http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJNC3dgreaU

Mind you, the Superbowl Shuffle was done before they won the Superbowl! Hellz ya. I was a Bears fan for life.

Little did I know at the time I was devoting myself to over 2 decades of debacle and misery. But, like any good fan, I stayed true to my team hoping for returned glory year after miserable year. The 2000s have been particuarly hard since the Bears have actually had talent on the team (as opposed to much of the 90s). Yet, we’ve only made it to the playoffs 3 times this past decade and only won any playoff games in 2006 when we made a Superbowl run.

That 2006 Superbowl lost convinced me that Rex Grossman could never be a winner in this league. You can’t play like a pro-bowler one game and like a JVer in the next and expect good things week end and week out. Lovie Smith though, stood by his quarterback, something I both respect and hate about Lovie. Long story short, we haven’t been back to the playoffs and we haven’t had a quarterback. Until 2009 that was.

The trade for Jay Cutler this off-season shook all Bears fans to their very core. This was the #$%^ing Chicago Bears. We don’t make blockbuster trades. That’s left to the Washington Redskins, Dallas Cowboys or Oakland Raiders… But, in March we did the unthinkable and traded for a very young probowl QB who was going to walk around on Lake Michigan when he wasn’t winning us every game we played.

I drank the cool aid. Lovie and Jerry showed me something that I didn’t think they had in them. And our 2009 season was the most disappointing season in memory. I don’t really have a point or moral here other than to say I hope the 2010s are better for the Chicago Bears than the 2000s were.

Bear Down, Chicago Bears. Bear Down.

Well, as you can imagine, this was pretty interesting if not all together depressing… which I suppose could be expected as I sipped my coffee and was reminded that half the world lives on less than a couple bucks a day!  At any rate, some of his stories were really quite intriguing as he retold his interviews with these different people and I'd encourage you to waste some time paging through this book if you ever get the chance.

But one thing really stuck out to me… it was the poor in places like the U.S. and Japan who really "felt poor" even though they had much more compared to the others in the book from places like Thailand and Kenya because they had a much deeper sense of "relative poverty".  In other words, the people around them had so much more than they had they felt much poorer; where as people in Kenya, who live in poverty, have less than others around them but it wasn't as if they had so much less that they felt completely isolated from the society around them.

Maybe not the most profound stuff ever, but it did make me wonder how I make people around me feel poor and vice versa.

You can see it here if you want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kdYYcV3xFw 

Click here to view the embedded video.

 I have nothing to say in my defense.

 Imagine a world where the nations top 16 teams played it out over a month from the beginning of December to the beginning of January.  Teams like Michigan wouldn't be getting hosed by this computer and teams like Boise State could actually get a chance to show they are a good team.  It would be amazing.  But, alas, the ol' mighty dollar wins in the end and these freaks in charge don't want to give up their oh so precious "bowl games".

 All I've ever seen in bowls are flakes, nuts and fruits… go figure.

A few manupulative stats for your reading enjoyment:

• The top 20% of the economic ladder (that's you if you're reading this) consume 49% of the world's fish and meat.
• The bottom 20% of the economic ladder (those are the people you never see) consume 4% of the world's fish and meat.
• The U.S. consumer spends over $10 billion annually on their pets (fluffy is real cute).
• The UNDP estimates it would only take an additional $9 billion annually for all to have access to clean water (over-rated).

Listen, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I don't want to feel bad myself. All I'm suggesting is that we take some time to prioritize what we are thankful for this year and choose to use some of our hard earned money to reflect that.