What's In A Name? Plenty.

More and more over the past weeks, I have paid closer attention to the names that people have. I used to think that many people were named by sadistic parents to have monikers that would plague them all their lives. Now, I see that perhaps there's a sinister logic in some names and how lives pan out.

First up, Bernie Madoff (pronounced 'made off'): he is now the man of the mo. with his reported US$ 50 billion bilking of almost everyone who lived.

Next, the man who is now in charge of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, that is responsible (loosely of course) for supervising financial activities in investment, etc, Christopher Cox (pronounced 'cocks'--yes, like chickens, dummy, or the other things that we tell children not to play with if they don't want to go blind). I don't know if Chris was playing with his, but he was played for a sucker, that's evident, though he was not the first.

We have Illlinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich (pronounced 'blag-oh-ja-vich'). On the streets, a blag or to blag is lying to getting something (like into a club or some goodies) through confidence trickery or cheekiness. The man is the name, yo!

We also have George Soros (pronounced 'sore us'). Georgie was famous for breaking the Bank of England when he had more money to play with than the central bank and broke the back of the pound in currency speculation on what is called "Black Wednesday" (September 16, 1992), and forced the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The bank surely got sore. Soros is anything but sore now as one of the world's richest men. The Bank of England? Now trying to stop sterling slide off the cliff again.

I'm stretch a bit with Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron, and his co-executive Jeffrey Skilling ('is killing'), who were had up for a range of securities fraud charges. Lay has several meanings, including, to lie, to bet, to press down by force, to calm, to dispose of, to have sexual intercourse;o in some metaphorical or literal senses, our Ken was doing a lot of that. Jeff, clearly was the final nail. Ken and Jeff's lies were surely killing a lot of good people and a business.

These are some of the prominent instances that we know about, and I imagine our news hounds have enough material in their archives to titillate my senses that this is more than a string of coincidences. You know that I don't believe that things happen just by chance.