Last night in a dark woody area of Germany, the Tour de Gonads cycle race started in earnest. Crowds of at least 3 turned out to support what many claim to be the hardest race of them all.

Erik von Zwei-acher yelped from his 27lb clunker bike, "The Tour de France is for wimps in padded shorts."

Few would disagree. After three circuits of these undulating cobbled streets and a quick sprint through a busy high street, the race would ruin more than a few pro cyclists' cobbles.

When asked why he took part, year after year, Helmut Schon, 79, answered, "Zis race has done me no harm whatsoever. After winning in 1975, my street cred shot through the roof. I have been the guest speaker at more nude conventions than I can shake a dick at."

When pressed about the winning streak that followed his first victory, he stuttered, "It iz a vunderful sensation, standing proud on a rostrum, presented with flowers and the Yellow G-string by pretty girls. The champagne uncorking can be a bit tricky, but I only lost one cork."

If you would care to participate in the pain, and have a competitive streak that would drive you to victory (followed by the adulation of sitting in an ice bucket for 2 hours), contact Helmut at his website. You can also sign up for the horse racing too. Slightly faster and bumpier than a bike ride, but your privates are cushioned by a luxury layer of skin over a bony horse's spine. Sign up, sign up.

lost in translation, during a power outage.

The genial Video professor on the advert seems such a nice man. He is smiling broadly as he promises to teach you everything you need to know about Word, Excel and dozens of other software titles. And if you don't learn a thing, just return the CD and he will send you $10 for your time. How can you go wrong with a deal like that from a guy who gives rather than grabs?

Read the litany of complaints in Infomercial Scam.com and you may be less inclined to order a CD from the good Video Professor. To be generous to him, he is not heading a multi-million dollar felonous scam, but to be even more generous, I will say that this educational company, accused by 126 people of fleecing its customers, is not a reflection of its leadership.

Let's just say that the accounts department isn't quite as easy going as the boss in the advert. The faceless bean counters have a tendency to put the onus on customers to bat back an unexpected flood of CDs (and demands for payments) that follow the initial jovial transaction.

When 126 people go to the trouble to say they aren't happy, you have to think someone somewhere is being a greedy bastard. And how stupid to be so greedy, when the product is worth a lot of money even if marketed modestly without resorting to gouging. Greed is stupid!

Barry Bonds, baseball legend, has grown in every way since first joining the ranks of baseball's greats. In the course of normal training, his hat size has increased by one, and his chest is 11" broader than when he first swung a bat in anger. As a result of this supreme physical development, the great big player has waddled around the diamond without any urgency more times than anyone else in baseball history.

His dedication to baseball and the metamorphosis of his body came at great sacrifice. He deserves respect! Yeah right, just like the guys producing bloated broiler chickens at your local hormone-riddled factory deserve respect.

Since revelations about steroid abuse, Bonds now stands at the top of the baseball tree with the cynics beaming a spotlight on his every achievement. As of this week, it has been proven that Barry Bonds sports a bigger head than he is supposed to have, and he carries more rippling muscles than Arnie under his shirt.

Is this sort of criticism fair? After all, he is a dedicated sportsman and there is no definitive proof. No, it isn't fair. It is a racist slur propagated by the press with a grudge against people from the land of Steroidia. Shame on the media for picking on a minority athlete whose only aim in life has been to hit a record winning run and make the simple baseball fan who caught the ball nearly half a million bucks richer. He should be applauded for putting a ball sponsor in the media spotlight for a couple of days.

He should be applauded for turning me off baseball. My wife is eternally grateful that I won't bother tuning in any more. If I want to see true steroid abuse, perfected and honed without remorse by sportsmen, I will continue to watch The Worlds Strongest Man.

Markets rise, markets fall and splatter. Back in February, Peter Eliades, editor of the Stockmarket Cycles newsletter, stated that a certain top-related breakthrough could be a hard one to pull off.

The top to which he refers is that of the NYSE Advance/Decline line. This line, of course, is calculated by adding a given day's plurality of advancing issues over declining issues on the New York Stock Exchange to the cumulative total from previous days. (Yahoo Finance)

Of course, how silly of us not to know that. The cumulative effect of reading this gobbledeygook was two flickering eyelids and a desire for alcohol/dinner. As Wall Street rollercoasts along, his theorems get better.

...the stock market's recent strength has finally brought the A/D line back within striking distance of that 1959 high.

Most interesting. I will have to see if this is related in any way to my minus 99.7% return on a penny stock that was guaranteed to kill the competition for in-flight entertainment. Something must have been out of whack, because my judgement was faultless! Maybe a faltering A/D line at the time was responsible for just 3 inflight installations in a Garuda airlines fleet of hundreds, and a wrong invoice to a jet-setting Russian oil tycoon.

What importance should technical analysts place on all of this (A/D line)? Eliades writes that he isn't sure.

Marvellous answer. He must be an economist or a financial adviser to have come out with that inconclusive conclusion. But then Yahoo, who posted this ludicrous speculative mumbo jumbo article must have threatened to push him off the fence if he didn't come up with a definitive course of action for the fabulous A/D line.

"We do not claim to have the answers to those questions but based on all the other technical information at our disposal, it would not surprise us to see the cumulative advance/decline ratio stall at these levels."

I think I will become a financial stock picker, invent acronyms, create a theorem and end up as successful as this clown.