Patti LaBelle is singing the national anthem at game four of the World Series.  I do believe she just sang “What so proudly we hailed at the skylight’s last gleaming.”  I guess it kinda works.

Andrew Lahde, the famously prescient hedge fund manager who made return rates close to 1000% betting on the collapse of the subprime market, closed up shop last month, saying that he’d made enough money and experienced enough stress, thank you very much.  Now he has penned a farewell letter of the sort we should all be so lucky to write.

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

He goes on to encourage George Soros to “sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest” and proposes the legalization of hemp.

Mr. Lahde is now living the life that should be mine.

The final installment in this three-part map series is my favorite of all (and it’s not political!).  Worldmapper has almost 600 maps where the world’s land mass is resized according to a variety of statistics.  It’s easy to kill a few hours on this site.

This map shows war deaths in 2002 (that blob in the middle is Africa):

And this one shows alcohol consumption (look how swollen the UK and Japan are):