Lots of interesting stuff in today’s Wall Street Journal.

CEO’s

The first item of interest is the Danish study indicating that a company’s profitability fell by an average of 20% in the two years after the death of its CEO’s child and by 15% after the death of the CEO’s wife. So it would seem that shareholders would be wise to keep tabs on the personal lives of the CEO’s running the companies in which they own stock. A death in the family, sell.

The good news here is that after the death of the CEO’s mother-in-law, the company’s profitability on average rose. For the heartless investor, then, it would behoove him to find a way to kill a CEO’s mother-in-law after the death of his wife or child.

If, as the study seems to suggest, a CEO’s personal life influences the company’s profits, I’d like to see the study expanded to track a company’s bottom line after, say, the CEO acquires a mistress, defeats opponents at tennis, his fantasy football team wins or loses, someone totals his car or after meeting some French people. Drug taking of any kind should also be included and many stoners would be curious to see the results of a company’s worth after a week of bonging. The possibilities here are endless.

Sex On the Tarmac

Oscar Maroni, Jr., known as the Larry Flynt of Brazil, not only distributes adult magazines, but runs Sao Paulo’s most famous brothel, The Bahamas Club. He was given permission to build an eleven story hotel around the corner from the brothel, which just happens to be a scant 2,000 feet north of the landing strip at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport. Mr. Maroni, who has boasted of having slept with 1,500 women, is 500 women short of Wilt Chamberlain’s claim of having bedded 2,000 women.

But that’s not the point of the story. There have been two fatal plane accidents in Brazil, the most recent being a plane that skidded off the runway and brushed up against the as yet incomplete hotel. Apparantly it took this long for Sao Paulo authorities to ask, “Hey, isn’t a real tall building so close to an airstrip kind of, you know, uh, well, dangerous?

Apparently not. Nevertheless, Sao Paulo officials are taking the initiative in closing down hotel construction because they found federal aviation officials’ personal phone numbers in a directory seized in Mr. Maroni’s office. Maroni explained that it’s normal for a businessman to have government contacts in order to keep them apprised of such important events as specials on massages, fellatio and three-ways, not to mention donkey dunking night.

When asked for a comment, Captain Carlos Camacho, director of flight safety for the National Aviators Union, said from his Bahamas Club room that he doesn’t see the hotel as a threat.

I’m glad to see that bureaucrats and politicians in other countries are just as venal as ours. I’m reminded of the recent collapse of that bridge in Minnesota, which had structural defects known to the city and state for many years, but the politicians chose to spend the money on arts centers, stadiums and bikeways. And they did it without a brothel.

Princeton: Ivy League Sex At It’s Best

Seems that during orientation week Princeton requires incoming freshmen to attend a student-performed play called Sex on a Saturday Night, which was written to warn innocent arrivals to the dangers of sexual assault and alcohol abuse. Seems to me that a good production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe would do the trick, but I’m no educator.

In the play the hero, Joe, a bookish upperclassman is urged to “score big” on his first date with a naive freshman (woman?) named Frances. Of course the couple get drunk, Joe boinks her and realizes the next morning that he committed “date rape. Meanwhile, all of the other characters in the play “hook up” with one another in easy fashion, sending the clear message that being sexually active is normal and accepted.

Since the play is sanctioned by the university it’s safe to assume that the adminstrators agree with the message, however destructive it is. But I’m just a guy from a Jesuit university, not a Princetonian, so what do I know!?

I’m reminded of the uber-liberals I chatted with back in Hollywood when their kids were reaching the age of puberty. They sighed wistfully at how quickly they had turned from toddler to teen and said it was time to tell them about condoms and other birth control devices. I said, “They’re only fourteen and fifteen.” In their wisdom, my liberal friends replied that they’re going to experiment with sex anyway so you might as well insure that they know how to protect themselves.

But what about abstinence, or the suggestion of abstinence, or informing the daughters that early sex, good, bad or indifferent, is important enough to damage them emotionally, and telling their sons that using women for sex at such an early age could set a destructive pattern of behavior for them as young men.

The response was always the same. They’re going to have sex whether or not, so I want them to be safe.

This is parental abdication. Princeton is simply insuring that this approach continues into young adulthood. It kind of makes me yearn for the old days when a father would take his son to a whorehouse to get laid for the first time, just to get it out of their system for a while.
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