I just wanted to offer my immediate, quick, bullet-point take on the flurry of GIGANTIC market-related news today, which i

briefly referenced last night.

A struggling economy. Rising unemployment. A crumbling housing market. Ballooning national debt. Disappearing social security and Medicare funds. Surging energy and food prices. Failing financial institutions. A looming environmental catastrophe. Increasing anti-Americanism. Burgeoning terrorist threats.

This is the reality.

No matter your political party or ideology, these are the issues that matter.

I understand few of my few regular readers will appreciate this particular post, but this is a matter of grave import: I really need the owners of the St. Louis Rams football team to fire their head coach.

The guy totally ruined my day, which is an impressive feat given how much I was looking forward to it. Today, after all, was the opening game in the touch football league I help organize, as well as the first Sunday of the NFL season.

I didn't want to let go.

My brother and I were dropping off mom and dad at the airport, appreciating our last moments together after a wonderful week celebrating our cousin's wedding with a lot of other family members.

It was while I was hugging my parents, saying my goodbyes, that I felt a sudden, powerful twinge of sadness. And I realized I didn't want to let go.

Been away and not able to update the blog, but a lot has gone on in the past week. i won't have the time to do a full posting for a few days, so i thought i'd throw out a bunch of quick hits, in chronological order since I began my trip.

On the same night I wrote about the idealistic Sixties and how the eventual disillusionment that followed has continued to hold its grip on the American psyche,  Michelle Obama gave a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention about not accepting the 'world as it is" but striving to create the 'world as it should be.'

Saw the play 'Hair' in Central Park this past weekend.

Damn, it's a shame I missed the Sixties.

The outfits were funky and colorful and sexy. The music was danceable and uplifting. The drugs were mostly harmless, more about expanding the mind than escaping reality. And the whole free love thing, well, that seemed pretty groovy too.

This will be a very short post, but I don't understand how Lou Dobbs still has a job. Are his ratings really that good? He's turned a major primetime show on a mainstream news channel into not much more than a mouthpiece for his own personal jihad against illegal immigrants.

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).