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.

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Full disclosure — I hate the guy. But he got shafted.

The man is a bloated, overweening, star-fucking shock jock with little juice left in his fusebox. He parlayed a modest soundbyte knowledge of contemporary issues into interviews with important guests who came on his show to promote their career or latest book.

Imus was made to grovel before his accusers, not the Rutgers basketball team, but to the professional race baiters, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Imus took the media bullet for comments that were nursery-school tame compared to the horrid, despicable, daily flood of garbage the culture has for years sadly accepted from the mouths of rappers, MTV, BET, music videos and reality shows, about which the above morality monitors have said little.

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Lots of betting among my friends in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. Smart money was on the Colts, but some of my pals defied conventional wisdom the way teenagers avoid speaking in full sentences. Their money went to the Bears and for the first half of the first quarter, it looked like a good bet.

Everybody said they were crazy. The Colts were a sure thing, but the truth in sports is a sure thing except maybe that the Detroit Lions will continue to get worse as long as Matt Millen is at the helm.

Some things, however, are sure things. For example, you can bet the house that you’ll never hear someone say, “I’d like to buy a car seat for my Lamborghini” or a priest saying, “Get out of my fucking church.” It won’t happen.

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