Big-money 24 hours, racist cereal and reader feedback
Wow, how was your last 24 hours or so?
If you count Thursday night, for the players, coaches and parents of the Signal Mountain, Baylor or CCS girls’ soccer teams, it was pretty good. Each advanced into the high school state championship matches in their respective classifications.
Still, it’s doubtful anyone had a better Thursday night/ Friday morning than Jeff Bezos. Overnight stock trading of Bezos’ company — some little upstart outfit called Amazon — netted Bezos a tidy profit.
He made $7 billion overnight and into Friday morning. Yes, $7 billion; yes, billion with a “b” friends.
If you break that down, $7 billion in, let’s just say 24 hours means: ›
Bezos made enough to buy the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Lakers between lunch Thursday and Friday at noon; ›
Bezos made $291,666,667 per hour in that time frame, which works out to more than $4.86 million per minute and more than $81,000 per second. ›
If Bezos just had the last 24 hours — rather than the $90 billion empire — his $7 billion run would tie him with the 73rd richest American. That’s a good day, friends.
TIME FOR CHANGE
Ah, yes, the vagueness of that mini-headline could mean anything in today’s world.
Political? Sure. Football coaches? You bet, especially if your have a license plate dating back to Orange accomplishments in 1998. From tax codes to racial relations? A given.
For this change though, the concern about the clock has prompted a couple of New England states to look to revolt from our current timekeeping system.
With Maine mainly leading the charge, three states in the upper Northeast are looking at asking voters if they want to join the Atlantic Time Zone — an hour ahead of Eastern — and ignore the clock flip-flop that comes twice a year with the Daylight Savings Time calendar.
The biggest points of contention are economic coordination and the fact that the U.S. would then have five time zones. But the smartest part of this certainly has to be the intelligent choice to do away with Daylight Savings Time, which was put in place when our country’s main financial endeavor was agriculture.
Massachusetts and New Hampshire are the other two states mulling over a change. While we’re on the subject, if states have the power to decide what time it is, why wouldn’t the state of Tennessee look to become an all-Central-Time-zone state?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Man, we’re cereal offenders. Seriously.
Some folks got offended by a cartoon on the back of the box of Corn Pops because all of the animated Pops were yellow except one brown Pop. The Brown Pop was drawn as the janitor in the frame and some cried “racist” because, well, that’s the rallying cry that gets the most attention.
Faux outrage over a cereal box truly waters down the real racism that exists.
Will those who get their hair dyed be offended at Frosted Flakes?
Will folks from Ireland? Are they ticked at Lucky Charms?
Will little people be horrified at those hooligans Snap, Crackle and Pop? And goodness forbid what they must think of those scofflaw Keebler Elves.
If you want to be upset, be upset with how much sugar an ever-fattening generation of young Americans consumes with each bowl.
SATURDAY SOUND-OFF
Most Saturdays we end this mini-rant with someone locally doing something that is star worthy. Sure, we could have tipped the visor to the folks running the Heart Walk today at AT&T Park, and they are well-deserving.
Today, we’ll introduce the Saturday Soundoff, an email from you folks who are not overly pleased with something in this space from the last week. No names are used because I love the feedback, which a) shares a different point of view and b) shows a vested interest in the paper.
And I respect both of those things.
We’ll offer two today; each after this week’s column on the debate about monuments of A.P. Stewart and Ed Johnson.
“How about a memorial to wannabe editorial writers who are at best average sports writers? Comparing apples to oranges in today’s A2 is a waste of several lines that could have been used for another hearing aid advertisement.”
And …
“Today’s article even worse, does anybody at the paper edit what you write. Middle schoolers could do better. Please tell me you are close to retirement?”
Enjoy the weekend.