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Happy Tuesday everyone, here’s my Top 5 for June 28, 2011 from Len Berman at www.ThatsSports.com.
1. Quick Hits
The L.A. Dodgers file for bankruptcy.
At Wimbledon, the women’s draw got blown up. #1 seed Caroline Wozniacki, and both Williams sisters are out.
The US women’s World Cup soccer team makes its 2011 debut against Korea today in Germany.
Lorenzo Charles, who scored the NCAA championship-winning basket for Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State team in 1983, was killed in an accident while driving a bus in Raleigh.
Kentucky coach John Calipari gets a 36.5 million dollar contract through 2019.
South Carolina can clinch its 2nd straight College World Series title with a win tonight over Florida.
Wide receiver Terrell Owens is said to have knee surgery for an injury reportedly suffered while taping a TV show for VH1.

After being unemployed for two years, I am working again. But before you start jumping up and down with joy on my behalf, let me add: instead of being one of the nearly 14 million Americans who are unemployed, I am now one of the 8.5 million Americans who are under-employed. That is, I am working part time, earning about a third of what I was making before I was laid off in early 2009.
Nevertheless, I beat the odds. All indications are that those who have been out of work longest are least likely to find

Ever since last week’s episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, I cannot stop wondering why anyone would decorate their home like the Palace of Versailles. Then I realized, “rich” people in the suburbs are guilty of a lot of other tacky decor, too.
Here are the top five tackiest decor trends I have come across in suburbia and my hope is you will try to avoid them. They don’t make you look better, just cheesier.
Opulence to the 10th Power
Think Teresa Giudice’s gold

“Installation pieces are problematic,” said Manhattan contemporary art gallery owner Renato Danese, an understatement if there ever was one. Three-dimensional artworks, often sprawling over a large room, installations are intended to transform a viewer’s perception of an interior space and are, therefore, “specific to the site in the gallery.” That is to say, an installation would lose its meaning and purpose if just taken out of the gallery and put up somewhere that didn’t look much like that gallery.
They are also problematic for another reason — they rarely sell. “It’s almost impossible to sell a whole installation,” said Vanessa Rubinick, manager for the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in Zurich, Switzerland. Installations are too big and ungainly for all but another art gallery or museum to put on display, and they tend to cost more than the type of artwork referred to as “houseable.” So, after the gallery exhibition is over, most installations are disassembled and returned to the artist’s studio or wherever they are

” … love the land you’re on.”
Remember that old song — “If you’re not with the one you love, love the one you’re with”? The words keep running through my mind as I listen to many of our friends who dream of someday owning traditional farms and farmland.
This back-to-the-land dream is a traditional American longing, revived in the 1960s and 1970s. We envision a small farm with plenty of space for a homey farmstead, plants, animals, loved ones; a farm that will support a family without the need for outside income and off-farm jobs.
In other words, a vision of farm life that is probably not viable for most people today, even if we use the most advanced permaculture

For a media that was sent to the woodshed for helping to inflate and failing to predict two disastrous bubbles in a single decade — dot-coms and housing — perhaps it stands to reason that its motto these days seems to be “we won’t get fooled again.”
How else to explain the plethora of recent stories and headlines not just debating or questioning whether we’re in a technology bubble, but declaring definitively that we are? Some favorites: “Should you brave the new technology bubble?” in London’s Daily Mail and “Technology bubble raises fears of a Palo Alto housing bust” in crosstown rival The Telegraph. Is Britain even more bubble-obsessed than we are?
To be sure, most of these pieces are more concerned than convinced that there actually is a technology bubble, but in some ways, these are the strangest offerings of all, since they are forced to confront, well, facts. Take, for example, a story in the Financial Times on June 16 — the day after online music service Pandora’s hot, if quickly cooling, initial public offering. “Pandora’s soaring debut stokes concerns of new internet bubble,” the page-one headline

Anyone who has ever spent quality time on promoting political support for the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people knows that there is a longstanding, contentious and tangled political debate concerning the Palestinian struggle for freedom and the question of nonviolent resistance. This issue has been broached by a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that quotes me on this topic as a passenger in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
This is a tangled issue, but it is also a very important one, deserving of careful rather than glib consideration. So I would like to take some space to clarify the issues raised by the Christian Science Monitor

We’re coming up on the commemoration of the most powerful time in our nation’s history. July 4th, 1776 — the day when our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, declaring their independence from British rule. That single, audacious act set in motion the advancement of a country whose foundation is the very same solid foundation of life itself.
Our forefathers had a very strong belief that they clearly and confidently held in common. And The Declaration of Independence begins by affirming that shared

Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders committed common sense on the floor of the US Senate. It’s amazing that he wasn’t cited for an ethics violation.
Sanders called on the president to leave the beltway, go across the country and talk sense to the American people about the cruel obscenities of the Republican position on lifting the debt ceiling. Threatening to blow up the economy by forcing the US to default on its debts if they don’t get their way, Republicans are demanding over $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years with no, nada, zero contribution from increased taxes on the wealthy, Wall Street, or the big corporations.
Sanders lays out the today’s reality: corporations and the wealthy are making out like bandits, the middle class is getting crushed and poverty is

In its ongoing attempt to weaken a key provision of the health care reform law — the one that requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care — the insurance industry is predicting dire consequences for people enrolled in health savings accounts (HSAs) if lawmakers don’t act soon.
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurance lobbying group, warned in a recent report that the rapid growth of HSAs will be hurt unless Congress exempts them from the 80 percent requirement — or abolishes the threshold altogether.
HSAs are available only to people enrolled in high-deductible plans. They are also exceedingly profitable for insurers.
AHIP said it is “reaching out to policymakers on both sides of the aisle about ways to mitigate the potential unintended consequences of provisions in the new health care reform law that could disrupt or limit the availability of coverage through HSA plans.”
Having spent nearly 20 years in the health insurance industry, I knew it was just a matter of time before AHIP would mount a big campaign to ensure a bright future for HSA plans.
One of the reasons I left my job in the insurance industry was because I could not in good faith continue to promote HSA plans as the best thing since sliced bread, as I was expected to do. I knew from my own research that these plans were not good options for most Americans. I came to realize that ever-increasing numbers of people who were enrolling in them were actually joining the ranks of the underinsured because they had to spend far more out of their own pockets for care than they ever had before.
AHIP crowed in its report that more than 11.4 million Americans are now covered by HSA plans, an increase of 14 percent since just last

Before Rory McIlroy’s triumph fades in our memories, it’s worth considering the lessons the young Irishman’s U.S. Open victory offers for the 2012 presidential race.
(Full disclosure: I mentioned the idea of drawing parallels between the U.S. Open and politics to my middle son, who can’t stand golf or either political party, and he sarcastically agreed that a golf tournament was a good analogy. “Ohhh, that’s

Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake in Bad Teacher (courtesy of Sony Pictures)
Bad Teacher is a new comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a totally inappropriate teacher, Elizabeth Halsey. As the movie begins, Elizabeth is not excited about the first day of school. Nor is she interested in putting her students first. Truthfully, Elizabeth’s primary focus is finding a guy who’s going to take care of

“I didn’t sign up for this, I just want to feel normal again,” said Judy, my patient who aptly describes what the 21st century Western woman going through menopause feels. If you want to know how to turn down your body’s internal “thermostat” you are in the right place. Alternative medicine, including food therapy, is a viable option for managing menopause symptoms.
Menopause symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, irritability, brain fog and other symptoms seem to be considered the norm for women over the age of 50. Researchers from the Department of Integrated Health at Westminster University polled 1,000 British women ages 45 to 55 and compared their answers to those of women from the U.S., Canada, Japan and

“The story is told in countless versions. Somebody — a saintly rabbi, a mystic caught up in holy ecstasy, even in one version a lost astronaut — chances to see God face to face and lives to tell about it. ‘What is God really like?’ asks an anxious crowd back home. The narrator

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann vocally vowed to embrace the Constitution. She accredited herself a “constitutional conservative,” and inaugurated constitutional tutorials for the Tea Party Caucus in the manner of a schoolmarm. But she soon divorced the Constitution over irreconcilable differences.
She earnestly argued that the Founding Fathers emancipated

We live in accelerated times: It took the radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. Television did it in 13 years. Hotmail, in less than a year. Cityville? 15

Growing up, I never dreamed of a wedding. Everything about them made me cringe, from the gooey vows to the corny wedding band. Not to mention, I was terrified of dresses. I was a tomboy; the thought of having to wear a white flowing gown sent me over the

As always, remember that John’s book The Influence of Teachers is for sale at Amazon.
A month or so ago, I speculated about the most influential person in American education — then two weeks ago I expanded upon those musings in a feature for the New York Daily News. In both columns I put forth four nominees — Wendy Kopp, Big Bird, Arne Duncan and Joel Klein — and chose Joel for his remarkable network of eleven protgs now influencing what happens in schools and classrooms around the nation.
I was attacked for my choice by people who feel that his influence has been negative, or even destructive. Few seemed to notice that I neither praised nor condemned the former Chancellor’s

Money probably won’t make you happy, but there’s something that will.
Study after study has shown wealth has surprisingly little effect on how happy you are. Most of us tend to think that if we just made a bit more money, we’d get more satisfaction out of life or have a greater sense of well-being. But on the whole, this turns out not to be true. So why doesn’t money make us happy? Recent research suggests the answer lies, at least in part, in how wealthier people lose touch with their ability to savor life’s pleasures.
Savoring is a way of increasing and prolonging our positive

You don’t have to have a reason to smile. All you have to do is stretch the muscles in your face and prepare to feel wonderful!
We were consultants with Orange cell phones in London, a part of French Telecom, when they began sending out diet tips as text messages. Immediately we realized how valuable it would be to have daily “chill pills” — short sayings that put us back on track and keep us focused on what is really important. Join us this Friday, July 1, when our Daily Chill Pills begin at The Huffington Post.
We all need such

Officially, almost all of us will stop working by our mid-sixties, and those of us lucky enough to have pensions will be able to draw them – but the reality is likely to be rather different.

Many people to continue to work well into their seventies. This army of elderly employees rarely appears on the official records and is one reason the employment statistics are less reliable than they should be.

Apparently the government economists were surprised when the so called headline jobless rate in the United States climbed back up to 9.1%.

What's going on? The answers are mixed but it is clear that one of the problems in calculating America's unemployment problems is the numbers themselves.It all depends on who you count, after all. My suspicion is that it is the official statistics are incomplete.
Crackers
My evidence is what I call the Little Old Motel Lady. Over the past year I have been travelling doing research on a book. I have gone to libraries and archives all across the country and that means I have become a connoisseur of cheap

AMC’s The Killing, which concluded its first season last Sunday, simultaneously engaged and enraged viewers and critics alike with its story of the investigation into the brutal murder of a teenage girl in rain-soaked Seattle.
Some of this had to do with the subject matter — a challenging and uncommonly dark blend of murder, madness, grief and desperation. But much of the mixed reaction to the show had more to do with its execution. Was The Killing a well-made, meticulously plotted drama that deserved the tsunami of critical praise it received at the time of its premiere or was it a poorly conceived exercise in soggy storytelling?
Regardless, it was (and still is) one of the most talked about television series of the year, and certainly one of the most ambitious, and for those reasons alone it deserves as much favorable attention as possible. The fact that a brand new scripted basic cable series with no big stars in its cast could make its debut and command so much attention at the start of broadcast television’s May sweeps period and continue to stand out while when dozens of high-profile scripted and unscripted shows were building to their seismic season finales was a remarkable

A former Citigroup banker has pleaded not guilty to charges that he stole $19.2m in the "ultimate inside job".

Prosecutors say Gary Foster, a 35-year old former vice president at Citigroup, moved the money from two separate accounts at the bank to his own account at JP Morgan Chase.

The offence is said to have taken place between May 2009 and December 2010.

Mr Foster, who left the bank in January this year, faces 30 years in prison if

Dubbed fashion’s enfant terrible by the press from the time of his first runway shows in the 1970s, Jean Paul Gaultier is indisputably one of the most important fashion designers of recent decades. Currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk is the first international exhibition devoted to the French couturier.
Very early, Gaultier’s avant-garde fashion reflected an understanding of a multicultural society’s issues, shaking up — with invariable good humor — established societal and aesthetic codes. Through twists, transformations, transgressions and reinterpretations, he not only erases the boundaries between cultures but also the sexes, creating a new androgyny or playing with subverting hyper sexualized fashion codes.
The exhibition features approximately 140 ensembles, mainly from the designer’s couture collections, but also from his pret-a-porter line, along with their