I have had the pleasure of experiencing Niagara Falls twice.  The first time was in 2001 on a solo trip – a stopover of just a few hours.  The second time was a honeymoon trip in 2004 - a considerably longer stay.  In 2001, I was on a trip from Illinois out to the baseball Hall of Fame [...]

USA Today is reporting that GM will shut down 15 of its plants for 9 weeks between May and July.  GM has a total of 21 plants. Clearly, by any measure, GM is in a world of hurt.  At the end of 2008, they had a book value (assets – liabilities) of  -$85 billion.  This [...]

We have a card with HSBC that gives us 1% cash back on all purchases and 2% back on weekend purchases.  We’ve started charging a lot of things so that we get the cash back.  Note: we have not changed our spending patterns because of the availability of credit on the card; we simply use [...]

A few unusual stories were making the rounds last week. I picked a few of them to highlight. The saga of Octomom Nadya Suleman has filed a trademark application for the term “Ocotomom”. She intends to use it in conjunction with baby products and a TV variety show. I’m not even sure that she has [...]

Staff writer and golf fanatic Johnny Goodman (not his real name) shares his experience at the 2009 Masters. This year I made my first trip to the Masters golf Tournament in Augusta Georgia. As a fan and player of the sport, this was on a short list of things I really wanted to do at least [...]

It seems that we live in a world with very different strata of financial awareness.  On the one side, the savvy investors of today have all the information they could possibly need at the tip of their stylus, and they know how to use it.  On the other side, there are a lot of people [...]

Some exciting things are around the corner. I’ve approached a couple of folks to write periodic guest articles for the blog.  I don’t have have a firm schedule on how often these will appear, but I think they will add an interesting spice to the blog.  These guys are good writers, and I think you [...]

Bob Morris yawned and took a bite out of his grape jelly donut. It had been sitting on his desk since morning, and it was stale. Bob had barely made it to his desk when the call came in. A hiker had stumbled across two bodies in the woods. Bob had been at the scene [...]

This is the first in the “A day in the Life” series. The series will pop up periodically on Thursdays. Most of the articles will be shorter than this. However, I did not feel that I can edit very much out of this tale without losing value for the reader. Walrus served as an air [...]

The Soap Boxers’s Stock Market Challenge, 2009 The rules: Each player predicts the closing value of the Dow Jones industrial average at the close of day on December 31, 2009. Points are awarded on a 12-10-8-6-4-2-0 basis for being closest to the actual closing value. The score of all players on each team are added together, and [...]