American Greed, part 2

This article describes the memorial service for "Kenny Boy" Lay, the former Enron exec who died last week. You may recall that he was found guilty for his part in the implosion of Enron which, among other things, cost most of the employees of the firm their retirement funds. Perhaps you'll also remember that Enron traders likely engineered the California energy crisis a few years back. When he died, Lay was on "vacation" after his conviction, awaiting his sentence.

If it wasn't for the scandal, Lay and his buddies at Enron would have been stupidly rich. as it turned out, they were only ridiculously rich. Don't you hate it when malfeasance gets in the way?

So, back to the article. The reverend giving the eulogy compared Lay to Jesus and Martin Luther King jr. adding that time will show his innocence. Umm, no. Unless these were extremely contrasting comparisons, that it utter crap. What is sad here is that not only was this man a symbol of the overboard greed we're seeing in this nation, but that there are those who apologize and glorify it, invoking the name of God to do so. What sick culture can produce these words from a Christian reverend?

global warming and wine

The article linked to above concerns recent studies that indicate how the affects of global warming will render most of the finest wine producing regions in the US incapable of growing grapes. For the last 5 years I've been making a joke that I'm going to find some suitable land in Maine for a vineyard and wait for global warming to make it viable. Now my stupid joke may become a sad reality. That may be the worst result of my sense of humor since the last date I went on...

Oh, and this is the first post to be posted both on this blog and my other one. Congratulations to me for finding common ground.

soccer, futbal, footie, calcio etc.

I am in the midst of world cup fever. Thought I'm usually at work during the matches (stupid time zones), I'm DVRing the important ones and trying to remain ignorant of the result until I get a chance to watch it later. Today however, I got to work and the owner was already there with the gamecast going on the internet. We tracked the England-Portugal match via the play by play update when there were no customers around and did the same for the first 60 minutes of the brasil-france match. Then he found a live video feed from espn and we watched the last 20 minutes or so on his laptop. The feed kept getting broken up but we got the gist of it from the audio and the tension was certainly building up as both of us were pulling for the French.



I've been a fan of the French team since 1998 when they won it all on their home turf. Zinedine Zidane is an amazing player so I think that's a large part of it. My most brilliant moment on the soccer field was inspired by one of his plays in the '98 final. Also, you gotta love their coach, he looks like some drunk existentialist writer on the sideline; very French, very appropriate (see attached photo). I was very happy to see le bleus win this afternoon but it could have been anyone; as much as I like any team, I hate brazil more.

So now we've got an all Europe final four teams. I think the Germans have a good shot as the home team but Italy has been shutting down opposing offenses very well and have some good forwards so they could easily make it to the finals if they score early. Portugal has played well but they seem to lack a certain something to push them over the edge. France can easily ride their momentum past them to the finals. With Zidane retiring after the tournament, you can tell he's pushing the team to wine and they are happy to oblige their capitain. I guess my two favorites would be Italy and France for purely culinary and enotecnical reasons but I'm really just happy that it won't be Brasil.