The big news in the sports world today is Michael’s Vick’s new six year, one hundred million dollar deal with the Philadelphia Eagles.  The Eagles nabbed Vick off the NFL trash heap as a reclamation project after his legal troubles involving dogfighting.  Last season, Vick set career highs with 21 touchdowns and 3018 passing yards, while tossing [...]

[Editor's note: turn back the clock to October 13, 2008.  In a dark corner of Blogspot, I launched the blog that would become The Soap Boxers.  This was the very first article.  As alluded to in the original title, and again in the final sentence, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal was an inspiration for this [...]

OK, it’s a grab bag of random thoughts today. First of all, the other writers don’t get enough credit.  This site stated out as my baby, and in the early days I was writing 5-7+ articles every single week.  I can’t imagine how this was possible, but I made it happen.  Over the years, the [...]

On Wednesday, Apple announced that CEO Steve Jobs will be stepping down from that role.  Jobs has been battling health issues – including pancreatic cancer – for several years, so the move was not completely unexpected. For most people, Steve Jobs IS Apple.  Co-founder Jobs was forced out of Apple during a 1985 power struggle with [...]

  On July 1, 2010, Hewlett Packard finalized a deal to buy Palm for $1.2 billion. Palm was a relatively small company struggling to keep its footing in the smart device market – competing against behemoths like Apple and Google (Android). Finally, the financial resources of industry titan HP would allow the Palm OS to [...]

There is no debate that the rich pay a disproportionate amount of income taxes in the United States. Whether this is fair or not is a political discussion that I won’t address in this article. I’m more concerned about the reliability of statistics that are floating around. You’ve probably heard that the top 20% of [...]

Once again, Carlos Zambrano is persona non grata in the Cubs clubhouse.  He was suspended for 30 days without pay following his most recent blowup.  After giving up five home runs against the Atlanta Braves, he began using Atlanta icon Chipper Jones as target practice before getting ejected from the game.  Mind you, Jones wasn’t [...]

Tax (Photo credit: 401K) 47% of Americans pay no income tax, according to many sources. Is this really true? Let’s take a look. First of all, I’m going to present IRS data, so I’m limited to the information from tax returns. According to the 2010 US census the population of the United States was around [...]

Editor’s note: this was the second Fiction Friday story I published (the baseball-themed Release Point being the first). A co-worker told me that this story gave him nightmares, which I took as a compliment.  Originally published on April 3, 2009, and pulled out of the vault today … Tale of the Wolf! The wolf was [...]

Last night was supposed to be all about the House voting on the bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.  A compromise had been reached, and the Republican House and the Democratic Senate were poised to pass a bill and send it to the President for his quick signature.  Crisis averted, economy back on track, [...]