A Convergence of Holidays ----- It's almost Memorial Day, a time when most of us take a little extra time to relax. For a lot of us, it signals the start of summer; it comes around the time most school years end, and in warmer places, pools start to open after Memorial day. It's a day of barbeques and soda and chips and lots of other things. But this year is special. Get out your limited-edition comics and author-signed fantasy novels. Throw your polyhedral dice on the tabletop. Grab your lightsabers.

Here at Smarty, we enjoy our geekery. All of us indulge in pop culture to some degree, and while we all enjoy different flavors of said pop culture, there's at least one we all agree on without question: Star Wars. And that means that May 4th is a pretty crucial holiday for us. Hopefully all of you are celebrating in some way. We celebrated by buying tickets to go see Avengers: Age of Ultron together as an office. It's another Disney property. . . and it's part of the reason this article was written.

Written by Jonathan Oliver Comcast's Evil Twin We love our movies and our television. After a hard day at work, many Americans like to enjoy some downtime with a good TV show or movie. When technology advanced in the 1980s in the form of video cassette tapes, this gave us a new choice for how and when we consumed media. From this innovation came a natural outgrowth: the video store. Virtually every town in America had one. The stores weren't glamorous, but we came. We came because we value our ability to choose.

Why Do Some Businesses Fail, and Others Succeed Against All Odds? On the last day of my microeconomics class, my professor asked us a question: > "If there are 1. 333 trillion barrels of oil left on the planet and we use 6. 89 billion barrels of oil each year, how long will it take for us to run out of oil?" Pencils and calculators came out to solve what seemed like a math problem. I also started to do the long division, but then stepped back. It occurred to me that economics is a branch of sociology, not math.