13 2009 GLOBE NEWSWIRE ICC Worldwide Inc

It was still not a pretty week any way you look at it.Most of the time, I feel like a New England weather forecaster when I make my picks It's a ridiculous job sometimes, and if I'm wrong, oh well. I get a fresh slate tomorrow and I get to make the same dumb mistakes without consequences. Much of the NFL has evolved into a league of entitled, underachieving multi-millionaires who show up, sort of, play the game, sort of, shower, tweet, and go home.They shrug off questions, or they use stock quotes like, "We just didn't execute." No kidding.Or they point fingers. Or they sneak out a side door and avoid reporters altogether.Trying to predict what a team will do on any given Sunday has evolved into a contemplation of some truly finer points of the game. We all have ideas about how games will be won or lost.Going down the weekly NFL schedule, I feel like I'm back in college spending way too much time cutting class to go to Suffolk Downs to bet on old, broken-down horses handled by crooked trainers and ridden by small men sporting crops with battery packs in them. It was a real mind game, and if you knew the cast of characters pretty well, you could pick up a buck or two.Push come to shove, just hang around under the tote board, wait for a ton of money to show up somewhere in the last thirty seconds before the betting windows closed, hit a window quickly and wait around for the end of the race to cash a ticket on a fixed race.And here I am, half a lifetime later, using those same skills to try to predict the NFL: Try to understand who's thinking what, look for a cue, hit a window just as it's closing, hope my pick doesn't break down coming down the stretch.Even at a good track, which Suffolk Downs was not, sometimes the best horse wins, and sometimes it does not. If it were as simple as reading a Racing Form, there would be no reason to run the race.And so it is with the NFL. Oh, in the end, the cream tends to rise to the top, but in the weekly merry-go-round of games, nothing ever surprises me.My picks last weekend were so bad, I think I would have done better with a dart board.Among other miscues, I made what reasoned out to a fairly convincing argument for the Panthers to upend the Saints, and for about a half, it looked like it might happen.In the end, of course, my prediction for the upset of the week went south as the Saints proved that they deserve to be 8-0 for the first time in team history.The Panthers proved that they deserved to go home with their tails tucked between their legs because they could have won that game.From owner Jerry Richardson to head coach John Fox to alleged QB Jake Delhomme to $1,000,000-a-game defensive end Julius Peppers, they should all be ashamed of themselves, but I can't imagine they are.Peppers really earned his pay in Week Nine, with one tackle recorded on the day That was a one million dollar tackle.

My whole house and everything in it is not worth what Julius Peppers made for one tackle. Think about that.People are starving, children have no health care, people are murdered by the thousands in faraway countries where life is more miserable than anything we can imagine, and Julius Peppers made a million bucks for one stinking tackle.The bum, he's worse than the little men with their battery packs. At least they did what their employers expected of them.I don't mean to get all sociological here, but I'm angry and you should be, too Peppers is but one example of what is wrong in the NFL. One way or another, the owners and the NFLPA had best come to terms, because if they don't, I suspect that fans will abandon the game in droves.But neither management nor players are accountable to us, no matter what I think.And I am no more accountable for my lousy picks than a New England weather man is in calling for sunshine when the snow has already begun to fall.However, I am willing to man up and say, hey, I was sadly mistaken. Give me the criticism I deserve.Few people were paying attention to my argument for Carolina anyway, but to those who were, I can only say that sometimes I am right about these things. And clearly, sometimes I am not.The same goes for a half dozen other lousy picks I made.As I said to someone in the threads: What good is life if you can't go out on the occasional limb with a laptop in one hand and a chainsaw in the otherMy new motto..

CORONA DEL MAR, Calif., Jan. 13, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) ICC Worldwide, Inc.(Pink Sheets:ICCW) today announced financial results for the fiscal year endedSeptember 30, 2008. For the year, revenue was $255,588 from the company'scontinuing telecommunications wholesale operations and $1,149,163 fromdiscontinued retail store operations for the same period. The retail stores weresold on October 31, 2008 following the end of the fiscal year. The Companyincurred a net loss of $4,691,601 for the year ended September 30, 2008including $1,977,141 in losses from the discontinued retail store operations.ICC's President & CEO, Rich Lauer stated, "Fiscal 2008 was a challenging yearfor ICC Worldwide.