The chalk dust has settled and what do we have left, the #1 overall seed Florida vs another team that spent some good time ranked at #1 during the regular basketball season in Ohio State University. Does this National Championship sound familiar? Probably does since this is the same match up as the BCS National Championship back in early January this year. I just can't wait for the Florida-OSU lacrosse championship in May. Really guys, you have to share the love. Don't get me wrong, am I intrigued, of course I am, hands down two of the best teams during the regular season has weathered the tourney storm and now get a chance to settle it on the court, but man if you're not a fan of OSU or Florida, you kind of feel like they are getting to cheer for all the good stuff this year.
I know you all want predictions, I picked Georgetown, so what do I know, but let me just say this, Florida has been there before, they manhandled UCLA again this year, so 90% of the analyst are going to say that Florida is going to win it again this year (just listen to sports radio on Monday, you will hear it). Well, everyone thought OSU basically had the BCS championship in the bag earlier this year and we saw how Florida shoved it down their throats during the game. Florida is the better team and more experienced in this situation, but let us not forget what happened just a couple of months ago. I leave it at that.
IN: MadLibs - the day has come where my love for Madlibs is finally vindicated. Sit down Sudoku, don't even bother getting back up Crossword puzzles, Madlibs has been crowned the new champion of "stupid things to do when you have free time," and its not looking to relinquish until Mah Jong makes a comeback. Yes, people have finally come back to realize how fun it is to fill in blanks with nouns, verbs, and adverbs (no one actually knows what this is, but the US education system has convinced us that adverbs are only words that end in "ly"). I mean where else can poop be filled in as a noun, a verb, an adjective (like poopy face), and an adverb (pooply), and all the while making you laugh because the sentence would sound something like this, On his way to the White House the poop had to poop with the poopy terrorist, then he stumbled pooply onto Uranus. Classy and funny all at the same time. Madlibs also gives people the excuse to use such words as butt, weiner, booger, potato, and toe cheese. So congrats Madlibs on making the comeback we were all waiting for.
OUT: Fair Trade Goods - sorry Coldplay but your cause is off just a bit. Let me say that the Fair Trade movement itself continues to grow in popularity (thus this would be an IN), but I am attacking the economics behind it, which is why I am saying that it should be OUT. Made most famous by the band Coldplay and most commonly bought in coffee form, fair trade was the idea that Corporations should begin to pay a fair price for the commodities that they buy, thus allowing the person producing the goods a fair living wage for their production. The downfall, it stuck its nose in the face of a free market and is causing problems with coffee commodity pricing along with agricultural efforts in developing countries. Let me start with agricultural efforts. So a farmer in Columbia sees that his neighbor makes more money producing coffee that is sold as fair trade coffee. He converts part of his land that is used to produce bananas so that he can grow coffee beans. When he goes to sell the coffee he gets the premium price as it is fair trade, but he finds out that the costs to convert the land in addition to the fact that only a small portion of his land was used to grow coffee (simple economics here dealing with incremental costs)causes costs to grow coffee to be more then the amount he recovered when the coffee is sold, thus he loses out. In addition, because farmers think they can make more money on growing coffee beans, they are growing less bananas (just as an example) so even though the world's demand for bananas remains the same, the supply goes down, thus the cost of bananas goes up for the end consumer (none of this increase in price is passed down to the farmer again, so they lose out again). So not only is the coffee more expensive, but bananas are more expensive and both are passed onto the consumer and not given back to the farmer. So here's the end result of what fair trade is doing, it is more costly for the farmer to sell the product and it is more costly for the consumer to buy that product along with other products, sounds really fair to me.
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