The fear of Tiger may be over

Ok, so I picked Phil to win the PGA Championship, I was wrong. Phil played extremely bad, he still made the cut which was better than Tiger did in the British Open, but he wasn’t good. I’ll bet there weren’t to many people who were right or had even heard of Y.E. Yang before he stared down Tiger and beat him yesterday. So again I didn’t get the winner right but my logic was spot on. I saw how in the Masters and US Open Tiger was in contention on Sunday but was beaten by both his playing partner and the winner in both tournaments. I said Phil would be in the final group with Tiger and beat him. If you substitute Y.E. Yang for Phil I had the ending pegged. The era of everyone throwing up on themselves when Tiger is within a couple of strokes is over. It has now been 6 majors without a win for Tiger and he is now 33 years old. I do think he will win 4 majors and own the record for most major titles but I don’t think it will be easy. History says that once a player reaches 35 he doesn’t win many majors after that, and there have only been a couple of winners who were over 40. Tiger needs to win one a year for the next 4 years which will put him at 37 and before you say it is automatic, remember he didn’t win one this year. I heard a media member say after the first round that you didn’t even need to watch, Tiger has this one and that he would win the next three for a Tiger slam. It is a good thing golf is won by having the best score and not judged like boxing or Tiger would never lose.

Griswald Vacation

about 5 miles out of Baker City Oregon the trany starts to rev and I can't go faster than 40 mph. So I pull in to town and find the closest gas station. After filling up with gas I ask for the closest mechanic. The only mechanic is a couple blocks down the road so I pull in and he has a big smile on his face. I tell him what is happening and he said let me drive it. He throws it into reverse and we hear the sounds of metal being ripped and torn apart. Without even looking at it he said you need a rebuilt trany. I ask how much and how long and he said $2500 and I am sure we can finish this week. Just a sidebar but does anyone have any good negotiating tactics in this situation? So I ask him to direct us to the nicest hotel. After pulling into the MOTEL we are informed that there is a room tonight but the Hells Caynon Motorcycle Rally is in town and there will be 10,000 bikers invading the town and no hotel rooms. So if anyone out there has a place for me to stay in Baker City Oregon while I am abused by the mechanic I would appreciate it.

Buy Ford

  I can't believe the news today.  Now I know your about my age if that made you sing the U2 song Sunday bloody Sunday, one of my favorites of all time.  Anyway, I read that the car company GM is now 50% owned by the Federal Government and 39% owned by the UAW or United Auto Workers Union.  Now, I have had a lot of bad ideas in my day but this is the worst idea I have ever heard of!

  We have a government that has no idea how to make a profit or do anything that takes customer service, think of the last time you went to the DMV or called the IRS with a question.  Now partner that with the people who negotiated an $87 dollar an hour average rate for all blue collar workers and had no idea that this would make the cars to expensive and not competitive to foreign models.  So, who cares, they will just be out of buisness right?  Well there is the big problem, they have already taken billions from the taxpayers and my guess is they will continue to do so every time they need more.  Once again can you say bad idea! 

  Now contrast this with Ford who took no money from the taxpayers.  Founder Henry Ford I consider to be one of the great Capitalist in American history.  The Ford Foundation is a charity set up and funded by the Ford family and was given enough money to go on in perpituity.  Ford’s stock hit a low of $1.01 and closed today at $5.19. 

  Ford makes a great product, I sold my 1997 Ford Winstar this year, it had over 200,000 miles on it and never neded any major work and got a 2007 Ford F250 diesel truck.  But talk about an uphill battle, not only do they have the usual foreign competition that doen’t have to pay near as much labor costs, but now they have to compete against a company with an endless supply of our tax dollars.  I urge you to buy a Ford and support this great company for two reasons.  First to show that Capitalism is still alive and works much better than Socialism and second, because the US needs a world class manufacturer to keep our great country healthy and strong.

 

Konosuke Matsushita

I just finished reading “Matsushita Leadership lessons from the 20^th century’s most remarkable entrepreneur” by John P. Kotter.  This book introduced me to Konosuke Matsushita who was arguably as the title states the entrepreneur who went from the least, his father went broke and he quit school in the third grade to work as an indentured servant, to employing more people and making more profit than any other company.

Matsushita started everything with one concept.  He was not an inventor; he took existing products and made them 30% better and 30% cheaper.  His first project was a light socket that he thought he could make better.  Eventually he grew a consumer electronics company and had many brands that I really hadn’t heard of.  He was not into self promotion and his companies never bore his name.

The book did a great job of showing the highs and lows that he had to go through to become successful.  Some of the interesting concepts I learned from the book were, he never paid himself a large salary, never sold equity in his company for financing, demanded profitability from every division.  The one that blew my mind was he once wrote a letter to the Government in Japan saying they should save enough money that the Government is run off the interest like an endowment.  What a difference to how the US Government is funding things.

This was a real interesting book.  If you are an entrepreneur or like successes stories you will love this book.

WHAT ARE WE MAD ABOUT

Are you kidding me?  Let me get this straight, we are supposed to be really upset at AIG because the government gave them and others TRILLIONS of dollars and they paid 120 million in bonuses to employees.  Ok, I understand, why they are paying bonuses when the company lost all this money?  The simple answer is they already had employment contracts that paid a bonus at a certain date.  These are legal contracts that can only be broken by the company filling bankruptcy which is what we should have allowed to happen in the beginning.  Bad companies that make bad decisions, like paying millions in bonuses even though the company is failing, need to go bankrupt so that good companies that make good decisions can take the bad companies customers and employees and everyone is happy.   

I am not nearly as mad at AIG paying 120 million in bonuses as I am at President Obama giving away TRILLIONS of dollars.  Remember, it takes more than 999 million dollars to make a BILLION and more than 999 BILLION dollars to make a TRILLION dollars.  Billion and trillion used to be terms that were only thrown around by kids upping bets, I’ll bet you a million, well I’ll bet you a billion, oh yea, well I’ll bet you a trillion, and that was were the game stopped.   Now I wonder how many months it will take to hear that President Obama has spent a GADZILLION, if that really is a word.

The last figure I heard was that the Government has spent more than 7 TRILLION dollars.   Getting mad at AIG paying 120 million in bonuses is like getting upset about the wind generated from a flee fart while your in the middle of a hurricane. 

HISTORY BEFORE OUR EYES

I have several friends and family members who have expressed to me their disgust with the Obama inauguration.  They say things like, why is everything about him being black and do we really need Oprah and Halle Berry telling us what an amazing guy he is and the rest of Hollywood and all the media anointing him as the savior before he has done anything as President yet.  I understand, and quite frankly I already have a little Obama fatigue as well.

Let’s get one thing straight, I did not vote for Obama.  I am conservative and disagree with just about every stance he has taken over the years and with almost everything he said in his campaign.  I didn’t vote for McCain either, like I said I am conservative, I believe in small government, something the Republican Party abandoned many years ago, but I am getting off topic. 

What people have to realize is what this means to black people everywhere.  There are many people still alive from the time black people were not allowed to use the same drinking fountain as whites, or use the same bathroom, eat at the same restaurant, go to the same school, or play on the same sports teams.  People my age, I was born in 1970, have not seen much of this.  I will admit to hearing a girl in my grade school called a zebra because she had a black father and a white mother but she was pretty popular and was even voted on to the cheerleading squad in high school, so the large majority of people treated her with respect.  But the point is, many black people were mistreated.  They were treated as second class citizens and found it tougher to do just about everything from getting an education to getting a job or once they had a job, getting promoted. 

What Obama represents is a feeling of WOW, look how far we have come.  If a black man can be elected President of the United States, the leader of the free World, then there is truly nothing that they can’t do.  It is amazing, historic, even to people like me who disagree with his politics.  I remember seeing one of my favorite columnists Walt Williams, who is a black conservative, cry when Obama was officially announced as the winner of the election.  At first that confused me but I think I understand now.  The late great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous I have a dream speech that he could see the day when a man was judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin, this is proof that that day has come.  We as a country should celebrate, it should be a bigger celebration than a normal inauguration, it is history and I hope my kids remember it.  So while the media and Hollywood is grating on your nerves, relax, take a deep breath and enjoy the fact that you are witnessing history.

Conclusion to Amazon adventure

Finally I am writing the conclusion to my Amazon adventure.  It was time to leave Itatuba and fly back to Miami.  This was a small town so we needed to take a small plane to a bigger city and then fly to Miami from there.  The plane was scheduled to leave at 9 AM so we got to the airport at 8 and checked in and did the usually stuff.  After waiting for an hour they told us the plane was late but had us go through the metal detector and wait.  Right before I went through I realized I had my trusty multi tool in my backpack, you know the one that survivor man told me to never get caught without.  So here I am, I don’t speak a lick of the language and I am carrying a knife through the metal detector.  Just then it occurred to me, Newton was standing unaware and I still owed him for my trouble with customs on the way in, so I took my knife and put it in his carryon without him knowing.  I went through first and had no problem and then turned to watch him.  He made it through fine but his bag did not.  They opened it up and took out the knife.  I didn’t understand any of the words but I could tell they were not happy with Newton for trying to sneak a knife on the plane. 

After a few hours of waiting they told us the plane would be here at 9 PM, only 12 hours late, so we went for a walk and got some lunch.  We came to Brazil in the dry season so I had been there 8 days and had not seen it rain.  This evidently was very uncommon but on our walk it started to rain, we ducked into a little market and it was over in a half hour but in that time more water came down than in any half hour I had ever experienced.  I literally thought cars might wash away but as soon as it stopped the water was gone, no big puddles or anything, it just runs down to the river.  So we go back to the airport and wait some more and they tell us 9 AM tomorrow we can load the plane.  So back to the hotel and start the process over, up at 7, to the airport by 8 and then they did something great.  Instead of making us wait, they immediately told us the plane would not be here until 9 PM.  On the one hand this meant our plane was delayed 36 hours but Raury, the geologist from Australia that we had come to meet, offered to take us out on his boat on the Amazon for the day.  We had already checked our bags so we did not have a change of clothes but we didn’t care, just wanted to see the Amazon from a small boat.  This boat was like a large canoe with a motor, there were no boats like the boats we ski behind on the lake, in fact if you could get one of those boats there it would be the greatest playground ever.  Picture a river with some spots where you can not see the other shore that is always pure glass and no other boats for hundreds of miles, a water-skiers dream. 

Raury told us he wanted to take us to the waterfalls, it was a couple hours up river and we may run out of gas but we wanted to give it a shot.  On the way we start to see a couple of dolphins jumping around the boat, it was just like a boat in the ocean with the dolphins playing around us but this was fresh water.  During one of my many hours spent watching the discovery channel I had seen a program on fresh water dolphins but here they were just out of arms reach jumping in fours or fives all around us.  As we went on we made it to the waterfall, my concept of a waterfall is a river falling hundreds of feet down a cliff but there a waterfall is really some small rapids.  We tied up our boat and got on shore, my first thought was of the Crocodiles but Raury assured me they don’t like the fast moving water.  I felt pretty good about that since he grew up down under.  The thoughts going through my head were that I may never get back to the Amazon and I would always regret it if I did not get in and swim.  Now remember we had to fly out later and I didn’t have a change of clothes, the humidity is such that if you get wet, you don’t dry out, so swimming with clothes was out of the question unless I wanted to fly in an airplane for many hours while wet.  So I did what I thought was the best, I whipped off my clothes, underwear and all, and jumped in.  After about ten minutes Raury said, “don’t piss mate” in his Australian accent, and then he proceeded to tell me about the parasite that is attracted to the ammonia in your urine and swims up your junk and sinks in three barbed hooks curving down so you can not pull them out.  My first thought was that he was just messing with me but as I began to believe him I wondered why he didn’t tell me not to piss ten minutes earlier when I first felt the urge and let it rip.  My wife was not very happy with me when I first told her this story, anyway after I got out he said, well at least we know you didn’t get anything bit off by the piranha but it will take up to four months before we know if you caught the parasite. 

I waited four months to write this so everyone would know weather to laugh or cry and am happy to report a clean bill of health.  The doctor said I was lucky I was not a very good fisherman!