As Oscar Wilde was on his deathbed, penniless in a French hotel, he looked around at the room and said:
“My wall paper and I are in a battle to the death, one or the other must go”. His famous last words!

Wilde was a Gay man and notorious predator;

“For months, the Marquess of Queensbury had been demanding that Wilde stay away from his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde, however, was quite infatuated with the young man and ignored the Marquess’ urgings. Furious, Queensbury intended to publicly denounce Wilde at the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, but he was refused a ticket. Two weeks later, he confronted Wilde at his club, leaving his infamously mispelled note accusing Wilde of “posing as a Somdomite.” Wilde decided to charge Queensbury with libel”

And beautiful in a Bukowski kind of way;

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”

I’m not the one to offer an unbiased opinion – but I’ve always thought he had a knack for that.

Unfortunately the ESPN site doesn’t have the correct dates on the articles on the search results page – but as events progressed from the point of that piece – his observations appear forward and accurate.

Julie – that was a thorough piece you wrote. I’m glad you pointed out in comments here that the phenomenon was scaled – that this seemed to occur at all levels.

A friend sent me something about the economic situation a couple weeks ago that emphasised greed as playing a large part. I’d replied that greed certainly had to be a factor (seems it usually is) but that hubris was even more notable to my view.

Julie – it also seems that you came close to directly alluding to this as having aspects of a Ponzi scheme.

You also mentioned that after the New Century shutdown that the sub-prime market stopped. I think one thing that contributed to this was that ratings agencies came under more scrutiny. All that magnificent moola that was rolling around suddenly had to actually account for itself – from the micro to the macro.

Not only are many ‘regular people’ overextended – but now the FedGov seems poised to follow me (and about 300 million other citizens, and the rest of the empire…) around and maintain my orifices for me – at what cost I can only imagine!

Don Quixote – thanks for the Wilde quote – I wasn’t familiar with it. A friend recently gave me a copy of some collected quotes of his – but that definitely wasn’t one of them. I appreciate the material you’ve brought out in this and other comments to Rodger’s postings.