Man* is an unbelievably resilient creature.

He can go from riches to rags and be OK, as long as he didn't lose his fortunes overnight. He can go from being happily married to bitterly divorced and manage, as long as his love wasn't betrayed in an instant.

I believe life can throw anything at us, and we will find a way to deal... as long as we have time to adapt.

It's amazing the ways a life can touch another.

Leroy Sievers was a respected and accomplished journalist, covering wars and conflicts all over the globe for CBS News and Nightline, winning a bunch of Emmys and a couple of Peabodys in the process, and yet I think it's fair to say that none of his work likely had as much of an impact as did his very public battle with cancer.

Is Google making us intellectually lazy?

That was the gist of a question financial wildman Jim Cramer asked Google's CEO Eric Schmidt on a CNBC interview this week. Cramer pointed out that one of his daughter's fifth-grade teachers banned the use of Google for an assignment she received. Schmidt seemed genuinely surprised by the anecdote, comparing it to how math teachers often ban the use of calculators.

So apparently, the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony wasn't exactly what it seemed. A firework display kicking off the countdown was generated by computer graphics, and a little girl performing a popular Chinese nationalist song was actually lip-syncing to the voice of another girl deemed not cute enough for prime time.

How truly appropriate and how terribly unsurprising.

Thrilling swimming races and scary Cold War flashbacks have snatched our collective attention from the John Edwards affair bombshell, but before moving on completely, I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments.

First, Edwards is a sleazebag. But not so much cause he first lied about the affair and in the process slandered the writers who reported the news - his entire political career was on the line so it's easy to understand why he tried so hard to deny the story (and why he probably did much worse to keep the story hush-hush).

I was going to write tonight about John Edwards and his affair but that sleazebag can wait because I just got done watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics. And all I can say is ...

WOW!

Holy shit. Football is back. Here I am, still consumed by Cardinals baseball, dressing in shorts and flip-flops, loving the A/C, eating outside at restaurants, sweating in the subways... and yet, ten NFL teams played in preseason games last night.

This happens every August; I get totally blindsided by football's return. But only for a moment - and then I get psyched.

While growing up in a St. Louis suburb, a bunch of kids who lived on my street would often get together in my neighbor's backyard to play some soccer. Occasionally, the ball would be kicked too hard and roll into the yard next door, and sometimes all the way to the back of that house, which sat perpendicularly to our soccer field. This was always a dicey, somewhat traumatic moment for us, and we would usually argue for quite some time about who had to go retrieve the ball.

Originally published on Aug. 2, 2008

Truman Burbank is agitated. The main character from the movie The Truman Show is increasingly suspicious that something's terribly amiss in his made-for-TV world, and his 'wife' tries to calm him down with a cup of 'mococa.'

"All natural," she tells him, holding the package of cocoa up to one of the millions of hidden cameras filming Truman's life without his knowledge. "Cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua ... I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best."

So my girlfriend is moving in with me at the end of the week (oh yeah, I'm feeling a whole lot of 'YAY!' and just a little bit of '(gulp)'), and I was at her apartment yesterday waiting for a couple of guys from the Housing Works charity organization. They were going to pick up some furniture that she needed to get rid of and couldn't manage to sell.

Many of my liberal friends and family (and since this is New York City, that means basically everyone I know) believe there is no way Barack Obama will win the presidency this fall. Partly, they feel conservatives will at the last minute find or fabricate some scandal that torpedoes Obama's campaign (tho I can't imagine how to top Reverend Wright), but mainly they are convinced that America is just not ready to elect a black man to the top office in the land.

I can't stand hypocrites. (Of course, I'm pretty sure I have some hypocritical beliefs, and I can stand myself, so I guess that makes me a hypocrite twice over).

But seriously, a little consistency when it comes to opinions is all I ask for.  Unfortunately, hypocrisy is everywhere. So before numbness to its existence permanently sets in, I wanted to express my outrage at two examples of hypocrisy that strike me as particularly galling.

1) Pro-choice folks who believe prostitution should be illegal (usually feminists).

My dad is an eternal optimist, one of those turn-lemons-into-lemonade people. And yeah, it sometimes annoys the living shit out of me.

I am, after all, an in-the-long-run-we're-all-dead type of guy, a devout half-empty man (I'd call myself an eternal pessimist, but I don't believe anything lasts forever :) )

Time for a short self-congratulatory post (For if I don't do it, who will?).

Right before the Fourth of July, I wrote that the price of oil was a bubble waiting to be pricked and nearing a short-term top. In the past three weeks, the price of oil has fallen by about $20 bucks a barrel, or almost 15 percent, a huge move by any standard. In terms of daily closing prices, July 3rd ended up being the exact top.

So last Tuesday Larry King interviews Barack Obama and then three days later, he does a show debating the existence of UFOs. It's fucking nutty. (King, who i just found out has done these shows for years, apparently wants to be the first broadcaster to interview an alien).

My mom's mom was far from the best person in the world (This is not the grandmother I discussed a couple weeks ago). She held grudges and often spoke ill of others, including family. She was racist. She belittled and insulted my grandfather, only becoming the dutiful, loving wife after he had a massive stroke and lacked the capacity to resist her will.

So as I see it, in this world, you are either a producer or a consumer.

Obviously, everyone does both to a certain extent, just as everyone is probably a little gay, but in the end, you lean mostly one way or the other. You're either adding to society or taking from it (and having children doesn't count cuz you're just as likely to raise a bunch of consuming monsters as you are the next Leonardo da Vinci).

So the other day I was talking to a softball teammate who's about to get married, and we were discussing why more and more people in their 30s and 40s - at least in New York - seem okay with the prospect of staying single. I know that many of these older bachelors and bachelorettes want children and I'd have to think that few of them relish the prospect of aging without a constant, dependable companion and lover. Yet they can't seem to find the one worth taking the ultimate plunge.

As a native St. Louisan who always feels some sort of odd civic pride whenever those clever beer commercials end with a dude intoning 'Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, Missouri,' I know I'm supposed to be upset about the recent acquisition by Belgium-based InBev. Yet I can't muster any passion over the loss of the historic brewer and one of my hometown's few remaining independent corporate behemoths (TWA, McDonnell Douglass, Ralston Purina all bit the dust long ago).

Ah, Mondays. Always such an unpleasant beast, a day only meant for enduring and muddling through in the best of circumstances, but sometimes gearing up for the workweek feels particularly difficult. I've just finished a relaxing weekend and I'm struggling to find my motivation mojo right now.

My weekend was enjoyably capped yesterday by my adorable three-year-old cousin's birthday party, followed by a few fun sets of tennis with my brother, all done under perfect midsummer weather and in a Riverdale park that brought back memories of my Midwestern suburban upbringing.