded with the rise of Tiger, but I would have speculated that Nicklaus easily earned about twice the number cited.

And to really blow me away, the news blurb on PGA Tour radio noted that Nicklaus is now number 155 on the Tour Money List, having just been passed by Anthony Kim (oops - my original post mistakenly referred to "Andrew" Kim).

...but that's immediately who I thought of when I heard a clip on the radio from the MTV music video awards show, or whatever it is called.  The host of the awards program was apparently a comedian from Great Britain, and at one point in the program he spoke up on behalf of people from outside the U.S. in begging the citizens of our country to elect Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.  Apparently Obama really has the non-U.S. citizen vote pretty much wrapped up.

Let's Make a Deal!  We'll all agree to let Obama take over as head of the United Nations on the condition that he never be allowed to hold a position in the United States government ever again.  Seems like a win-win.

Now, where's my "U.S. Out of U.N." sign....

With the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, there has been a lot of discussion from the mainstream media and their friends in the Democrat party about whether she has enough experience for the job of vice president.  Mrs. Palin has apparently been a city council member, mayor, and now governor of a state with a budget of something like $11-12 billion dollars and about 15,000 employees.

Regardless how you come out on whether she is qualified to be vice president, or ultimately president should that eventuality arise, you should take any concerns voiced by the mainstream media about the importance of succession planning with a grain of salt about the size of Rhode Island.

After all, when Tim Russert died unexpectedly, NBC had a slew of well qualified people ready to step in an make sure Meet the Press and their national election coverage would be taken over by the next generation of experienced, qualified journalists, right?

Um, not so much.  They wound up behaving exactly like their buddies in the Democrat party, dragging marble-mouthed Tom Brokaw out of quasi-retirement and thrusting him back into news coverage.

If the libs can't even manage to figure out how to come up with the next person most able to read a teleprompter and draw on a whiteboard, how much credibility do they have when worrying about anyone else's ability to pick qualified successors?