Berlusconi Rides Again

In world news, the headline reads Berlusconi Rides Again: "Only in Italy could Silvio Berlusconi, the country's richest and occasionally most outlandish man, be elected Prime Minister. Three times! Spry and combative as ever, the 71-year-old media mogul on Monday rolled to a clear-cut election victory just two years after Romano Prodi had ousted him from the job by a whisker's margin." Longtime readers of my blog might recall that we followed Berlusconi in the prior election when he made a no sex campaign promise to a religious leader, stating he would abstain until after the election. What an odd campaign promise, eh? Berlusconi lost that prior election, and yet one might suggest that the headline "Bersconi Rides Again" might well have applied both to this election and the prior, albeit with slightly different meanings.

In (loosely) related news....

High Testosterone Means High Profits: "You can almost hear Gordon Gekko cheer. Financial traders are widely seen as filthy rich, brash, and, well, ballsy. Now it turns out that there's cash in those cojones. According to new research from the University of Cambridge, a male trader's daily testosterone level is higher on days when he makes more than he would in an average day. What's more, the higher a trader's morning testosterone level, the more money he'll likely have netted before the close of business that day. Testosterone, in other words, can be good for business...." However, it's not all good times, as it were: "The effects triggered by chronically elevated levels of testosterone can eventually have the opposite effect. Animals observed in this same situation by scientists start to pick fights they ought to avoid, or to patrol a wider, more hazardous patch of territory. Perception of risk becomes blurred. For a trader on a roll in the midst of a bubble, for instance, that suggests 'several rounds of winning means testosterone so high they start taking stupid risks,' says John Coates, a former Wall Street trader turned senior research fellow at Cambridge, and lead author of the study. Amid today's volatile markets, chronically high levels of cortisol, which can conjure up feelings of anxiety and negative thoughts, are believed likely to squeeze a trader's stomach for risk, potentially perpetuating a market's fall still further."

Lastly, don't forget to join the bass fishing fantasy league. It makes following bass fishing so much more intriguing, even more fascinating than it already is. Now you can compete against other bass fishing enthusiasts and test your knowledge. But will fantasy bass fishing leagues spoil the purity of the sport? Bass fishing should be about a man, his rod, and the water. Has corporate America tainted the beauty and simplicity of following bass fishing?