the darndest thing
eFluxMedia has been turning up a lot lately in the Google News headlines that I scan. Dumb mistakes like this will keep me from clicking on their links in the future.
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"For this first year, we will be studying only male tooth donors. First, it is much easier to locate males at current addresses, since many girls donating teeth in the 1960s have changed their names. Second, the death rate is much higher for males, and may yield a larger sample of donors who are either living with cancer or have died of the disease. Seven percent of males and 3 percent of females who were young children in the 1960s are now deceased."
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In today’s environment, Catholics may feel politically disenfranchised, sensing that no party and few candidates fully share our comprehensive commitment to human life and dignity.The newsletter directed me to a website on Faithful Citizenship that will warrant further reading on my part.
April 19, 1977
Mr. Don Criqui
WOR
1440 Broadway
New York, NY 10036
Dear Don:
It may be the advent of spring, retrogressive insomnia, or simple weakness of bladder as age advances that caused me to be awake this morn at 5:45 to hear your commentary concerning baseball as seen by two faculty members of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce.
Much of what you reported they said appears to be sound and, from what I know of baseball through an association with it last year during its labor difficulties, a fair assessment of its problems. There is no doubt that fuller stadia and better television markets produce richer teams. Whether the 2.2 million break-even attendance figure holds for every team, it certainly seems a fair projection of what is needed through the turnstile to stay out of the red.
If you consider that last year's total major league attendance was 31,318,331 for 24 clubs, each then averaged only 1,304,930 or 895,070 below their estimated break-even level.
As politicians and marketing experts know, trying to get two million people to commit themselves to anything is a tough assignment.
It has been argued that the season is already too long, but the main part of the season still only runs from the second week in April to the end of September and has for many years. It is only the playoff system that extends it into mid-October, and this frankly is a creature of television. By playoff time, the season has already ended for 22 of the 26 teams, even though national attention (and highest television revenue) is focused intensely upon the remaining four divisional and then two league champions for the following three weekends.
The one idea the Wharton guys had that amused me, however, was their suggestion that baseball should rely more upon colleges to develop their player talent.
Are they, in effect, saying that the baseball industry should rely upon a government subsidy to train their entry level personnel?
Why not, you say, doesn't football and basketball? And what's this government subsidy stuff?
Well, isn't it? After all, a glance over the player rosters of major professional teams reveals that most of the players (as is true of most of the collegiate graduates) are from state supported colleges and universities. And those athletes that generally qualify for professional ranks do so because they have been outstanding athletes in high school and college. As such, they have been on athletic scholarships, which means that the taxpayers have been picking up their tuition, books, laboratory, and room and board costs.
As skilled athletes entering the labor field of professional sports, have they not been coached, trained, supported, and apprenticed with government funds at taxpayer expense? Isn't that a subsidy?
Sure scholarships come out of athletic department funds that are supposed to be self-supporting. But the institution that they attend isn't self-supporting. The facilities they use, the fields they play on, the classes they attend, the libraries (hopefully) they study in are all parts of the state supported institution.
It is hyperbole, of course, to talk in terms of direct government subsidy to baseball for player development. But there is an element of that existing in other sports.
In any event, government subsidized minor leagues have as much chance of catching on as does the idea of electronic voting on managerial decisions. I never viewed a ballpark crowd as an unbiased audience or considered it to hold a typical random sample of American opinion. Secondly, can you see Billy Martin reacting to the second guesser in the announcers' booth who puts the question to the crowd? I think it would make the Atlanta walk-off by the umpires last week seem like a casual perambulation. And finally, how long would those fancy electronic terminals at each seat hold up among our turf-gathering fanatics.
There is no question that baseball is faced with problems, but it strikes me that their source might be more easily traced to contracts with long-term deferred compensation clauses which can lead to the bankruptcy of franchises as the only means of getting those monkeys off the backs of a new ownership.
That doesn't bode well for the best interests of the players, the fans, or the sport. As the municipal unions in New York are learning and as the "city fathers" found out at the bond market, you can milk a good thing just so long until the day of reckoning. And that day always seems to arrive just when you are least prepared for it.
Incidentally, on the 2.2 million figure, only three clubs reached that total last year -- Cincinnati at 2.6, Philadelphia at 2.5, and Los Angeles at 2.4. The Yankees, who led the league practically all season, in a brand new ballpark managed to edge across the two million mark at 2.012, marking the first time in baseball history that four clubs had scaled the two million summit.
In the event you hadn't seen it, I am enclosing an article from Forbes magazine on this topic, and because I enjoy hearing you in the mornings, I thought (boastfully) you might like to hear some others at night. So I'm sending along two complimentary tickets to a glee club concert I am associated with. As a product of that South Bend Muscle Academy, you must have some Irish in you.
Best regards,
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Huntington went to Harvard, studying English literature and graduating in 1934. He went to work for his uncles at the company’s headquarters, then housed in the Graybar Building next to Grand Central Terminal, where his job was to keep track of sales of bread and pound cake. But he was often absent. In 1934 he defiantly took a day off to attend the Harvard-Yale football game. That ended his career in the family business. Yale won, 14-0.From The Washington Post:
In 1940, Mr. Hartford tried being a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, after putting up $100,000 to help get the paper started. If nothing else, the experience produced one of the all-time great excuses for missing deadline: he once sailed his yacht to cover an assignment on Long Island, and upon returning to the city could find no place to tie up and come ashore with the story.
With the start of World War II, he donated the yacht to the Coast Guard. In return he was given the command of a modest supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice — once, he said later, because his navigational charts were out of date, the other time because "I mistook feet for fathoms."
His excesses cost him financially and personally. He had unexpectedly ascetic habits in some pockets of his life, such as a disinclination to drink alcohol. But his fourth marriage, in the 1970s, marked a turning point. According to a 2004 Vanity Fair magazine report, that last wife, a Fort Lauderdale hairdresser a decade his junior, introduced Mr. Hartford to cocaine, amphetamines and quaaludes.It looks like Hartford had one good idea that could have increased his wealth if he had been able to get a gambling license for Paradise Island. From the Times again:
He was hospitalized at least once for an overdose, and his fourth wife remained a destructive presence in his life for years. His apartment at One Beekman Place in New York became the site of violent encounters involving transient visitors. He was once left for hours writhing in pain after falling and breaking a hip.
When he made the news, it was usually for something unsavory, such as the fourth wife's assault on his secretary.
Costlier still was Mr. Hartford’s makeover of Hog Island, in the Bahamas. After buying four-fifths of the place in 1959 and having it renamed Paradise Island, he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.Missed it by that much.
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March 16, 1978
Mr. Jody Powell
Press Secretary
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr.Powell:
I know you are overwhelmed with problems, and I hesitate to send you "just another clipping," but I thought this letter to The New York Times is particularly significant in light of the many issues that confront our society today.
I have not attempted to target on any specific piece of legislation or advance any similar cause, but I do wish to direct your attention to the increasing burden that the middle class -- that is, the producer group -- is being asked to carry for those others in our society who are solely consumers.
If the size of the middle class continues to diminish, if its ability to function and educate its children is further inhibited by ever increasing tax burdens and government programs, the ability of our economy to create sufficient wealth to take care of the needs of all will be critically undermined.
I seriously do not think I overstate the case.
Sincerely,
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