Anybody who thinks that public education can be fixed with bucketfuls of cash needs to read this story. I have close friends, including some who have worked in inner city public schools in St. Louis, who confirm that it's a 100% accurate description of the state of classrooms today. Public school, as it exists right now, is practically designed to repel the kind of teachers it needs. And any high-minded morons who oppose school choice should be forced to send their kids to an inner-city school for one year.

Ten days into the year 2000, in a deal that shocked the business world, AOL merged with Time Warner and created a media behemoth valued at over $165 billion dollars. Writers, pundits, and people who wring their hands together on TV heralded the arrival of the prototypical 21st century "new economy" company. The perception at the time was that AOL, supersized from the 1990's bull market, was buying Time Warner, even though everyone was calling it a merger. Steve Case was legitimizing himself to the world. Other mega-mergers were bound to follow. There were serious rumours that Yahoo! was going to buy Disney. Viacom was looking for a suitor. Of course, not even three months later, the Nasdaq spasmed, touched 5000, and hurtled to the ground like Wile E. Coyote off of a desert cliff.

Today, Steve Case resigned as the head of AOL Time Warner. There are plenty of "da lousy bum" stories being written in today's papers, no doubt. The two combined companies have lost hundreds of billions of market capitalization. Internal strife has raged between the AOL and Time Warner camps. There have been stories that AOL has made on oopsie on the accounting pages, and mayyyyybe I was a little to aggressive to the tune of ten billion dollars (it's more fun to say with your pinkie finger at the corner of your mouth).

But don't cry for Steve Case. Most of the new economy stocks lost over 90% of their value; losses of 99% (good lord) were not uncommon at all. When AOL's value was still high, he used his company's paper worth to land Time Warner as a hedge against the coming bubble-burst. Over the past few years, he's unloaded person stock to the tune of something like $700 million, according to a CNBC documentary. I personally have no problem with an entrepreneur making money in the free enterprise system. I'm a little unsure as to the ethics of unloading your own stock as its value tanks. For an independent investor, you'd call it shrewd. But a CEO and businessman is supposed to do something more; he's supposed to leave something greater than he started with. History is going to remember Steve Case as a man who screwed thousands of people at Time Warner and laughed all the way to the bank.

Basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal was interviewed six months ago on a cable sports show geared for the beer-n-nachos demographic. When asked about this year's NBA rookie sensation, 7-foot-plus Yoa Ming of China, who plays for the Houston Rockets, Shaq had this scintillating commentary to share: "Tell Yao Ming, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh'", he laughed, then hammed up the camera with some bad kung-fu moves.

The interesting part of this story to me is that it happened six bloody months ago; the only reason it's even a news story now (and a minor one at that) is that Shaquille's Lakers will be playing Ming's Rockets this upcoming Friday, and somebody somewhere did a little digging for some sports-page-smack in a Houston newspaper. Already the story is fading into the background; Shaq's a great guy, everybody loves him, "that's just Shaq being Shaq". Ming and his handlers, apparently, are gracefully defusing the incident. A double standard, perhaps? I can't help but wonder what might have happened if somebody like, say, John Rocker had made the same comment.

American politics may get more press coverage, but for entertainment value, it's hard to beat British Columbia. The province that brought us Amor de Cosmos and Bill Vander Zalm (and many, many, more!) now brings us Premier Gordon "DUI" Campbell.