finknottle

Throwing babies was just to illustrate how people who will joke about killing one defenseless thing won't join in on essentially the same thing when they are afraid people will call them out. Come on tough guys - lets see the same jokes and picture links about mutilating babies that we get for kittens.

I believe the rule was that property left to a spouse was entirely tax-free, the first 1.5 million in assets received was tax-free, and money over that was taxed at your normal income tax rate - so if for example you leave 13.5 million cash to your 3 kids, each would get 4.5 million or about 3.5 million after taxes. Fewer than 1% of the estates paid anything under the estate tax. There were several tricks to lower the rate like giving direct cash gifts each year and by 'generation skipping,' or leaving the estate to the grandkids, as well as actual tax tricks - those that pay anything only pay about 20% on average. Nevertheless this was seen as unfair to wealthy children, so the exemption was scheduled to rise to 6 million; meaning if you left 27 million to your three kids, they would each get 8 million after taxes instead of 6. Rather than raise the exemption as planned, under Bush the tax was dropped - no taxes on inherited wealth at all. This repeal was supposed to be temporary, with the tax coming back in 2011. However there is now a push to make the repeal permanent - I know the House approved it last month, but I don't think the Senate voted yet. Some data here: http://www.cbpp.org/5-25-00tax.htm

Keep your fingers crossed!

Wussieboys always joke about what they will do to the defenseless - sort of a compensation thing.

Babies sail better since you can get a tighter spiral on them. But you probably already know that.

I cannot figure out what you are all seeing; looks like 12 to me...

This is the part that amazes me. If you don't go after the signing bonus after this, then why bother to explicitely put it into the contract? What's the message?

I'm not a fan of TD, but it's becoming more and more believable that he really meant it when he said the coaches were not that interested in the guy and it was pretty much only about picks for TH.

Conrad Dobler

No, I am, and I mean here on twobillsdrive, where we are making snap judgements about the cards when only time will tell whether our own gutsy decisions turn out good or bad.

Talk about living in glass houses... I bet the card fans are laughing at the yokels over here, posting things like

Yeah, the very idea that ESPN would look take this team at face value - decent at 9-7 but taking a temporary step back with a rookie quarterback - is outrageous! They should realize that all of our losses were due to DB, and JP will not make any of his own mistakes!

lol, bird-retriever? I think it's the sand-cat (?), a 6 pound kitty that is perhaps the best snake-hunter there is - their interest and ability in hunting them is all the more remarkable since they have no defense against the poison. One of the reason cats are lightning fast - faster than any other carnivore family - is that their muscles are uniquely almost all fast-twitch muscle and with high recruitment rates. This means the muscle strands fire faster and can fire in greater numbers. Think about the Cheetah: it can accelerate from 0 to 20 meters per second (45 mph) in two seconds, faster than most racecars, and hit a top speed of about 65 mph. Of course it's doing this while taking down an animal larger than itself - not bad for a hundred pound cat! The downside of this performance-muscle composition is that they tire extremely quickly. That is why a cat's day is filled with a lot of napping and sitting. With an active cat it should something like 5 minutes of energetic activity followed by a half hour rest (I'm guessing here)... More importantly, that's why cat's tend not to go on walks. They are inclined, but simply can't sustain it like a dog. When they do go distances, it is puncuated by a lot of stops...

My cats lost interest in TV once they realized it wasn't real, with one exception: I was watching BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs.' They went to a lot of effort to try to get the movements and motions right. The earlier dinosaurs (think quick little raptors) were probably birdlike in their motions, and its a testament to the animators that it was good enough that my cats were suddenly riveted! So basically they will now watch any (modern) nature show with dinosaurs. Actual bird shows bore them - there has to be hunting and fighting involved. They especially like the stalking scenes.

It think what happens is this: nearly every cat learns to play/hunt, and if they learn the right moves they will kill their prey. But what doesn't always happen is that they learn that prey=food. I had a cat born on a farm and a cat born in a dog family. They both were good hunters, but the first would wolf down the mouse after a bout of play while the second would leave it alone when he exhausted the entertainment possibilities. And if it wasn't dead, so be it. So I suspect those cats that don't hunt don't see prey as food and probably don't play much normally.

True, but there's a nuance; both species are capable of living the other way if trained. It's just that dogs are instinctively better at it, having evolved more brain wiring for handling the complexities of social living (things like: who is the boss? The boss is gone, how does the heirarchy look now? Waht's my place in it? etc), while cats have more brain matter devoted to 'ambush skills' like coordination, spatial processing, and pattern recognition (that's why many cats are facinated by sleight-of-hand magic. Nevertheless both are hard-wired with the ability to adjust based on what they are taught as kittens/puppies so as to better respond to changing environments. Interesting experiment I read about: A bunch of house-cats that were living together in Egypt were released into the wild. Rather than go their seperate ways the community stayed together. Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with your basic point, just as to whether they are becoming less solitary because of evolution or simply because we are increasingly raising them in social settings.

Apples and oranges. Pound for pound cats are the porsche of hunters. If security is what you want get a puma. Of course the puma is not going to scare the intruder by barking, he's going to kill him instead.

Competative eating is, surprisingly, a pretty organized sport in the US. It's definately big in Asia. I once stumbled across a website which listed the stops on the US tour, as well as profiles of the top 25 players. What was interesting was that each stop featured a different regional hometown food - hot dogs, oysters, whatever. Each pro tended to have food strengths and weaknesses, like clay vs grass in tennis. In that respect the hotdog championship was sort of the Wimbleton of the tour. The skinny Japanese guy is the world champion I think. The skinny Japanese girl you are thinking of is probably the girl who got a lot of press a year or so ago. IIRC she was a student at College Park MD, was of Korean descent, entered a contest on a lark, turned out to be really good at it, and went pro.

But more than 3/4 produced a playoff team over the last four years... Buffalo's illustrious company: 0 Cincy, Jax, Houston, Washington, Detroit, New Orleans, Arizona And Houston only played 3 seasons... We're looking up at 1 Miami, Clev, SD, NYG, Dallas, Minn, Chicago, Carolina 2 Balt, Tenn, KC, Den, Oakland, Atlanta, TB, Seattle, SF 3 NE, NYJ, Pitts, Indy, St.L 4 Phil, GB

Yeah, and there is subtle mathematics going on here. A good hire has a much longer tenure than a bad hire. This skews the statistics, so on average most GM hires are 'bad.' No GM, for example, is likely to have two good hires, let alone three. On another note, IMO some of the hires listed were good but the team struggled for other reasons (like ownership) and the coaches reps took the blame: Shottenheimer / Spurrier for example.

A freekin' embarrassment to the City. Makes us look like yahoos.

Does that make the second from the beginning of the 4th in essense a third round pick? Maybe instead we should get miami's 4th round pick and call it a 3rd...

It amazes me that people have forgotten just how anemic our rushing offense looked when TH was in. Admittedly the rest of the team hadn't jelled yet, but the fact is that when other teams look at the bfilm they see a 60 yrds on 20 carries kind of guy...

I liked this comment:

True, but I don't know that anybody flat-out lies. They say stuff like 'we're looking at other options' or 'he is not a priority.' You can't say publically a guy is a reject, sign him, and then tell the fans he's the answer to your problems. That bridge is burnt for marketing purposes. So I guess it hinges on whether Green actually said that or not. On this line of thinking, does anybody know of any cases where a coach said firmly that such-and-such a player wasn't good enough to play for them, and then did a 180?