When I’m feeling a little too good about myself – a little too self-assured – nothing brings me back down to earth, to my normal state of self-loathing and despair, like five hours of nonstop futility and embarrassment. No, I’m not talking about the time I spent writing last week’s blog article (although I can see why you might have jumped to that conclusion). No, I’m talking about golf.

Nothing reminds me of how inadequate I am like spending half a day in nature, searching in vain for tee shots gone terribly awry, in pursuit of lost golf balls hidden like buried treasure deep in the woods. Which leads me to this poignant ethical question:

If you lose your tee shot in the woods and in the process of looking for your lost ball find another ball, which your golfing partner does not notice, how many yards closer to the fairway can you move your new ball to improve your lie?

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Oops. Seems I accidentally pressed the RETURN key on the Headline a bit too soon. My bad. What I meant to write was:

“Why Baseball is way betting than having sextuplets.”

Frankly, do I really need to defend this position? I mean, seriously, who would rather parent six screaming babies than to go to the ballpark, watch a game, while scarfing down peanuts, a hotdog and a cold beer? Anybody?

The fact of the matter is I have loved baseball ever since I was a young child. I even named this humor blog View from the Bleachers in part as a nod to my favorite spectator sport. Baseball has long been called America’s pastime. The first baseball game was played way back in 1846 – can you believe it? Any high school student today could tell you, that’s probably over 70 years ago.

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[To view Part I of the Year in Review – January – June, click here.]

Welcome back. What took you so long? We continue now with Part II of The Year in Review for 2010 (July – December), as seen from the Bleachers. Now where were we? Oh yes……

July: The world (and by “world” I mean every single country on the planet besides the USA) is riveted to the exciting FIFA World Cup of Soccer in South Africa.  A new craze is born as people from Tokyo to Paris to Sydney are getting hooked on the endearing monotone droning sound of the buzzing vuvuzela horn (as first reported here in VFTB).

Soon these colorful one-note plastic horns are popping up everywhere – at baseball games, political rallies, shareholders’ meetings, birthday parties, weddings, and, most recently, at my friends’ Bernie and Gwen Weinberger’s baby boy’s circumcision ceremony. Perhaps I should have asked permission first. My bad.

Also in the news, American television raises the bar for highbrow entertainment even higher with the explosive popularity of the hip reality series Jersey Shore. Colorful characters like Snooki and “The Situation” become well-tanned, breast-implanted role models for our kids. Every week is a new life lesson, like this one from episode 17, when cast member Snooki reminds us: “I’m not trashy. Unless I drink too much” or when Pauley cautions impressionable young viewers: “One minute you got three girls in the Jacuzzi, the next minute somebody’s in jail.” Sure beats the pointless tripe they try to fob off on us from the BBC or the National Geographic Channel, if you ask this reporter.

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As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.

[Editor’s note: For those of you following the Jewish calendar, look for my special Rosh Hashanah “You won’t believe what the Goyim world did to our people this past year” Edition, to be published at sundown on September 28, 2011, the start of the Jewish New Year. – TEJ]

Consider this my Holiday gift to you – a week late, sorry. Blame it on the Post Office. Here is the annual View from the Bleachers’ Year in Review – 2010 Edition, or as I like to call it VFTBYIR-2010E, for short.

Oh, just one thing: Pay no attention to the subtle and repeated placement of gratuitous links to previous VFTB articles scattered throughout this week’s post. My tech person told me search engines like that sort of stuff. Hope you don’t mind. Let’s get started, shall we?

January: Avatar smashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time).  Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).

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As far as I know, I am not the strongest man in the world. I doubt I would ever be mistaken for the fastest either. But I think I can say with a high degree of confidence, that if there were a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s MOST INFLEXIBLE HUMAN BEING, my picture would appear.

Our family recently joined a health club. What a terrible mistake that was. This past week, I took my very first YOGA class ever. Oh My God. Somehow – don’t ask me how – I made it through it. But if you’re over 50 and have never tried yoga before, let mine be a cautionary tale. Don’t even think about trying yoga – unless you enjoy intense pain coupled with public humiliation.

My competition in the class looked harmless enough: 15 women of various ages and sizes and three men of Indian descent who appeared to be in top physical fitness. These 15 women and the three Indian men (who, as best as I could tell came straight out of yoga central casting) all came equipped with their yoga mats, matching yoga outfits and bare feet. There was this one lone middle-aged white guy who came in without a yoga mat, wearing a dorky T-shirt that read “I’m in shape. Round is a shape” and sporting conspicuous white socks and sneakers. That middle-aged white guy would be me. In retrospect, I’m surprised an alarm bell did not sound the moment I walked through the door, declaring that a yoga pretender was attempting to break into this yoga sanctuary. I had absolutely no business being there.

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Finally a youth sports league has realized that when it comes to our kids, winning isn’t everything. (More on that below.) For too long, we parents have been pushing our kids way too hard, telling them they need to get passing grades in school if they want to get into a top flight college, or nagging them to do their chores now rather than waiting till, say, never, or harping on them relentlessly to practice their piano longer than fourteen minutes a week if they want to do well in their recital next week.

We are constantly pushing our kids way too hard to achieve, try harder, and be nicer to their younger sister, to the point that we are forgetting one fundamental point – that no matter how much of a snot-nosed brat they are when we ask them to help put away the dishes for the third time, no matter how much they whine that “Angela’s parents let her have Internet on her cell phone – why can’t I?”, our kids are all winners in this game called life.

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Welcome to installment #61 in my periodic series of business lessons on how you can take your business to never-before-imagined levels of success. In this challenging economy, companies are forced to do more with less and continue to look for ways to squeeze efficiencies, often by means of painful layoffs and other draconian cost controls. I have a better idea: Hug your company’s way to success.

Recently the New York Times reported fascinating findings from a soon-to-be-published research study by scientists at University of California at Berkeley. They measured the level of physical contact between teammates in the National Basketball Association over an entire season. Their conclusion: Teams and individuals that hugged, high-fived and chest bumped their teammates more tended to outperform those that engaged in less frequent affectionate physical contact.

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