Fall Hard, Fall Fast

In hindsight, they should have just given him a gold watch.

From the Probably Not What They Had In Mind file:

ABC News: Patrick Sullivan was such a popular sheriff that Arapahoe County renamed the jail after him when he retired. Sullivan, arrested on drug charges this week, is now an inmate in the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.

Apparently, he was an upright guy and everybody liked him. According to ABC, he served as sheriff for close to twenty years, was named national deputy of the year in 2001, retired, had a jail named after him, and became director of safety and security for a school board. Then he allegedly tried to swap meth with a man in exchange for sex.

And that's that.

Cutting the Christmas List Down to Size

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

Or rather, you would, if it weren't for the European credit crisis, high US unemployment and other assorted economic heebie jeebies. Fact is, you can't have everything, including that air rifle.

The Daily Mail:

The largest Santa school in the U.S. has been advising its students on how to lower children's expectations in the economic downturn. When confronted with a huge list of 'I wants', Santas are being told to tell them that they can't have everything. They should also take a look at the children's parents and 'size them up' before promising them something that their mother and father can't afford.

My knee jerk reaction is to say that Santa Claus shouldn't be a killjoy. But then, I have a feeling if I was down on my luck and my kid was wearing crummy old shoes, I'd appreciate if Santa Claus took this in and downplayed the latest iPod, too.

By the way: they have Santa schools? Since when?

The Bus Arrives: Bruce Boudreau

Black Monday was pretty dark for a couple of NHL coaches. Bruce Boudreau got tossed under the bus in Washington DC, and Paul Maurice got his pink slip from the Carolina Hurricanes.

The Boudreau dismissal is getting more press, and the talking heads are saying things like, "Ovechkin had his best season under Boudreau, but..."

The Washington GM said, “[Boudreau] pushed every button he could push. … You make the change and hope that a new voice and a new way of doing things and a new focus gets the best out of these players.”

That's a laugher. Just a couple of years ago, Ovechkin inked a 13-year, $124 million contract extension. His teammates Semin and Backstrom currently make $6.7 million/year each, and Mike Green pulls in $5.25 million. If that kind of money doesn't get the best out of somebody, nothing should. General Managers must want to send desks through windows when they discover that a player isn't "motivated" by Fort Knox.

Best for the Capitals means the Stanley Cup. The Capitals have won their division for the past four years, but always got booted out of the playoffs early. Nothing short of a Cup will be enough for the management and fans.

It's axiomatic that if you own an expensive player, then they own you. You aren't going to fire somebody worth $5 million to send a message to the team, and everybody knows it. And so: bus meets coach.

Learn a Trade

The road to salvation?

Here is a decent piece from the Wall Street Journal, which talks about how many blue collar job there are out there, and how few people there are to fill them.

It dovetails nicely with a piece I saw in the New York Times a while back, about law schools that keep pumping out more and more lawyers every year, without a thought to quality or job availabilty. And why shouldn't they? As the piece shows, running a law school means big bucks.

Law school has an image that high school grads and their mothers dig. Plumbing apprenticeships do not. Hence, a lot of lawyers and not so many plumbers. This is why I have a bone to pick with the headline editor of the WSJ piece. The headline says Help Wanted: In Unexpected Twist, Some Skilled Jobs Go Begging.

An unexpected twist? Since when? Society's been telling kids for decades that the only way to get ahead in life is to graduate from university. The university grads - unemployed or otherwise - shouldn't be surprised now that their toilet's stuck and their call goes straight to voicemail.

"Learn a trade." It was advice I heard a lot when I was younger. If things didn't work out, "Learn a trade." As it happens, I didn't go to school for a trade, but it was good advice back then, and it still is now.

As a note to the kids who have been watching too much TV, a tradesperson is still cool at parties. A carpenter and a surgeon deserve equal respect in my books, and as far as I can tell, they both get that respect. If it'll make you feel better, just say you're a "contractor." The doctors and lawyers immediately nod and say, "Wow, a contractor," and start thinking about renovations.

Grey Cup, Grey Hair, Black Eyes

Two CFL players finally did something worth watching.

Unfortunately, they're both over 70 years old.

Yahoo! Sports: The action starts almost immediately when Mosca and Kapp are both invited up on stage. Kapp holds a flower out towards Mosca, Mosca responds "Stick it up your a##," to cheers, Kapp then does stick the flower right into Mosca's face (as claimed in Mosca's version of events), then Mosca hits him with a handheld mike. Mosca then delivers the titular cane to the face a couple of times, and hard, while Kapp returns fire with a bull rush and a couple of punches and knocks Mosca through the curtain.

Talk about bearing a grudge. Apparently they've hated each other since a Grey Cup in 1963.

Unfortunately, the Yahoo! guy decides to get sappy: Someone could have been badly hurt here, and given these guys' ages, the danger of serious injury is even higher. It's also not the best advertisement for the CFL to have two of its legendary alumni engage in an all-out brawl like this.

Please. Like the CFL is going to get any better publicity than two old dudes throwing a fight made for YouTube.

Black Friday

Economics professors that ignore economic truths crack me up. Actually, they usually crack me no matter what their take on the economy, if only because they turn out to be dead wrong so often. Whenever the economy takes a powder, there's lots of economics guys telling us how to fix the problem. Nobody ever seems to ask, "Hey, genius, why didn't you see this coming in the first place?"

Anyway, take Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell. He wrote a piece in the New York Times that is full of all kinds of baloney (he also wrote a book that has the words "Common Good" in the title, so obviously he knows how to live your life better than you do; which is to say, he's full of it).

These people have apparently not read Robert Frank.

His latest piece is about Black Friday, the day when Americans race out to buy discount goods and sometimes beat each other up or pepper spray each other over $2 waffle irons. Frank doesn't like this. He thinks it's bad. He thinks you should be in bed at a reasonable time on Thanksgiving Eve, and that you shouldn't be out shopping too early in the morning. Frank, like many of his Ivy League ilk, thinks you need some guidance in the game of life. In this case, his way to get you out of the stores and back with your mother-in-law is to...tax Black Friday.

Let's just tiptoe through the tulips of Robert Frank's nonsense. It is an essay that reeks of arrogance:

In recent years, large retail chains have been competing to be the first to open their doors on Black Friday. The race is driven by the theory that stores with the earliest start time capture the most buyers and make the most sales. [It takes a univeristy professor to figure this out?] For many years, stores opened at a reasonable hour [which hour is reasonable?]. Then, some started opening at 5 a.m. [Oops. I guess 5 a.m. is unreasonable], prompting complaints from employees [name three of them] about having to go to sleep early on Thanksgiving and miss out on time with their families.

He has to be kidding. I find it hard to believe that Robert Frank stays up at night worrying about people that have to work the night shift. Besides, if it's a case of missing out on time with families, why doesn't Frank worry about gas station attendants, steel workers, cops, nurses, firefighters, late night bartenders, and 7-11 clerks? My guess is because those jobs don't have an anniversary date in the headlines, and they don't have the icky "consumerism" vibe that guys like Frank dislike so much.

Though I smell a rat when it comes to Frank's family-bleeding-heart-syndrome nonsense, I'll give him another crack at it:

Last year Toys “R” Us opened at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. This year, Wal-Mart will do the same. The costs to store owners and their employees and families are enormous: millions must now spend time away from home on the one occasion that all Americans, regardless of religion or cultural background, share as a family holiday.

What is it about university professors that make them think they know how to run a store better than a store manager, or work the night shift better than a working father of three? And why does Frank feel that he knows how you should spend your Thanksgiving? Want to collect some overtime? Want to surf Facebook? Want to do handstands on the corner of 5th and Main? Want to play handball with a piece of cement? As long as you're not breaking the law or writing crappy stuff for the New York Times, I don't care, and neither should Frank.

"The cost to store owners and the employees and families are enormous." Frank seems to forget that nobody is dragging these people into the store and forcing them to work under the whip. What these people are doing is called working. They have what is called a job. It gives them this thing called money, which they can use to put food on the tables of the families that Robert Frank is so worried about.

Note to the arrogant writer: these people aren't working at Wal-Mart and Target because they want to give you something to write about. They work there to make a living. If it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't do it, and neither would the stores. This is called "economics," Mr. Economics Professor.

As every mature adult realizes [take that, you damn immature conservatives!], we have to tax something, and the revenue from my 6-6-6 plan [his plan - besides having a horrible number for the marketing people to deal with - is to tax everything sold on Thanksgiving Thurs/Fri between 6pm and 6am at 6%] would make it possible to reduce taxes on other activities that are actually useful [name just three activities you would reduce taxes on, Bobby; I beg you]. Best of all, it would encourage Americans to spend Thanksgiving night where they really want to — in bed.


The arrogance is astounding. "Other activities that are actually useful...Encourage Americans to spend Thanksgiving where they really want to..." How does this guy know what people want? Robert Frank, just because you don't think cheap t-shirts and discount toys for the kids aren't useful, doesn't mean the single mom working on minimum wage won't appreciate the sales.

I'm getting tired of the people that are so worried about the poor that they decide to hammer the poor for being poor. Who does the man think is shopping at Wal-Mart and Target at 5am? Rockefeller? Black Friday is a time of year that a hurting family can grab some stuff on the cheap, while the employees can pick up some extra hours and overtime (and there's my arrogance; does it have to be poor people shopping at 5am? No. It could be anybody. And it's their business, not mine - pun intended).

If it's the odd Black Friday violence you're worried about, sure, the odd idiot might throw a punch here and there. That's life in large crowds. It draws headlines and makes people like Frank wet their pants, but it's few and far between. It's hardly a good enough reason to hose the guy who's looking for a cheap leaf blower.

When Robert Frank sits down at his computer on Sunday to tell people yet again how to live their own lives, I hope there's thousands of football fans saying what a great deal they got on their 50-inch TV. It should at least please Frank that they're spending time at home.

Update:

From CNN: Preliminary reports for Black Friday indicate that retailers may have seen their strongest sales ever during the all-important kick-off to the holiday shopping season.

Retail sales on Black Friday climbed 6.6% this year to an estimated $11.4 billion.

I don't know how this squares with Frank's funny theory that everyone in the country wants to stay home on Thanksgiving, but maybe he'll explain at a later date.
Photo: Michael Nagle/Getty Images