That being said, you must realize that I know next to nothing about the music of Michael Jackson–just the lurid headlines.

However, I stumbled upon a page of quotations today from the King of Pop, and I was impressed.

Two really struck me:

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.

The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.

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If the current US Copyright Law had been in effect over Shakespeare, I think he could have been sued by many authors for copyright infringement for writing that masterpiece.

Count how many lawsuits there could have been just for King Lear alone:

Shakespeare’s play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Celtic mythological figure Lear/Lir. Shakespeare’s most important source is thought to be the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.

Other possible sources are A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Malcontent (1604), by John Marston; The London Prodigal (1605); Arcadia (1580-1590), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot; Montaigne’s Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden (1606); Albion’s England, by William Warner, (1589); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett (1603), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness. King Lear is also a literary variant of a common fairy tale, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him.

The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus.

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First, she linked to a story about a proofreader who died at his desk and wasn’t discovered for five days. His legendary name is George Turklebaum, and you can read about him here.

What’s even better is a collection of un- or mis-proofread headlines that are worth more than a few chuckles.

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However, as both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Cleveland Plain Dealer announced restructurings over the weekend (the Star Tribune through bankruptcy), the bedrock of newspapers’ financial survival has been gobbled up by Craigslist and other free online advertising venues.

That would be the least flashiest aspect of the business–newspaper classified ads.

So, while newspaper readership is marginally down, classified advertising is hemhorraging. Analyze it as you may, but the bottom line is that newspapers are an endangered species, at least the big-city variety.

Which is all too sad.

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What it reveals–and what took me almost my entire professional career to figure out–is that you can’t trust anyone at work. They’ll all stab you in the back or throw you under the bus in an instant–if it somehow helps them.

Now, back to my headline. I could examine the saying, "There’s strength in numbers," from a perspective of where it came from and what it means, but I’d rather cue it into the book, I Hate People.

The authors reveal that forty or so years ago, Fortune magazine did a survey of qualities employers most sought in employees. Teamwork ranked tenth. In a similar survey done by the magazine in 2005, teamwork had jumped to number one.

How depressing, considering that the only people who love teams are those who command their appearance and those blowhards who worm their way into taking charge of them to feed their egos.

Hershon and Littman cite an experiment by a French engineer named Maximilien Ringelmann, who measured people’s efforts pulling on a rope attached to a strain gauge. Pulling in groups, people exerted themselves less; pulling alone, they gave it their all.

This has come to be known as "social loafing," or simply the "Ringelmann Effect."

Either way, it accounts for the futility of throwing teams at a problem. Better to give a million monkeys one typewriter each and see how long it takes them to recreate the Great Books of the Western World.

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I call this book, which is really only a hundred or so pages long and can be read in an hour, must reading because it confirms what should be obvious: Crashes develop because of greed and speculation. What may not be obvious–in fact, I know it’s not that obvious to the general publi–is that greed and speculation arise only after the government fans the flames of, well, greed and speculation by…

PRINTING TOO MUCH DAMN MONEY.

When you read the book, you’ll see how our troubles all began with the rise of capitalistic economies when governments figured out they could just print money without any basis in reality–paper money, money by fiat, sovereign money, call it what you want, but it’s not redeemable on any market for anything else of fungible value except…more paper money, or gold if you can acquire it (U.S. law now restricts its possession).

The first modern boom-and-bust cycle, or bubble, was the Tulip craze in 17th-century Holland, and bubbles continued (and continue) to plague the Western World through the 21st century. The book recounts several of them in U.S. history, including a colonial meltdown when a pair of shoes could cost $5,000–useless paper dollars, that is.

In every bubble, when the boom is on, the financial leaders are all deemed geniuses. When the fall comes, they are suddenly villains. The people who invested in these bubblicious financial instruments–the you’s and I’s of the world–suddenly forget that we were just as greedy, and none of the boom or bust could’ve happened without us.

Galbraith rightly concludes:

"Yet beyond a better perception of the speculative tendency and process itself, there probably is not a great deal that can be done [to prevent future bubbles]. Regulation outlawing financial incredulity or mass euphoria is not a practical possibility."

Tell that to the Obamaites, who at this moment, while crying regulation, are printing money by the supertanker-full to stoke our next great bubble.

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Laodicean, meaning lukewarm to politics, was the deciding word for Kavya (phonetic and easy) Shivashankar (actually, pretty phonetic as well), the 13-year-old winner. Actually, I take it all back–Ms. Shavishankar’s name is the easier one since the c in Laodicean could be confused with sh or ch.

I was happy to note the use of some attempted humor in constructing sentences using the challenge words, as in:

"While Lena’s geusioleptic cooking wowed her boyfriend, what really melted his heart was that she won the National Spelling Bee."

I doubt anyone will be using geusioleptic (tasty) anytime soon when yum and yummy work just as well.

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While I’ve tried, so far, one of her recipes–the first one, in fact, for Potage Promentier (potato-leek soup)–what truly impresses me about this book is the the absolutely simple, clear and understandable English that Julia used in writing it. No wonder it became the revolutionary cookbook that changed American cooking and eating habits.

Julia Child was an American, of course, who found herself in France with her husband while he was on a diplomatic mission. She soon mastered the French language but also French cuisine, whch she shares in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Even if you have no intention of learning to cook French food, Julia’s book–at least the introduction in which she tells the story of her years in Paris–is a must read to see how beautiful simply written English can be.

Back in her day, people communicated largely by letter since phones were still too expensive and still pretty scarce. People were foced to learn how to make themselves understood in writing. It clearly shows in this masterful work.

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Instead of "war on terror" or "war on terrorism," they’re using "overseas contingency operations," and instead of "acts of terror," they’re referring to "man-caused disasters."

George Orwell would be proud, in a negative sort of way, of course.

All of this prompted satirist Joe Queenan to rewrite some Talibanic sayings. In his reworking, "beheadings" become "cephalic attrition" and "flayings" have morphed into "unsolicited epidermal reconfigurations."

Oh, my, and at least another four years of this nonsense out of the nation’s capital, or rather, four more years of this "syntactic reconsideration and reconstitution," otherwise known in plain language, as "utter bullshit."

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Somehow I’m not buying the reason the Washington Nationals are giving for some of their players’ wearing misspelled Natinals uniform tops over the weekend. Supposedly, they had to send their opening-day jerseys to MLB offices for display, and the replacement uniforms arrived with the misspelling. Mean to tell me the club supplied only one uniform for the players and had to order replacements that somehow got misspelled? Anyway, here they are in full glory.

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