I have to begin by saying that I have been an Atlanta Falcons fan for a very long time. I can remember just about every draft pick we have had and remember the days of Cain, Andrews, Bartkowski, Mathis, Riggs, and a whole bunch more players that were outstanding. Mike Smith has come to Atlanta and setup a system and a process to win which is what we have lacked for a few years. As a long time fan, I am very happy to see us go back to a more traditional style offense and very happy to see Matt Ryan leading that for us.
At the beginning of the season, Atlanta was coming from the previous season considered to be one of the worst in the league and had a 4-12 record the year prior. It didn’t take the experts long after the 34-21 opener to see that Smith’s new system was going to yield results. He had several advantages – Michael Turner had fresh legs, the offensive line was working as a team, and Matt Ryan played in a pro-like system at Boston College. The preseason showed mixed results but Matt Ryan lit up the defense on his very first throw – a 62 yard touchdown to Michael Jenkins.
Ryan was also very successful at gaining the support of veteran players. Several referenced some of the greats like Farve, Manning, et al throughout the season as he showed his potential week after week.
After being selected 3rd in the 2008 draft, Ryan has become the 3rd quarterback in three years to win the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year award. Ben Roethlisberger (2004) and Vince Young (2006) had won prior to Ryan with no other quarterback having won that award prior to Big Ben.
In his years prior to being with Atlanta, he earned the nickname “Matty Ice”. John Abraham has come up with a new nickname for him – “ROY”. Ryan said he was flattered to even be mentioned with the other candidates.
Dana
December 29th, 2008
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This past holiday season (2008), we had quite a problem coming up with a punch to serve our guests at a holiday party. The good part about the search is that we sampled several. The downside is that we almost didn’t have a punch to serve because we didn’t conjure this one until the very last minute. In the end, we received glowing reviews for it and so we wanted to share it with everyone. We call it Holiday Cranberry Cocktail Punch and to be fair it is a modified Cosmopolitan:
- 10 oz Absolut Vodka
- 5 oz Triple Sec
- 5 oz Rose’s Lime Juice
- 1.5 L Cranberry Canada Dry Ginger Ale
- 1.5 L Cranberry Cocktail
For presentation we served this in a punch bowl that contained clementine slices and cranberries frozen in miniature bundt cake pans.
We offered this punch, wines, beers, and liquor drinks to our guests. This was the clear winner and we ended up making a total of 4 bowls of this for about 30 people over the course of 3.5 hours.
Dana
Over the past few weeks, I have had the luxury of being able to spend some time at home with my family and in between other activities with them, I was able to catch various pundits preaching on TV or in news articles how the world was coming to an end because of the US economy. If you haven’t caught any of this on the news, feel free to do a google search or visit our friends at EconomyInCrisis.org and then come back to this post. If you don’t want to visit that site, here is the general message – Everything related to the US Economy stinks: the rate cuts don’t work, NAFTA is killing domestic companies, and several other ‘America’s Economic Policies Stink’ messages.
If you want to look at the very short term, I will agree that there is enough pain to be had for everyone and then some. That is a very easy thing to do. You are very likely to know someone that has been affected or will be affected by this current recession. Dwelling on this will actually help the recession stick around because the pessimism about the economy lowers consumer confidence. With lower consumer confidence, we will experience deflation, lower consumer spending, lower industry profits and higher inflation.
The period we are experiencing is more like a creative destruction period where the world as we understand it is being destroyed only to leave a more balanced environment. Without a doubt it is and will be for at least 6 more months – painful. We can only thank ourselves as we went out and purchased more expensive food, guzzling cars, mini-mansion houses, and slicker pocket cell phones. Many other countries did the opposite and suppresed the urge to burn more gas than their neighbor. For example, China has grown through more cautious investment by stock-piling about $1trillion in US Treasuries. So, there has been a natural imbalance between saving and spending around the globe.
All systems eventually reach a new equilibrium as it is natural law to do so and humans are not able to defy the laws of physics. Eventually other countries will need to buy our higher quality goods as they seek to raise their own standards of living. This will happen but it will not happen overnight. When it does occur, the US will need to maintain their goods at that higher quality and be there to sell. So, companies with higher savings rates will leak money to those on the opposite side of the imbalance. The strongest companies will be those that determine how to make it from now until then without freeing themselves of all of their employees and raising the unemployment rate / lowering consumer confidence.
Here are a couple of items to be optimistic about:
- US Consumers are more educated about how the financial system works and consequently are staying away from riskier investments
- US Consumers are beginning to save more money (per www.bls.gov) – 0.75% increased to ~2.5%
- US Consumers are beginning to get numb to the bad news and will spend again. For example, Amazon sold almost 73 items per second.
- Investors around the world view this recession as a “sale” on American investments and they are buying up US Treasuries.
- The US Government is taking reasonable actions to combat the decline.
I don’t claim to know everything but what I do know is that it is easier to report on bad news than good. So, as I listen to the pundits on TV, I am going to keep the facts in mind and hope that the steep drop turns into a slow climb soon.
Dana
