The SoapBoxers

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 the best team score wins.

I will update the contest every month, focusing on the actual rate of Dow rise or fall compared to the guesses. For example, if a player guesses a 850 point increase and the Dow increased 100 points in the first month, they would be on target. This relies on a false assumption that the market will move similarly in each month.

Note: this contest is for entertainment purposes only and is not to be construed as investment advice.

The predictions:

Team Goliath

Team Goliath consists of three people who write blogs related to personal finance.

Trevor of Financial Nut
Why do I choose 8,400?  Though I do not necessarily agree with Keynesian economic theory, I do feel that some of this spending is going to create some jobs and allow for money to be injected back into the economy.  By this time I would imagine that many of the Obama Administration’s plans to deal with all of these “toxic assets” and to create employment in an increasingly dying economy will be in place.  Right now the plans are only being discussed and just barely being implemented.

In addition, recessions in the past haven’t lasted much longer than what we’ve had.  This one is, however, very unique and may be longer.

But at the end of the day, who really knows?! 🙂

Lazy Man of Lazy Man and Money
Although some suggest that much of the recent drop is psychological, I think that much can be explained by the large amounts of credit that were extended over the last 10-15 years. More money in the system allows earnings to rise – which results in a lower P/E ratio – making it easier for buyers to justify higher prices.

We’ll see what happens in a bad economy where the earnings drop not just due to the lack of buyers, but the lack of easy credit.

I do, however, think much of the damage is priced in now. Although I am not a currency expert, I think it will be important to watch the impact of the stimulus package on the dollar in the next 8+ months.

Heidi of Bankergirl brings a bit of sugar and spice to a group filled with snails and puppy dog tails. 
Based on historical data, we have yet to hit the low for this economic cycle. I think that sometime in the second quarter (or possibly early Q3) of 2009, the dow is going to hit its low. It will recover throughout late Q3 and into Q4, but it will land around the low-to-mid 8000 mark.

Hope I’m wrong – my job is much more secure once we are back up to around 10,000.

Team David

Team David consists of three people who have ordinary jobs and do not write about personal finance.

Peter Rabbit is an IT Auditor.
The last few reports on housing and the purchase of durable goods were very encouraging. These are lagging indicators when we enter a recession as well as when we come out of one. This signals to me that the worst may be behind us. By no means are we in a period of growth but we may have stabilized. Basically, I am betting that we have about 4 more days of 500 point gains sprinkled in the next few months. But otherwise you will see a lot of +100 and -100 point days that just pass time and wash each other out.

Phil Ossifer is a computer systems analyst and has recently launched the (not finance) blog Chunga Goes Wild
Stocks WON’T perform like they did over the last 80 years. Unique circumstances of that period are unrepeatable, e.g., post-Industrial Revolutionary growth, outcome from wars, political/demographic changes, etc.

Monetary policy will float us for a while, but also leads us toward a serious, long-term decline. We now have more debt than any nation; we have a negative savings rate – and yet we look to more spending for the answer. Over-consuming and under-producing is not sustainable!

Finally, analysis based on a few known factors like bad mortagages, trade deficits, and economic cycles are short-sighted. We are now in a complex, unpredictable, global system (think: Chaos theory). Cheers!

Black Hole is where logic goes to die.  Fittingly,  he works in human resources.
In the past month, the Dow has been on the incline, and I think it will be up and down (in small variances) throughout the year, but I think towards the end of the year it will climb a little more steadily.  Banks will become more stable than they are now,  and the economy is receiving such a boost monetarily that it will definitely turn around and quicker than other “recessions”. 

Free agent
The Soap Boxers will not be a member of a team, but I will be awarded points on the basis of my finish. Thus, a good showing by TCO can serve as a spoiler for one of the teams. Think of me as the guy in the middle of a game of “keep away”.
I personally believe that much of the recent drop in the market is due to psychological factors. A lot of really good stocks are getting beaten up. When the Dow was hovering around 6500, P/E ratios were at five year lows. This is a time to snap up some solid blue chip stocks at good prices. I think that there will be some slight corrections in the near future, but that we have hit bottom and that the market will turn the corner once spring is in full bloom. The positive energy of spring will improve the mindset of potential investors.

Submit your own guess in the comments sections. Invite your friends to compete against you. I will also track the guesses of commenters in the monthly update.  Only guesses made before April 30 will be included in the monthly updates (sorry, had to make the cutoff somewhere).

Join us tomorrow, as the Casual Observer takes a look at a day in the life of an air traffic controller.  The Walrus will be our guide.

On Thursday, I was fighting a virus and trying to get some much needed sleep.  Thursday morning,  my sleep was disrupted three times by the phone.  The first call was from my dentist’s office, which had not received the message I had left the previous night, informing them that I needed to cancel my appointment.  I was OK with this disruption, as it was a legitimate call.  

The other two disruptions were from telemarketers, and I was not OK with those disruptions.

The first call was from some company promising to lower my credit card interest rate.  I have repeatedly asked these scammers not to call back and told them they are in violation of the “Do Not Call” list.  However, their business must be very profitable and allow them to easily pay the FCC fines, as they continue to call back.  How do I know that they are not affiliated with one of my credit cards?  One time in the past, I asked which bank they were affiliated with.  After evasive answers (“We represent Mastercard and Visa”) they were unable to name a specific issuing bank. 

The next call was from congressman Steve King of Iowa’s 5th congressional district.  Steve’s robocall wanted me to participate in a survey.  I didn’t stay on the line to determine what the survey was actually about.  I have a pretty good guess, though, and if I am correct, it is an issue on which I do not agree with Steve.

The more disturbing aspect of the call, however, is that fact that I am not in Steve’s district.  I am not even close to being in Steve’s district.  I am really not sure why he would waste his resources calling me.  I’m curious how Steve’s constituents would react if they knew that he was using the resources of their district to make annoying telemarketing calls to voters whom he does not represent, instead of focusing those resources on something that could help his district?  I’d bet that some of them would accurately deem this to be wasteful government spending.

Friday featured a lovely call from a lady who seemed quite clueless about the “Do not call” list.  She said that I wasn’t on their list, but that she would add us.  When I clarified that the DNC list was a list maintained by the federal government, she proceeded to treat ME like the idiot, asking what part of her comment I didn’t understand.  My further attempts to educate her were cut off when she hung up.  Seriously, we don’t actually have telemarketers who are unaware of the DNC list, do we?  Not surprisingly, no information was available via call ID.

What can we do about telemarketing calls?  First, I would eliminate the computerized “robocalls”.  Either pay to have someone staff the phone lines (creating jobs) or don’t bother making the call.

Second, force politicians to abide by the “Do Not Call” list, or create some other way to allow voters to opt out of these calls.  Political calls are the worst sort of telemarketing calls; why should they be exempt?

Note that some states have taken positive steps toward these two goals.  More states must follow.

Finally, I am in favor of charging telemarketers a fee for each unsolicited call they make (even those that are not forbidden by the “Do Not Call” list).  This fee would be credited to the account of the phone number that is called.  This would be a nice way to compensate people for the annoyance of the call.  If telemarketers feel that this would make their business unprofitable, then perhaps they could spend some effort targeting their audience more affectively, rather than using a “shotgun” approach.

Note: this is the second post of Monday.  Scroll down to see the sports update post.

Some of you may be wonder about the identity of the benevolent soul who is allowing me to use some of his server space.  It is none other than Lazy Man of LazyManAndMoney.com.  If you haven’t been to his site, check it out.  He blogs about personal finance (and his beloved Red Sox and Patriots) from his own unique perspective.  There’s a good bit of humor, which is always a good thing.

Lazy Man also helped with several technical issues related to the setup.  Meaning that he did the setup and then troubleshot anything weird that happened.  Lazy has also provided a lot of useful information over the past few months.  To be honest, I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog if it wasn’t for him.  I had pretty much abandoned my writing for a decade.  It was his encouragement – and his own success – that caused me to launch the blog.

There is some news stuff on the blog:

In order to leave comments, you will need to put in a name and email address.  No, I am not collecting the addresses for anything (ugh, I would NEVER do that), and they will not be displayed along with your comments.  If you want a cool picture displayed with your comments, register at Gravatar.com.  You register your email address and then choose a picture to use as your avatar.  Then, any time you leave comments at a Gravatar-enabled site (and there are plenty) your image will be displayed.  (Note – the avatar is tied to your email address, not your name).

One more new thing.  You will start seeing “related websites” at the bottom of each article.  This is the result of a “plug-in” I am using that searches other blogs for related content.  I don’t have any control over the sites that are displayed, but I hope you enjoy the sites that are displayed.  Some of them might provide further evidence of a point I am making; others might completely contradict me.  For those of you who are WordPress bloggers, the plug-in is “Blog Traffic Exchange” and can be downloaded from http://www.blogtrafficexchange.com/related-websites/

A friend offered to host my blog on his server space. That means that I will be jumping ship from blogger and landing on my own domain at www.ObservingCasually.com Note: I have posted the same article in the old and new locations. If you are currently reading this, you are in the NEW location.

Please update your bookmarks/favorites accordingly. If you are currently subscribing via RSS (and very few of you are), you will have to resubscribe from the new site.

I have also decided on a schedule for the blog:

Monday: Sports
Tuesday: News
Wednesday: Wildcard (anything goes)
Thursday: People, places, historical events
Friday: Fiction Friday
Weekend: Wildcard

I will certainly miss a few days along the way, but this should give you a better idea of what to expect.

I do appreciate Blogger getting me off the ground with this blog. Blogger has a pretty easy learning curve, and it is definitely a good tool for beginners.

This is a 2-fer Thursday – 2 posts for the price of one. We won’t have these every week, but every now and then, I’ll do one. After you read this article, scroll down to read the Sporting News post.

I was startled the other night when I realized that my box of corn dogs contained only five dogs. In the past, it had always contained six. Since I am in the habit of eating three corn dogs at once, this was a traumatic turn of events.

All across the consumer landscape, changes are afoot. The manufacturers are in a difficult position. On one hand, many of them are seeing steep increases in costs. On the other hand, they are hesitant to raise prices in this economy and lose customers to competitors who don’t change prices.

Caught in this bind, the companies have gotten creative. Many companies are retaining the same physical dimensions of the package, but reducing the quantity of the product. It’s not just corn dogs, either. Grab your jar of peanut better and flip it upside down. See that – the bottom is concave! Fun size candy bars? They have gotten even smaller – many of them are narrower than they have been in the past.

Even the Girl Scouts have are going this – you’re getting one less ounce in your box of cookies. Pay attention to the food you’re buying and you’ll see other examples of content downsizing.

Some people might shrug this off and see it as an effective involuntary weight loss program. Not me – I’m a thin person and I need my food to make sure I don’t blow away in the wind.

Companies – if you need to raise the price, raise the price. An extra fifty cents in the grocery store will be a lot less annoying to me that noticing one fewer corn dog when I open the box.

My daughter is 19 months old. She has a quite a few toys, some of which are pretty cool – such as a rocking eelphant and a stuffed dog that can sing a bunch of songs (incredibly, the dog is still on it original battery, in spite of the fact that it is constantly turning itself on). Most of the time, however, she will eschew these toys in favor of her favorite non-toy items.

Whenever I am lying of the floor, she loves to crawl across my legs repeatedly. Sometimes she will just lay with her torso across my legs. She’s perfectly content to stay in that position until daddy’s legs fall asleep – or even longer.

She also likes paper. I don’t just mean wrapping paper or other colored papers. She also loves plain white printer paper. We can’t even leave paper loaded in the printer, because she’ll take it out and try to play with it.

My daughter eats these little Gerber dinners in a box. They are essentially a miniaturized TV dinner. She absolutely loves playing with the little box the meals come in.

We have coasters on the end tables. Well, we try to have coasters on the end tables. We have little fabric coasters and the thirstystone coasters – she loves all of them.

We try to keep the remote control out of her reach, but if it gets left too far toward the front of the end table, she’ll notice within seconds and grab it in an effort to change the channel to something better.

She’ll leave the cordless phone alone for long stretches, and then suddenly will be grabbing at it constantly until we put it out of her reach. She had attempted to dial a few times, but has not yet successfully completed a call.

She also loves to get into the phones books – particular the big yellow pages. The handful of takeout menus near the phone books are even greater prize.

Hey, you can see through them, and they make cool noises when you hit stuff with them. What’s not to like?

It’s a cliché, but I sometimes wonder why we even bother to buy the toys. She would definitely be happier with the boxes.

The Rocky Mountain News recently won an award for overall excellence from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) in the category of large circulation newspapers. Unfortunately, the award will ring a bit hollow for the Rocky Mountain News, as the newspaper ceased operations permanently on February 27, just a bit short of its 150th anniversary.

This is an award winning newspaper with a lot of fans and a long history, unable to find a buyer. The writers of the Rocky are trying to get enough financial support from the public to continue operations, launching the site www.indenvertimes.com. The baseball writers who cover the Colorado Rockies (my favorite team) have launched their own site, www.insidetherockies.com. I like what is being done on these sites – lots of good ideas.

The plight of the Rocky is hardly unique. A number of large newspapers are in bad financial shape. Is this merely a temporary down turn due to the poor economy, or is the printed newspaper becoming the buggy whip of the 21st century?

I hate to say it, but it may be the latter.

When newspapers first became popular, they were the only way that most people could receive the news. They had a virtual monopoly on news.

The radio came along, and then the television. They provided breaking news in a timelier manner than the newspapers, but the newspapers still had a very distinct advantage. The consumer could decide when they wanted to read the news in a newspaper, whereas the radio and TV stations dictated the time of their news.

The advent of the internet was concerning to the print media, but for a while, there was relatively limited information on the internet and there were large portions of the population who did not have access.

Today, the internet has incredible coverage of almost every topics, and nearly everyone has access, often 24 X 7 access, and sometimes on their cell phone. With the popularity of WiFi, people can surf news websites while eating in a restaurant. I have not yet done this – I actually grab a physical newspaper if I am going to ready while I eat – but I have seen numerous examples of “surf and turf”.

Advertisers have been following consumers and have also flocked to the internet. In the early days, only the big sites had advertisers. Even sites with a decent following (such as my Alabama site) didn’t have advertisers because the operators were unable to navigate the hoops necessary to procure advertising.

Times have changed. Today, people will jump through the hoops for you. This little blog has advertisers (most notably, Tyson Chicken seems to pop up a lot). What did I do to see this up? Not much. I clicked a few buttons. Google (which owns blogger.com) finds advertisers via their AdSense network (they take a portion of the revenue, of course). The advertisers can bid on certain key words, and in the future they will be able to target people based on their browsing histories (see the “privacy” box on the right side of the screen if you have concerns about this).

Today’s internet advertisers can even target their ads for particular times of the day. I see the Tyson ads – on my blog and other places around the internet – very often during prime eating hours. This makes a lot of sense. Advertising a food product at 5 PM makes a lot more sense than advertising it at 10 PM. Also, most of the ads are on a “pay per click” basis, meaning that advertisers don’t pay a penny unless someone actually clicks on the ad and goes to the advertiser’s web site.

Given these factors, how can newspapers succeed? First of all, keep the customers you have. Until recently, my wife and I subscribed to a local newspaper. However, the carrier was horrible with his aim, only rarely delivering the newspaper to the doorstep. We made repeated calls to the newspaper, but the problem never went away. Finally, we got annoyed with constantly digging through the bushes to find the newspaper and canceled it. We felt that the newspaper was completely ignoring our complaints; thus we felt that it was only fair that we completely ignore the existence of their product.

Beyond avoiding alienating customers, what can the newspapers do? I’m not an expert on the industry, but this is what I see from the point of The Soap Boxers:

First and foremost, you must have an online presence of some sort. If people can’t find news stories on your web site, you’ll be perceived as a dinosaur.

You should focus a large amount of effort on the coverage of local stories. People aren’t going to grab your paper to see your version of the latest national story. There are hundreds of place where they can find this information online. Coverage of local news and local sports is different, though – people have a limited number of sources for this information.

Finally, use teasers. Perhaps you could have a three part biography of a local hero. The first part would be available online, but the rest would only be available in the print edition.

I really started getting serious about my writing about six weeks ago. At the time, I set goals for my word counts in future months (I’m somewhat obsessive about that). At the time, I expected to start with 8500 combined words in February for the blog and a few other writing projects. By August, I hoped to build up to 17,000 combined words per month for all of the projects.

Well, it’s March, and the other projects have been shelved for now – but I have managed to hit the 17,000 word mark, well ahead of schedule. Considering how little free time I seem to have most of the time, I’m pretty happy with that. I hadn’t written consistently in about a decade and was worried that I would quickly run out of things to say – but my head still seems to be full of words (probably because of all the games of Wordscraper I play on Facebook). Overall, I’m happy with the writing aspect of the blog.

I have a handful of loyal visitors and a bunch of other folks who drop in from time to time. I’m not quite where I hoped to be in terms of numbers of readers, but I’m not overly disappointed. Quality over quantity, right? ☺

February’s posts skewed toward sports a bit more than I would have liked. To be certain, there will always be a large chunk of the blog devoted to sports, simply because I am a sports nut. However, I will try to mix in a few more topics on a regular basis.

During the next month of two, the blog will be gaining a bit more structure. I will try to set aside certain days of the week of month for specific topics. I have already begun this with Fiction Fridays. I will attempt to write a new short story to be published on the blog every Friday. This might be overly aggressive, but I’ll give it a shot. Sports will probably take up residence on Mondays (and probably one other day a week) because this is a topic where freshness is important, and weekends tend to be a bit better for writing. I’m sure you are stunned to find out that some of the content (the fiction, for example) is written several days in advance! It is also quite possible that I might need to scale back to 5-6 articles per week. I have a full time job and family obligations, and can’t always set aside time to write.

I will also try to add a few more fun things for the readers. In April, three well known personal finance bloggers will swing by TCO to participate in a contest. I’ll keep the details minimal, just to keep you curious.

As the future direction becomes clearer, I’ll provide more information. There will not be drastic changes – for the most part, I’ll simply be realigning the schedule. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop me a line at Kosmo@ObservingCasually.com

I began college in 1993. Holy cow, that’s more than 15 years ago … how time flies.

Anyway, back in 1993, the world wide web was in its very infancy. The number of web sites were a tiny fraction of what is available today. The sites that did exist were mostly text based, with occasional pictures.

During this time, I became familiar with Mosaic (the precursor to Netscape, which was in turn the precursor to Mozilla and Firefox). However. Most of the time, however, the actual computers on campus were occupied. I would often hang out in little rooms that had some dumb terminals that would allow me to connect to the university’s UNIX network. However, the functionality of these terminals was purely text-based activities. I could check email, chat online on IRC (on a channel with the friendly name of “love2chat”), and even surf the web. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional.

In the fall of 1994, I became disappointed with the lack of information about the country music group Alabama on the web. I took it upon myself to launch a website. In 1994, this was a lot more work than it is today. After entering some cryptic UNIX commands, I eventually had a web site. I went to work. The first thing I did was to create a discography that listed every Alabama album. I gave a short review of the album and rated each song on a star scale (5 being the highest, I believe).

Over the next couple of years, this became a labor of love. With the assistance from Sly in the computing center, the site grew and attracted thousands of visitors per month. Eventually, the web site was migrated to its own domain (alabamafans.com) and Sly and I became full partners on the site. We had a email list of people who shared memories and opinions of the group. We even had some song snippets in a new format called “MPEG-1 audio layer 3”. The format was not universally known at that time, so we had links to sites where people could download software to play these files. MP3, as it is now known, has become a bit more popular over the years.

From a financial perspective, the timing was horrible. Hosting fees were much higher than they are now, and we weren’t able to get donations through Paypal – because Paypal did not exist. We poured hundreds of dollars a year into what was essentially free advertising for a very successful band. Was it worth it? Certainly. The interaction with other fans over the years was a great reward. My memorabilia collection grew, as a few folks sold things to “the guy who runs the site.”

The crowning moment, though, was the Illinois State fair in 1997. I had just moved to Illinois after graduating from college (and have since moved back to Iowa). I learned that Alabama would be at the fair. A couple years earlier, a guy who worked with Alabama saw the site, liked it, and told me to come backstage if I was ever at a concert. I gave a note to a security guard (and crossed my fingers) and he relayed it to the guy. Within minutes, I was back stage.

Although I didn’t get to formally meet Randy, Teddy, Jeff, and Mark, I did get to meet several of the musicians who played with them. I was in the middle of the stage chatting with people shortly before the concert was scheduled to begin.

As the time of the concert became imminent, my friend said something to the effect of “hey, I bet your seat is in the nosebleeds. I can find you something better.” He pulled up a stool on the side of the stage and I sat there – mere feet from the stage – during the entire show. Kenny Chesney was the opener and Alabama had a great show.  Jeff Cook changes instruments a LOT, by the way – he passed by me every time he needed a different one.  Afterward, my friend gave me the drumsticks that were used during the show.

What ever happened to the alabamafans.com website? It no longer exists. Eventually, Alabama, like every other organization, had its own official site, and my site was redundant – but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

How many people make more than $250,000 per year?

The short answer: based on information from the IRS, fewer than 3% of tax returns (3.924 million returns out of 140+ million total returns) claimed more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income (AGI) in tax year 2009 (more current data is not available). By definition, the number making more than $250,000 must be less than 3% (since some will fall in the range between $200,000 and $250,000.)

The long answer is pretty long – more than a thousand words long, judging by the length of this article. While I am not a CPA , or even a practicing accountant, I do have a degree in accounting and thoroughly enjoyed my income tax courses in college (yep, glutton for punishment). I’ll make an effort not to get too bogged down in technical terms in this article.

Why the question?
For whatever reason, $250,000 has become a benchmark amount. During the 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama had a tax plan that would raise taxes on couples making more than $250,000. A bit later, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would impose a 90% tax for recipients of bonuses paid by companies that received bailout funds. This tax would be imposed on people making more than $250,000.

Why the source?
The IRS is in the business of determining how much money people make and have a vested interest in the accuracy of their data. I have a synopsis of their data in the table at the end of the post, and have also linked directly to their spreadsheet.

Definition of terms
Household – I am defining a household as any entity that filed a tax return. Note that people who do not have a tax liability are not required to file a tax return. These people tend to be on the low end of the income spectrum.

Income – This is definitely the tricky term. There are a few different things we could measure.

• Total income (line 22 of form 1040). Essentially, this is the result of adding up the money that comes in from all sources during the year – with the exclusion of tax-exempt interest income and the tax-exempt portion of some retirement benefits. This does include capital gains and business income (or loss). This is the largest of the three amounts I will describe.
• Adjusted gross income (AGI) (line 37 of form 1040). This is total income with a few deductions. For the typical person, the deductions would be for student loan interest as well as contributions to retirement accounts and health savings accounts. This amount will be smaller than total income, and this is what is used in the IRS statistics that I have used as my source.
• Taxable income (line 43 of form 1040). This is determined by taking the AGI, subtracting either the standard or itemized deduction, and then also subtracting the amount for exemptions (for tax year 2008, you would multiply $3500 X the number of exemptions – basically, the number of people in your household – and subtract this amount from the AGI.) Taxable income is used to determine your marginal tax rate. (Note: the marginal rate is the rate that is applied to the top slice of your income – it is not applied to your entire income. Income is taxed on a stair step basis, with each chunk of income taxed at a higher rate). In the case of Obama’s tax plan, he would be referring to $250,000 in taxable income, not total income or AGI.

You can quibble with the numbers a bit. You may claim that some people cheat on their taxes, so that the number of people who SHOULD be claiming an AGI of $250,000 is higher than the amount that actually do. You may claim that full-time students or single people should not be counted as households (of course, that argument could be countered by the argument that there are valid households that are not filing tax returns). However, it seems unlikely that you’re going to move the needle very much. The fact of the matter is that very few households earn more than $250,000.

Legend
Column 1 – Range of adjusted gross income
Column 2 – Number of returns that fall into this range
Column 3 – Percentage of total returns
Column 4 – Cumulative percentage (percent of return that have this AGI or lower)
Column 5 – Percentage of returns that are above this range
Column 6 – Number of exemptions per return

Columns 1 and 2 are taken directly from the IRS spreadsheet. The other columns are calculations based on information from the IRS spreadsheet.

 
Editor’s note: this has become a very popular article. It has been nearly 2 1/2 years since its initial publication. At the time of publication, I used the most current data from the IRS – numbers from the 2006 tax year. On August 8, 2011, I refreshed this article with more current data, this time from the 2009 tax year. If you find this article useful, please help support this site by buying some items using the Amazon links on this page. The Soap Boxers contains articles on a number of topics – come back often! – Kosmo