Personal stuff – Page 83

Has the “Beast” been slain?

One of the first community events I attended after getting settled into my adopted Delmarva home was an event called “Beast of the East”. For those who didn’t know about the event, it was a custom motorcycle show – think “Orange County Choppers” and bikes of that ilk. (Here’s an example from last year, a 9/11 tribute bike.) In the two springs I’ve lived here, the event was held at the Youth and Civic Center on the third weekend in April (coinciding with the “Pork in the Park” barbeque festival out at Winterplace Park.) I thought that was a pretty good idea and created some synergy between the events and a good draw for tourist dollars.

But I wasn’t as excited about the 2006 edition as I was about the 2005 edition. Obviously, the newness factor wearing off was one reason, but also the 2005 edition featured other onsite entertainment. There were four live bands plus they had a thrill show in the parking lot. Last year’s BotE had a car show but no outside entertainment scheduled. (It was a rainy weekend, so most activities would’ve likely been cancelled anyway.) And it seemed to me like attendance was off from the 2005 edition.

So I guess my question is whether the 2006 Beast of the East ends up being the last one, or if it’s been scheduled for a time slot closer to Delmarva Bike Week, or if they’ve decided to change the venue.

This brings up an oft-discussed point when the subject of the WYCC’s fate comes up. Now that we’ve apparently settled on the shape of the Old Mall project, another concern in that part of town is sprucing up the almost 30 year old Civic Center. But I’ll let you in on something.

I went to concerts for many moons during my youth, and the majority of those shows were in a forty year old (at the time) decrepit 7,500 capacity dump called the Toledo Sports Arena. This venue mostly hosted concerts, trade shows, and the Toledo Storm minor league hockey team (and still does, even at 60 years old.) But the biggest difference between the two facilities isn’t who plays there or even how nice the facility is, it’s what’s sold there. While Wicomico County isn’t a dry county, the WYCC is a dry facility and the lack of beer sales likely does send business away.

I understand that the land was deeded to the county upon the condition that alcohol not be sold there. But it may be time to rethink this facility in its present set of uses or even its existence. A key piece of the proposed Discovery Place development in Laurel is a new 12,000 seat arena, and I’m betting that if/when that opens, they’ll sell alcohol and all of the business the WYCC has fought to maintain over the years will flee northward to the new facility because it will be newer, bigger, and have the potential additional revenue stream that beer sales can provide.

So it’s quite possible that the demise of the “Beast of the East” show is a harbinger of things to come for the Youth and Civic Center. I’m sorry to see the event go but sometimes it takes the economic hit of not getting into the stream of tourism dollars that flow along route 50 to the beach to slap some sense into the powers-that-be.

Carnival of Maryland #3 is up…

I’ve been a little remiss in this since it happened Sunday, but The Ridger at The Greenbelt has selected 14 articles for edition #3 of The Carnival of Maryland – eight by my cohorts of the Maryland Bloggers Alliance and 6 by others. And she saves the best for last, if you catch my drift.

The next edition is slated for April 8th, with it being Easter we’ll see who turns out as host.

Oh, and while I’m at it…I found out just now after writing the post above that the MBA has added yet another member. Matt at Going To The Mat writes out of Frederick, and as he states, describes his blog as “Wrestling with Issues and Ideas in politics, the law, education, and other stuff.” So welcome aboard Matt!

Can we stick to the issues, please?

Well, time will tell if yesterday’s post at Salisbury News will cost Joe Albero $100 or not. He’s offering this as a reward to any eagle-eye photographer who catches Debbie Comegys making an obscene gesture. (And he has such a nice picture of the particular gesture on his site.)

Now I’ll note that I’ve observed Mrs. Comegys’ behavior at a couple of the forums and yes, she comes across sort of rudely. I didn’t personally witness the pen incident at the SWAC forum but it sounds like something not outside her pattern of behavior.

But – why is she becoming an issue? Debbie Comegys isn’t running for City Council. She disrupted one forum. I understand that Joe Albero is a Tim Spies supporter and, to be charitable, isn’t among those who’d like to see Gary Comegys reelected to his post. I suppose Gary’s spousal choice could be construed as one of a number of character issues Gary Comegys seems to have (which have been covered by several local bloggers), but then I’m certainly no expert advisor at marriage here either.

I get along reasonably well with Joe; in fact, I was one of the well-wishers the other night at his birthday party. We also comment on each others’ websites, we’re linked to one another, and he’ll point to articles of mine he likes and I’ll do the same for his site. Both of us know that we each have different blogging styles and things that are important to me may not be so to him and vice versa. However, I have to say to Joe that this whole Debbie Comegys reward brouhaha just serves as too much of a sideshow and detracts from what needs to be a serious discussion regarding the direction the city of Salisbury should head toward in the next decade.

Now I know Joe’s a well-meaning kind of guy. He’s abrasive to some, but on the whole I have no issues with him personally. I’ve also seen the sort of good he’s done in uncovering a few of the issues that this campaign has revolved around. So why let a personal vendetta of sorts get in the way of that, and also make the blogs a distracting and polarizing issue themselves?

That’s just my two cents on this whole situation. It leaves me $99.98 short of Joe Albero’s offer but I think it’s more valuable to the citizens of Salisbury in the long run.

Geez, people will think we set this up!

Yes, that was me on “Robinson on the Radio”. Actually I was trying to call in before Albero got on but he beat me to it.

Honestly, I think John’s more comfortable without a guest on. Yeah, he took a call from his mom but you got to start someplace. I’ve suggested before that maybe he should work in half-hour segments so perhaps he could have a guest for the first half-hour and then take calls after the bottom of the hour break. If the guest wants to stay and answer questions he/she could or just say his/her piece and go home.

What’s funny is that us Salisbury-area bloggers seem to get a disproportionate amount of airtime on John’s show. I suppose that comes from being an “opinion leader” as Rep. Gilchrest called me once in a letter I received from his office. Something tells me I’m going to get another one soon.

If John wants his show to survive and thrive in a sort of difficult time slot for talk radio (people tend to lose focus on issues in the late afternoon because they’re looking forward to the end of the work day – particularly on Friday) he’ll need to find a way to connect with the audience. He’s done that reasonably well with me so far because I want to listen to what political leaders and candidates have to say. But after the municipal election John won’t have that built-in interest of people trying to decide who to vote for, so he’ll need to study up on the issues people care about.

I understand his point about the first couple weeks’ go-round with the candidates and political/media leaders being a crash course in learning what the hot topics are. After next week, he won’t have those training wheels and the show will stand or fall on the merits of its host and interested callers.

Except for Fridays, I’m at work during the 3-4 p.m. slot. As I’ve pointed out before, I’m a “dittohead” so Rush is on my radio from 12-3. In order to keep me from putting my headphones back on and resuming my enjoyment of the headbanger music I listen to at work, John needs to keep his show compelling. Now that he’s starting what one may consider a post-special-guest phase, keeping my interest may be a challenge, but I’ll continue to give him an opportunity for awhile.

Finally, I would like to give him praise for one thing. It’s obvious to those who read me that I’m a partisan and consider myself a “reinventionist” Republican, one trying to place the party closer to the ideals espoused by our Founding Fathers about government close to the people. Thus, I know that I disagree with many Democrats and even a lot of folks in my own party on some issues (like the Long War). But I agree that the disagreements should be friendly and debate kept civil. Agreeing to disagree goes a long way, and keeping communication open continues an opportunity to finally make people see things in the proper fashion.

Oh, one point I didn’t get a chance to make. I know us bloggers are looked at as evil people who can only throw brickbats at the elected officials and don’t do much in the community, but today I took the day off work so I could let the people in my little neighborhood know that I wish to represent them on the Wicomico Neighborhood Congress and would like to help form a neighborhood association. So a few of you reading may have seen a bright blue flyer on your door – that was me. And yesterday I volunteered to work at the upcoming Pork in the Park barbeque festival and the weekend after that I’ll again participate in the Ben Layton walk because it was so fun last year.

Maybe people don’t agree with me or my blog politically, but I challenge them to get off their couches, turn off “American Idol”, and do something to make a difference in the community. I don’t have a whole lot of talents, but the ones I do have I try to take advantage of and help out, whether it be here on monoblogue or in the community at large. We bloggers have a tendency to do that, nasty comments by some political figures notwithstanding.

I’ve come to love this area I live in, and want to keep it a good one. Each and every one of us can participate in the process if we choose to.

Gilchrest votes for Popeye over policy

The House just passed a $124 billion funding measure for the troops in Iraq – well, $100 billion for them and $24 billion for a myriad of other projects. The most infamous one is buried way back on Page 115 (the .pdf file of HB1591 is 168 pages):

There is hereby appropriated to the Secretary of Agriculture $25,000,000, to remain available until expended, to make payments to growers and first handlers, as defined by the Secretary, of fresh spinach that were unable to market spinach crops as a result of the Food and Drug Administration Public Health Advisory issued on September 14, 2006. The payment made to a grower or first handler under this section shall not exceed 75 percent of the value of the unmarketed spinach crops.

Of course, the key objection MOST of the GOP (with the two exceptions of Rep. Gilchrest and Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, also Rep. JoAnn Davis of Virginia did not vote) had was the withdrawal date of March 31, 2008. The Republicans have zero objection to voting for money for the troops. Like the 198 House Republicans who properly voted against this measure despite its military funding, I’m one of those who objects to any specific pullout date – you withdraw when the job is finished. If this were to pass and somehow survive a Bush veto, the Iraqi people would enjoy a calm before the coming storm with the summer of 2008 becoming a bloodbath in Iraq, and possibly other places far beyond the Middle East. Who knows what an emboldened Iran is capable of?

But we know had this bill been a “clean” bill without the pork, the result would’ve been opposite – the minority GOP voting for it and Democrats voting no. Obviously the Democrats want peace at any cost.

I know Wayne Gilchrest believes that he’s going to vote for this because voting against it could be implied as denying money for our troops and he won’t vote that way. I’m willing to understand the nuance in this, though – no Democrat propaganda that would say Wayne Gilchrest voted to cut funding to the troops would be unresponded to by me. I know what the story is behind this vote.

But once again, I’m furious with the representative I helped to elect. Like I noted in my post yesterday about GOP Delegate Page Elmore siding with the Democrats on Maryland’s HB400, it doesn’t matter how often you vote with the Democrats because they’re still going to run someone against you and lump you in with those evil conservative Republicans. The question now becomes whether a Republican will endeavor to face Gilchrest as a 2008 primary opponent – with an early March primary next year time is short for any candidate willing to step up and challenge the incumbent.

“Racism” raises its ugly head. I’m beheading it.

As my faithful readers know, I was on the radio this morning. I’ll come back to that subject a little later, but the main point of my post this evening occurred after seeing a Daily Times piece that “Cato” showed to me as he was reading his copy. It seems that Salisbury City Councilperson Shanie Shields and Wicomico NAACP head Mary Ashanti are a little miffed at the makeup of the Wicomico Neighborhood Congress, and then the Daily Times piled on by noting that no one living west of Hebron is in the group. So already the group is backtracking and trying to be more “inclusive.”

This raises several questions in my mind. First and foremost, where does “inclusion” end? Are there any Hispanics or Asians on the commitee, or does it even stop at race? Are we going to hear next from the GLBT crowd if we find that all of the steering committee members are straight?

To me, the people to ask about this lack of “people of color” on the committee are Shanie and Mary. Because Shanie Shields is now the membership director, I can throw the question back at her and Mary Ashanti – what have you done to encourage participation from that community? (Complaining to the Daily Times doesn’t count.) Perhaps they’ll say a few words about it on March 29th because District 1 County Councilperson Sheree Sample-Hughes is starting her promised quarterly meetings on that night.

Personally I heard about the Wicomico Neighborhood Congress through news coverage but I recall there were several radio ads on WICO-AM, and I’d guess on their sister stations as well. Between news/talk, midtempo rock, country, and smooth jazz, they should’ve covered a good chunk of the demographics.

Some of you may know this and some may not, but I’m one of those 50 or so volunteers who asked about joining. So I have a vested interest in the WNC, and I didn’t join this outfit because I was looking for “diversity”. Each area of Wicomico County and each community is free to participate as it wishes. And it may be that the fine folks in places like Mardela Springs, Bivalve, and Tyaskin are taking a “wait and see” approach as they warily eye our group. So I participated in the vote, and while I had up to 10 choices I selected just four because they were people I knew and had a good impression about. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to attend these steering committee meetings because I have another commitment on Tuesday nights; however, I’ll be able to get my input in after April 10th.

Lost in all the hubbub is the simple fact that this body is only being organized at the moment – the purpose of the steering committee is to set rules, bylaws, and guidelines that the WNC will go by. I don’t believe the actual group will get down to business until May. And, while I’d like plenty of participation, a group the size of that discussed in the Daily Times today (up to 400) would, in my estimation, be far too unwieldy to be any good.

My intention in joining the WNC was to represent the neighborhood in which I bought my house. Part of that will actually be attempting to form our own neighborhood group since as far as I know, none exists. To that end, I’m going to represent everyone regardless of race, creed, color, religion…they’re my neighbors. So I wish the minority communities would get over their attitude about someone not of their race representing them. It’s counterproductive and takes away from the work that’s being started.

All right, a few words about my radio time this morning. I’m not as sure I was as on my game today as I could’ve been. At times I find it much easier to write the correct words and string together coherent thoughts than to say them, and this morning was one of those times. Fortunately, my friend G.A. (“Cato”) doesn’t have that problem as much as I do so we did all right. But I could’ve done better, I got a bit off track on my one thought and lost my opportunity to tie it back to where I wanted to go with it.

I still like the thought of a portion of the old mall becoming a business incubator if the building is structurally sound enough and can be refurbished at a reasonable cost. I know it may be far too late for that, but at least I’ve made the effort and placed the idea in the hopper. I also know the old Station 16 firehouse was discussed today by John Robinson and Terry Cohen, and I know my blogging cohort Joe Albero has a cash offer for the building on the table. What I’d like to see is his plan, as well as any other ones for the building. I’m led to assume that it’s reasonably sound structurally, so it’s not a likely candidate for the wrecking ball like the old mall is.

As I noted this morning, my job depends on investment from people with a dream. Since I like this area and have adopted it as home, I’d like to stay here. Dealing with petty squabbles about racial makeup of a steering committee detracts from the goal we should all have, one of making this community a better one for people like me to adopt.

Radio days volume 2

Apparently someone thinks I’m a political expert. I already know I have a face for radio (and a voice for the print media); nevertheless, I’ll be back on WICO tomorrow morning at 7:40 a.m. discussing tonight’s political forum with host Bill Reddish. It’ll be a double treat for Salisbury political junkies as my fellow blogger “Cato” from Delmarva Dealings will be joining us.

So I may or may not post on the forum tonight – most likely I will but if it’s just more of the same I’ve heard at the three others I’ve seen on TV or live I might choose to combine a forum post with my thoughts on radio day #2 either tomorrow night or Wednesday.

There’s your heads-up for tomorrow, be listening! It should be a good twenty minutes if not more.

Pumpin’ and dumpin’ – an update

Just wanted to update on what’s become the most commented-on post I’ve ever done. I STILL get comments every so often on a post that’s 2 1/2 months old. I guess it comes up pretty high on the search engines for the phrase “junk faxes”.

Just for funsies, I’m updating the prices on these stocks while I do this. Prices on the original “p and d” stocks as of the close Friday were:

AGGI (Allied Energy Group) – 0.11 (0.53 when fax was received)

EVCC (Environmental Control Corporation) – 2.45 (1.19 when fax was received)

GBVS (Global Beverage Solutions) – 0.22 (0.89 when fax was received)

HSFI (Homeland Security International) – 0.05 (0.18 when fax was received)

HYBT (Hybrid Technologies, Inc.) – 4.31 (6.80 when fax was received)

SYNI (Syngas International Corp.) – 0.37 (0.40 when fax was received)

TAOL (TAO Minerals Ltd.) – 0.09 (0.15 when fax was received)

Doubling my money on EVCC would be cool, but the others have been stagnant to horrible over the 4-6 month period I’ve occasionally tracked them. It’s still easier for me to throw darts at a stock list and make money investing that way than to go by what these so-called experts suggest I purchase.

For whatever reason, the tidal wave of these faxes the company I work for got last fall has slowed way down; either that or someone’s beating me to the fax machine in the morning. Either way, I only have one new contender in the last 3 months, a company called Terra Nostra Resources Corporation (TNRO). This came as an “Asian Investment Alert!” on March 5th.

It’s an interesting case. On the fax, it quoted the price of $2.10 on February 16. By the time we got this fax, the stock had come off a late February peak at about $3.20 and was back in the $2.60 range. Put out this fax and voila! the next couple days the price shot back up over $3.00 again (on a volume of about 300,000 shares) before settling back to $2.88 as of Friday’s close. In looking at a 3-month chart of Terra Nostra it’s intriguing to note that it was lightly traded (no more than 100,000 shares daily and normally far less) before February 15 or so.

A classic case of pumpin’ and dumpin’. As it states on the document, Cyber Communications made $250,000 on the blast fax, and of course the people at Gemini Market News, Inc. who paid Cyber, intended to sell their shares and I’m sure they got their $250,000 back and then some.

Of course, we all know how I feel about Chinese firms to begin with, so having these junk faxes hit our office doesn’t help my attitude any.

I also did a quick THOMAS search to see if there was any legislation pending to amend or correct the Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005, and right now nothing is sitting in the 110th Congress pertaining to junk faxes.

So there is your update on “Pumpin’ and dumpin'”. I’ll keep on this and occasionally update progress. As always, investigate before you invest. If we can stop being the people P.T. Barnum warned us about, the market for these junk faxes will eventually dry up on its own and a thousand forests will be saved.

A couple milestones

While writing my post about the RedHawks loss, I looked and saw that I’m closing in on the 400 post mark. Now the consecutive numbering system that my pages go by has passed the 400 mark (this one will be number 404) but there’s been a few test posts and such along the line as well as “pages” which get a number but aren’t in order and link categories which also get a number. (And sometimes I go out of order as I do drafts for future post publication.) I had many category names for the last election that are no longer on monoblogue, which accounts for the bulk of the difference. I’m also close to 500 saved comments, although my Akismet program has shelved over 20,000 spam messages. Fortunately for my sanity, I’ve made sure that all but a handful have been vaporized into the ether. (It’s only made three mistakes so far but I always check just to make sure.)

And over the weekend I should get my 30,000th visitor according to my Site Meter. It may not seem like a whole lot but when I looked it also showed me that the last 7 days should be a new record week as I close in on 1,500 for the week. I was quite pleased that I had over 1,000 visitors that actually registered as reading my site last week, particularly when I was down for 29 hours and that outage covered one of my prime readership periods twice. This is not just a hit counter, it’s actual visitors.

My website’s server also tracks monoblogue visitors and for some reason that portion was down for 14 days at the end of February and into March (probably related to my server outage which occurred at the end of that time.) Since coming back, that counter is telling me I have an average for the month of about 850 visitors a day (who seem to leave spam messages!) and that’s a record high, as is my daily hit rate of over 3,700. If I went by the “valid” figures and added even a conservative average for the 14 day outage, I should’ve gotten my 150,000th visitor recently.

But I also needed an excuse to work in a welcome to the two newest members of the Maryland Blogger Alliance. We’ve added Snail’s Tales out of Germantown, where Aydin places a heavy emphasis on the world of science (much like The Voltage Gate), and we also added The Greenbelt which is written out of Laurel, MD. “The Ridger”, as she is known, writes from a perspective of “language, liberalism, freethinking”. I’d place her sort of along the lines of Stephanie of Jousting for Justice.

I mentioned The Greenbelt last because it segues into my next point. She will be hosting the upcoming Carnival of Maryland #3 (not this coming Sunday, but Sunday the 25th) and we’ll see if I can get something into three in a row here. In case you missed it (and if you did, shame on you!) here are Carnival #1 (hosted by Crablaw) and Carnival #2 courtesy of Pillage Idiot. Both feature a monoblogue submission as well as many other good ones. And please note that you don’t have to be in the Maryland Bloggers Alliance to be posted.

So that brings you up to speed on both the local scene and the MBA. I’m actually going to postdate this post by about 24 hours so I can take some time on monoblogue this weekend and do non-writing things like update the links list, see about putting a Carnival of Maryland box on my sidebar, and work on a couple rather lengthy future posts. I’ve gotten a bit smarter in the almost two years (my blogiversary of my original blog – yet another milestone – is April 1st) that I’ve done this writing and one thing I’ve learned is spacing your posts out is good practice. This way readers get “fresh red meat” and a reason to come back often!

Editor’s note: At 11:23 a.m. this morning, someone hopped out of Delmarva Dealings and became my 30,000th visitor. Then they went to carbonfootprint.com. It was a local person because I believe the 71.200.xxx.xxx “exchange” is exclusively on Delmarva via Comcast (it’s my IP address too.)

Thoughts on global warming

Moments ago I got back from one of my walks around my neighborhood. To place this post in perspective I just went to weather.com and looked up the averages for Salisbury for March 17th. Our normal high for today is 56 degrees and normally the low is 36.

It’s 34 degrees out right now, with a 20 mph wind out of the northwest. Twenty miles per hour my ass! It was spitting out snow flurries here and as I walked up a rise on one of the back streets in my neighborhood I was walking into the teeth of a gale-force gust I swear was imported directly from upper Siberia. I thought to myself that if humans in general (and Americans in particular) are the creators of global warming, we’re sure doing a piss poor job of it this weekend.

So let’s just tell Al Gore (he of the energy hog mansion in Tennessee) that we’ll believe man causes global warming when we get 70 degrees for a high for the whole month of March, instead of one day this week.

Oh, just had thought #2. A couple weeks ago I went to a website called carbonfootprint.com. Someone in the UK has figured out how to calculate one’s so-called carbon footprint. Sadly to say, my carbon footprint is only 13,443 kG while the U.K. average is 10,963 kG. I guess I have a little more work to do don’t I? These nutcases say that my carbon footprint “should” only be 2500 kG. Well, I have news for them – my house will stay at 70 degrees all winter and 76 degrees this summer, and I’m going to continue to drive MY car its 12,500 miles yearly. If that makes too big of a carbon footprint for you, well that’s too damn bad. I’m just an average American who wants to enjoy life and it’s not for you to say how I should live it.

Al Gore used over 220,000 kWh of electricity last year, while the American average is 10,656. (In 12 months between my apartment and here I used 8,486 kWh of electricity so I’m even below the norm for Americans – still my “carbon footprint” is too high for these U.K. clowns.)

How’s this post for an inconvenient truth?

Made in the U.S.A.

Tonight I was looking for some shoes, since my old ones were getting pretty worn out. Now I have two issues when I buy shoes. Number one, I have duck feet, so called because I wear a size 9 1/2 EEE shoe. So it’s tough for me to find comfy shoes. The other issue is that, as a rule, I try not to buy anything that’s made in China if I can help it.

So you know, I’m certainly not a Buchanan-style protectionist; in fact, I’m all for free and fair trade. I just have issues with buying items from a country that points missiles at us.

Because I had one other item I was planning on getting at Wal-Mart anyhow, I stopped there first and looked for shoes. I think every single shoe I looked at was made in China. Now the tea I did get there (the actual purpose of my Wal-Mart stop) may have been made in China too but I have no idea. (Actually, where do we get our tea from?)

So I left there and eventually found my way to Vernon Powell, where I’d bought the pair of shoes I was replacing. As luck would have it, they had a pair on sale that both fit my wide feet and was at least assembled here in the good old U.S.A. They’re almost the same as my last pair and are known as New Balance 575’s. So I supported American workers in some factory someplace.

But it got me to thinking about this on the drive home. It seems like almost anything you buy at a discount retailer (and many more upscale ones too) is made in China. Now I realize that by having about 20% of the world population just sheer chance would dictate that a lot of things are made there but why China and not India (close behind China with about 1/6 or so of world population)? At least India is less hostile to our interests than China is.

Of course, the even bigger preference to me is having items made right here in the U.S.A. I can’t say I strictly apply this rule (after all I bought a Japanese car) but at least I had the option of considering American cars at the time I made the purchase. This doesn’t seem to apply nearly as much in many other areas, particularly electronics. And it’s sort of a shame when how many thousands of American workers have been tossed out of a job because a company moves production overseas – I have a friend whose company did just that and let go hundreds of workers in Ohio. Now she complains regularly about having to deal with the Chinese and the crappy product they send over here. But it’s cheaper for the company!

I suppose this all goes back to the comment that’s made when advocates of illegal immigrants are questioned about why those people are hired. They always say that the illegals do the jobs Americans won’t do. Surely that’s not always the case, but it just makes me wonder how it’s possible that, even with the much lower cost of labor in China, American ingenuity can’t figure out how to make products that are price-competitive. Has America really gotten that lazy and ignorant?

Quite honestly, if China said tomorrow that, “ok, America, either we get to reinstate our rightful rule in Taiwan or we stop selling you our exports” they would have us over a barrel. (Never mind all the Treasury bonds they hold.) But what troubles me is that a huge number of Americans would say, “phfft! It’s only Taiwan, who cares?” and bitch because the news break is interrupting “American Idol.” Slowly but surely, China is building toward a time when they can put a proverbial gun to our head and it’s a little scary.

Back in the 1980’s, one of the socially-correct items for multinational businesses to do was to divest themselves from South Africa to protect their policy of apartheid. Maybe it’s time for American businesses to do a new divestiture out of China and back into more friendly countries, even our very own.

N-C-double A!

I know my fellow MBA blogger Maryland Conservatarian was happy about his Holy Cross Crusaders making it to the dance…well my Miami RedHawks are joining his team as we knocked off the #2 seed Akron Zips 53-52 in the MAC Championship!! A Doug Penno 3 pointer as time “expired” gave the RedHawks the win. The clock had ran out as the ball fell through the net but it was eventually determined that the time had restarted tardily after a missed Akron free throw. Thus 0.6 seconds were placed back on the clock. But Akron’s long inbounds pass went harmlessly out of bounds as time again expired and the RedHawks pulled an upset for the second straight night (beating #1 seed Toledo in the semifinal) to win it all!

I’m betting we’ll be something like a #14 seed since we’re only 18-14 with the win but we get to go back to the dance for the first time since 1999, when a team led by current Boston Celtics player Wally Szczerbiak made it to the Sweet 16 before succumbing to defending champion Kentucky. Every few years a MAC team makes a good run in the tournament (Kent State was an elite 8 team in 2002) so hopefully my RedHawks can make some noise in their 17th trip overall to the dance.

Meanwhile, Doug Penno will probably never have to buy another drink in Oxford the rest of his life. But would someone please tell the AP that nowhere on my diploma does it say “of Ohio.” We are Miami University, that other one is the University of Miami (although in reality they should be the University of Coral Gables.) Named after the Indian tribe and the nearby Miami River, we were a university well before Florida was a state.