One of my favorite financial lists: Forbes's Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. It's reassuring, in a way, to know that you needn't be a rock star or movie star to leave your heirs with a perpetual multimillion-dollar royalty stream: you can be a cartoonist, a bookish professor with a fondness for hobbits, or Dale Earnhardt. The top ten:

1. Elvis
2. Charles Schulz
3. J.R.R. Tolkein
4. John Lennon
5. George Harrison
6. Dr. Seuss
7. Dale Earnhardt
8. Tupac Shakur
9. Bob Marley
10. Marilyn Monroe

Also on the list is Dr. Robert Atkins, whose diet book, Forbes notes, has topped the New York Times paperback self-help list for 333 consecutive weeks. And all I see when I go outside are fat, fat children.