By the Numbers

/…Our world is a parade of numbers!

It’s one way we determine accomplishments in politics, in business, in sports, in our lives….It’s one way we measure success and failure—

#…Derek Jeter of the Yankees…3004 hits, the only Yankee among the great Yankees to reach and surpass that plateau..

#…Oddsmakers placed 1 to 4 odds Jeter’s 3,000th would be a single.  It was a home run!

#…The Blue Jays bullpen, has blown 14 of 32 saves, second last in the American League…

#…Zero the number of goals scored by TFC in the last two games………….

#… At 34, Yoshikazu Tanaka is Japan’s youngest billionaire.  He owns Gree Inc. his country’s second largest networking company.

#…The unemployment rate in Greece is 16%, but the rate for those under 24 is 42.5%.  In  Spain 44.4% of those under 24 are not employed.

#…21-thousand is the number of part time jobs canadians found in May,  7-thousand the number of fulltime jobs!!

#…The people of Greece owe their government almost 60 billion dollars in unpaid taxes!!!

#…The 60 billion dollars is owed by 900,000 individuals and companies.

#…In the United States, for the first time,  married couples make up less than half(45%) of all households.

#…This weekend in Toronto, the forecasters got the weather 50% right, that may be above their average!

#… Comedian Craig Ferguson observed “The Royal couple will be visiting 8 major cities during their 9 days in Canada.

That’s amazing to me, he continued, Canada has eight major cities???”

So now the narrative extruded from all those numbers in summation:

Derek Jeter has reached one of the loftiest plateaus in baseball that will be duplicated by very few because you need both skill and longevity to walk on it.

This time the oddsmakers got it wrong but normally they are right far more often than weather forecasters.

A baseball team can’t be thinking about a post season with a bullpen as bad as the one the Blue Jays management has put together. And we don’t expect

TFC(Toronto’s soccer team) to be in the playoffs either.

We are impressed, with the abilities, talent and good luck of one Yoshikazu Tanaka,  now with a fortune of a billion dollars.

If there’s going to be major trouble in Greece and Spain you can expect it from those under 24.  You cannot continue to expect law and good order in countries where

that large a segment of young people have no work!

I don’t know what we our business reporters are excited about.  Many would not see the creation of that many part-time  jobs as a good thing, when compared to the

pathetic number of fulltime jobs reported in May.

Now if the people of Greece came clean and paid the back taxes they owe the government…..the bankers in Germany and France would be smiling,  but you can’t get blood from a stone.

In the United States what God has ordained, man has put asunder and the number of  married couples continues well into the minority.

And one thing more:

Craig Ferguson is a mean man with mean jokes about our great country, the one NOT saddled with a debt of 14 trillion dollars!!!!

And so it goes:

“Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers.”

Nicholas Eberstadt

The Tyranny of Numbers:  mismeasurement and misrule.