News Commentary

Marathon hopeful, 101-year-old , training hard
Already Britain's oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world's oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette.

Training for a marathon is hard for a 101 year old? This is news? What is news is that this father of 17 returned to work at 99, bored with retirement after two years.

For those of you wondering how he has stayed so fit and managed to father 17 children, it could be that Buster has done housework as a means of to both ends: studies indicate that men who do housework get more sex. It is not that men are unaware of this; they just keep hoping for shortcuts, like chocolates and empty promises.

Barak Obama raised $55 million in February.

To put this in perspective, it represents less than 2/1,000th of 1% of the federal budget and less than 3/10,000th of 1% of annual GDP. We still spend less on elections than we do on Halloween candy each year.

Home prices are dropping. The media reports this as bad news. Oddly, this same media had earlier reported rising home prices as bad news, a sign that homes were becoming unaffordable. I guess this is how the media keeps their reporting balanced; any direction the pendulum swings can be construed as bad news.

Forbes latest list of billionaires has some interesting data, among other things seeming to support the notion of globalization. "Two years ago, half of the world's 20 richest were from the U.S. Now only four are. India wins bragging rights for having four among the top 10, more than any other country." In second place, bumping Bill Gates and nudging up against Warren Buffet, is Mexican investor Carlos Slim, whose net worth has doubled in the last two years to $60 billion. The 1,125 billionaires on Forbes' list are worth a combined $4.4 trillion. Assuming a 10% interest rate, their combined net worth would generate Obama's $55 million in donations in about an hour. Facebook's 23 year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the world's youngest self-made billionaire. (At 23, I'm pretty sure my net worth (a shaky balance sheet that included a number of albums and a Bang & Olufsen turntable on one side and student loans and a '65 mustang prone to monthly break downs on the other) was probably closer to a negative $5,500.) With all that money, it is probably no wonder that Zuckerberg would need to create a social network site like Facebook. Many friends can be had for considerably less than a billion and someone with this much money would need some way to keep track of them all.

Personally, I'm hoping to get on Forbes' list within the next year as I begin hostile take overs of other blogs, leveraging my small number of comments to take over first Scott Adams blog and then begin picking off the blogs of people like Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington. How will I finance the purchase of these blogs? By highly leveraging my comments and obscure rating into stock I expect hedge fund managers to snap up. Why would they snap this up? Because next month, some other hedge fund manager will bid the price even higher. Now is the time for savvy investors to get in on the ground floor. I'm pretty excited about this, but I digress.

Mike Huckabee bowed out of the Republican primary contest. This has nonetheless been a boon to his career. He'll be starring in a new Broadway Musical: Gomer Pyle, New Mayor of Mayberry. The drama revolves around the mayor's move to outlaw evolution in the town; that Gomer Pyle is mayor seems evidence that he has succeeded.