quote/unquote (Christmas edition)

(Another in a series by Wilson in St. Louis)

"Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat,
Please to put a penny in the old man's hat;
if you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do,
if you haven't got a ha'penny, God bless you..."
*----- beggar's rhyme, anonymous


"Or consider Christmas * could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop-clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the western world is made ill from overeating * all in the name of lowly Jesus?"
*- Upton Sinclair, "Money Writes" (1927)

"Zimbabwe is mine."
*- Robert Mugabe

"Forget about scouting, or player development, or even making a trade. See it, buy it and let the market be damned. No one could have imagined the kind of shameless shopping spree the Yankees have been on this month * $161 million for CC Sabathia, $82.5 million for A.J. Burnett and a reported $180 million for Teixeira * at a time when more than 10 million Americans are out of work and another 4 million might join them in 2009."
*-------- Wallace Matthews, Newsday