Winner and Loser and “Anything”

Well, now the songs from the single “Anything” have been sent to our e-mail subscribers, a week in advance, and it will indeed be interesting to hear what the reaction will be. I you would like to get the songs now you can sign up here.

And since I wrote a post some weeks ago about failures and winner-loser culture, I just had to share a story I found in Levitt and Dubner’s book “Freakonomics“:

A poor black couple in New York had a boy back in 1958, and the man decided to name him Winner. Obviously he thought that the name Winner Lane would guarantee his son future success.

Three years later, the couple received another son, and for some strange reason they named this son Loser! So this second son had to grow up with the name Loser Lane, and as far as the story goes he hasn’t changed it later.

Loser, though, didn’t seem too affected by his name; he got a scholarship, graduated from college and started working at the New York police department. Eventually he became a high ranked officer as a police inspector. It seems that no one hardly ever calls him Loser, though; people call him a range of other names like Jimmy, Timmy and even Losier and his colleagues just call him Lou.

What happened to Winner then, you may wonder? Well, his biggest achievement seems to be his long criminal record containing more than 40 occasions of burglary, abuse and other stuff.

Maybe then names doesn’t matter too much or maybe they do; the father just mixed up the boys.

/Pär