Back when the 2017 baseball season started (what seemed like twelve years ago to many), the Los Angeles Dodgers had an overall payroll for their roster totaling over $240 million – that’s a lot of money for men who wear tights, eyeliner, and play a game for a living.   The next highest payroll was the New York Yankees at a little north of $201 million.   Facing the Dodgers currently in the World Series are the Houston Astros, and they started the season with a payroll of approximately $124 million.   Just for comparison’s sake, the Astros were #18 on the payroll list, meaning that there were sixteen teams beside the Dodgers who spent more on their rosters and did NOT make it to the Big Game (actually, it’s Games – plural – and they seem to drag on forever).   In essence, we’re witnessing a battle for jewelry (the highly coveted World Series Ring) and the chance to visit the White House without having to wait in line for a tour with one team paying $116 million more than the

Do you have that friend or family member who pronounces a fairly common word incorrectly on a regular basis?   Or, do you know someone who’s pretty intelligent but consistently conjugates one particular verb incorrectly?   I have a friend of almost 20 years when something isn’t quite going his way, he gets “ fustrated ” – this friend is a very successful, college-educated professional who works with executives at the C level every day.   In the conjugation department, I have a relative who constantly says “I seen that” – I’m not sure if he knows that the word “saw” isn’t just something you use to cut through a log or plank.   The next time you find yourself in a discussion with a handful of people, watch for the use of the word “impact” and listen to the way it’s being used.   I’m willing to bet you’ll hear this phrase: “I was impacted by . . .”   Until relatively recently, the “translation” of that phrase would have meant that the person was, literally, crushed like a stone

If you’ve learned one thing from reading these columns, it’s this: I don’t read a ton of books by or about the French philosopher Descartes or spend large amounts of money traveling the world to view the Masters’ paintings in far-flung museums – my entertainment and sources of knowledge run to the more . . . mundane, if you will.   Well, I’m not about to disappoint.   In the movie Men in Black , the two main characters J & K (played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, respectively) have recently met and K is trying to recruit J to join the clandestine government agency that monitors aliens on planet Earth.   Agent K has just shown J a lot of things that are hard to believe/explain and urges J to keep them secret.   At this point, J interrupts him, and this piece of dialogue ensues: J: Why the big secret?   People are smart.   They can handle it.   K: A person is smart.   People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.   Fifteen hundred years ago,

Back in 1835, an Austrian physicist by the name of Schrodinger devised a way to explain quantum physics (and impress women) by placing a cat inside a sealed box with a vial of poisonous gas that could break at any moment and kill the unwitting feline.   The crux of this exercise was this: until one opened the box to see if Mr. Finickypants was still upright, the cat could be considered both alive and dead.   (Who says physicists don’t know how to party?)   We’ll come back to Schrodinger, a potential cat killer, in a few moments. According to CoreLogic – a California-based company that provides financial analytics – this is the year that the lion’s share of people who foreclosed on a home previously will be coming back into the market to purchase a home.   These folks are being called “Boomerang Buyers”.   As you know, it takes seven years for a foreclosure to be removed from someone’s credit report, and 2010 was the year when foreclosures hit their peak.   Seven years is a

Let’s open this week’s column with a quote from Dr. Ben Carson, head of the United States Department of Urban Development – also known by it’s much cooler street nickname of HUD (which is not to be confused with the Paul Newman movie of the same name): “Bureaucrats are people who think their rules are more important than the goals.”   This column isn’t going to be about breaking the rules or anything like that – quite the opposite, actually.   Here in our culture, we often talk about and revere the mavericks, the rule breakers.   They make for a good movie or book, for sure.   However, when people excel and achieve while KEEPING the rules – no matter how restrictive they may seem – THAT is when you have a very cool and intriguing story.   A nyone who’s been forced to read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets can attest to the fact he seems to use A LOT of words to convey a simple thought.   One might argue that Old Will was getting paid by the word, so he was fluffing