Thank goodness it's just a horrifically painful injury with a slow recovery

It's funny how prejudices can embed themselves into seemingly innocuous phrases that survive from generation to generation. I discovered one such phrase the hard way this weekend: "Thank goodness it's just a sprain."

As the urgent-care doctor explained to me a few hours after I missed a step and sprained my foot -- an injury that announced itself with the sickening pop of tearing tissue -- a fracture would have been a "better" injury because it would have made for an easier recovery. Despite the commonness of sprains, somehow the term has come to signify a slight twisting of the ankle, the sort of thing you get over by hopping on the unaffected foot a couple of times, looking around to make sure nobody's making Gerald Ford references, and then getting on with your day.

Nuh-uh. A sprain is a rip. If the same thing happened to the outside of your body, blood and perhaps the police would be involved.

Falling in such a silly way was hard enough on the ego; I wasn't about to let anyone minimize my suffering by describing it as "just" anything. Now I have a new mission in life: Sprain awareness. I suppose I'll have to start a new nonprofit, appoint myself executive director, and recruit a board of rich people who have suffered sprains, have loved ones who have suffered sprains, or who are in some way members of the sprain community. We'll have a 5k Fun Limp to raise money, a publicity campaign called SprainAware, and after a few years in business we'll hire a rebranding firm who will donate hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of time coming up with our new slogan: "Sprain!"

So, sprain sufferers, rise up! No, actually, don't. Sit down, put some ice on that thing, and invite your friends over to watch the bruises heal.

Account(ing)ability

I'm unemployed and I vote.

Doesn't have much of a ring to it, does it? Even though millions have been thrown out of work as a result of the actions and inactions of a handful of jerks relating to mortgages, a stigma remains. The unemployed, at least in America, are unlikely to coalesce into a political force.

That's a shame, because accountability is in order. Because of poor writing skills (yes, it actually is a question of elementary writing skills) it is not possible for me to determine when the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment intends to release the insurance payments I'm entitled to. (Notice I don't call them benefits; these are merely insurance payments, and even if I receive everything I could possibly be entitled to, I'll still have paid far more into the system than I'll ever get out of it.)

Nor can one call, write, or e-mail the department to get an answer. It's the worst sort of bureaucracy, not something that makes me proud to be a Coloradan. Then there are the upfront mistakes the department made, like buying software that doesn't work, a genius move that seems to be obligatory for government agencies.

Department chief Don Mares has been complaining publicly about lack of resources, but knowing something about how workplaces work, I think I see an additional explanation for the department's poor performance:

Poor performance.

Charity aggravator

We all know bad things happen to good people. Now, according to one consultant, an extremely bad thing is happening to good charities.

Former Oracle executive Kevin Boulas is firmly in the nonprofits-are-businesses-and-need-to-be-treated-like-businesses-in-all-respects camp, so in a broad sense he favors the trend to apply the tools of financial analysis and transparency to charities. But he says the most prominent operation to do so -- Charity Navigator -- is bringing the worst of Wall Street to the nonprofit sector by inadvertently forcing the donors and executives who should be creating a better future, to focus instead on short-term results.

Charity Navigator, which is itself a 501(c)(3), assigns charities a rating of 0 to 4 stars, and this rating is based primarily on the proportion of revenue that the organization spends on its mission rather than on itself. Charity Navigator slices and dices the data in lots of fun ways, but it all comes from publicly available IRS forms. Anyone who has a calculator with a divide key can do the same thing.

The ratio of programmatic to administrative expenses was an important way of judging nonprofits long before Charity Navigator came along in 2001; indeed, many foundations restrict grants so that none of their money can go toward general operating expenses like salaries and utility bills. This has long irked nonprofit CEOs, who, when they are feeling particularly gutsy, point out that people (and the phone company) need to be paid if the mission has any hope of being fulfilled. To stigmatize general operating expenses is to imply that all charity work should be done by volunteers rather than professionals. Taken to its logical end, this means the only people permitted to execute the mission should be the independently wealthy on the one hand, and destitute monks and nuns on the other. The middle class need not apply.

“I’ve got a foundation willing to give me a million dollars, but only after I get a pilot program up and running,” the founder of a new organization that aims to bring more arts education into high-poverty schools told me. “How do I get the pilot up without funding?”

By blindly following this tradition of programs-and-services-good, general-operating-expenses-bad -- and amplifying it by throwing around judgmental words like “best” and “worst” and “overpaid” -- Charity Navigator may indeed steer donors away from crooked operators who blow money meant for crippled orphans on Jaguars and hookers for themselves. But it also steers them away from nonprofits that dare to invest in their own future capacity, Boulas charges. Giving to a charity that earns Charity Navigator’s highest marks is no different from investing in a company that spends 100% of revenue on production, with nothing left over to do research, pay employees or repay investors. Nice idea, but no company can afford to operate like…

Well, like a charity. Boulas’s point is that actual charities can’t afford to operate “like a charity” either. “Charity Navigator merely reinforces opacity. It forces nonprofits to game the numbers instead of opening the books,” he told me. “Companies build themselves to last for a very long time, but they seem to begrudge nonprofits the same privilege.”

By propagating an erroneous view of how nonprofits are supposed to spend their money, Boulas contends, Charity Navigator has perpetuated Wall Street’s most dangerous myth: that because only today matters, accountability can be put off forever.

Fidelity likes the ladies

For fundraisers, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s recent study of gender differences in giving habits may seem like a throwback to the future. Like the vacuum salesmen of yore or Zero Mostel courting Broadway benefactors in “The Producers,” we’re advised to ask if we may kindly speak with the lady of the house.

Fidelity didn’t put it quite that baldly. Without actually using the words “wymyn” or “grrrls,” Fidelity dressed the study in the language of feminism: “Women are more likely than men to report they assumed the role of primary or sole decision-maker with regard to how much was donated to charity and which charities received donations over the past two years.”

What that comes down to, of course, is a restatement of the wisdom of the ancients (the ones who created soap operas): that women typically control a household’s discretionary income.

The study further confirmed stereotypes by finding that rich women are the best givers of all. (Do you go to a theater? Any theater? In the playbill, dollars to donuts, there will be a report on a fundraising gala that will consist largely of photos of ruddy-cheeked matrons beaming at one another. Them’s the ones.) Aside from being likely to give more dollars, such women have several attributes that may make them particularly good prospects for long-term relationship-building: they are likeliest to use giving vehicles that require forethought, such as donor-advised funds; likeliest to donate securities; likeliest to work with a financial adviser; and least likely to request anonymity.

Perhaps most important, high-income women were most likely to agree with the statement “In challenging economic times I typically give more because the need is greater.” Thirty-five percent of high-income women said this sounds like them, versus 25% of high-income men.

The study defined high-income as $150,000 or more in “household income” and made no distinction between women who clawed their way to success and those who married it. From charities’ perspective, it may not matter. Whether you’ve come a long way, baby, or not, we’re glad to know you.

Block that shot

I'm not sure if it's a Denver thing, a small-market thing or a postmodern thing, but I surely do despise a species of camera shot that infests the local TV news.

Not since a drunken sailor operated the cameras at "NYPD Blue" has my attention been so urgently drawn to the camera rather than the subject. Denver's "photojournalists," as one station calls them, frequently capture the reflection of a person being interviewed in a shiny object such as a window or a glossy-painted car, rather than the person himself or herself. So we'll hear, for example, a sheriff's deputy saying, "The suspect fled at a high rate of speed," and what we see is the deputy's distorted face reflected in the fender of his squad car.

I can't imagine what this technique adds to any story. The print equivalent would be something like writing, "If anybody could have heard the deputy speak, this is what they would have heard: 'The suspect fled at a high rate of speed,'" rather than simply, "'The suspect fled at a high rate of speed,' the deputy said."

Stop being fancy-pants, "photojournalists," and just get the story.

The MonkeySwing War (1950-2009)

Freedom isn't free but MonkeySwing is, and I want very much to download it onto my iPod. However I keep getting an error message, something about network this or that. It could be argued that I should be working on my proposal-writing and interviewing skills, but my ancestors suffered and strived so that I could live in liberty and I intend to honor their sacrifice by grabbing me some MonkeySwing before the price goes up.

We all know the net has been under-performing lately, and I think it has to do with traffic being rerouted around those big denial-of-service attacks. I believe we're going to wake up one morning and President Obama is going to be on TV saying the first wave of bombers have returned from their sorties over North Korea and God bless America. Unless the North Koreans manage to sneak out a nuke or two -- in which case those of us who are left will be talking about that -- I believe the free world will immediately start talking about what to call whatever it is that just started. The Second Korean War? Or, because the first one never really ended, a new battle in the Korean War (1950-2009)?

I believe that in an unguarded moment with Michelle or some of the pastors he's been test-driving, the President has already confessed that Bush was right about the Axis of Evil after all. In the early-morning speech I envision, he is going to seek our and God's forgiveness for getting us into a third war when we elected him to do something about the first two, but then remind us that he pledged never to hesitate to use force to protect American interests. He will conclude by saying:

"The Second Korean War has begun"

or

"After all these years, the Korean War is finally about to end."

If I have grandchildren, I will tell them that American fighters and the Korean people, cheated of proper lives by their dictators, suffered and strived so that they, too, could download in liberty. The history e-books may disagree, but to me it will be the MonkeySwing War.

1.5% for what?

A recent inheritance gave me the opportunity to do something I've wanted to do forever: fire my investment adviser.

Truth be told, the parting was mutual. After being split four ways, the remains of my late father-in-law's IRA were too small for this firm to want to keep under management. Meantime, from my perspective, paying their annual fee of 1.5% -- while modest compared with, say, the 100% that Bernie Madoff commanded -- would be like buying a small motorcycle every year and immediately destroying it, only less fun. So it was a case of you-can't-quit-you're-fired-you-can't-fire-me-I-quit.

Before getting to that point, the firm made a halfhearted attempt to explain to my wife the value they add, and she made a halfhearted attempt to explain it to me. There wasn't much to say. To justify the 1.5% fee they would need to prove they earned clients 1.5-plus-n% more than clients could earn themselves, and they couldn't.

Because this was a retirement account we did view the firm's four-page, single-spaced analysis of projected income and expenses in retirement. This proposal established beyond doubt that whoever wrote it had passed Algebra 1 and been legitimately promoted to Algebra 2. But it relied on two variables that were pure, laughable guesswork: how long you intended to live and how much you intended your investments to earn.

To gullible widows and orphans (and this money was now literally widow and orphan money) it may seem possible to balance the levers of longevity and return to produce a desired result. But it's an absurd notion. If we could have instructed someone to select lower-yielding stocks and thereby extend my father-in-law's life, don't you think we would have?