So I am in the gym yesterday morning, pushing myself through my normal workout and towards the end of my hour-plus, I look up and there’s Dan Duquette, former GM of the Boston Red Sox, working out. Bizarre. I had heard he lived in Acton, MA, but one would figure that a guy like that probably made some good money in his day and would have the required gym equipment in his own house? Oh well.
This whole Alex Rodriguez thing is the perfect example of how frustrating professional sports can be. Let’s get this straight – the player wants to come here, Texas (his current team) wants to trade him, the Red Sox want to acquire him. Yet the union doesn’t want it to happen because something like 4-6% of his original salary (made up of, ahem, $252 million dollars over 10 years) is the sacrifice Rodriguez would have to make to do what he wants. Then he says “I’ll do the trade if the union approves it.” What a sissy. What a bunch of babies, in fact. The union, which possesses a strangle-hold on those in their employ, is an organization that borders on the illegal and Rodriguez himself shouldn’t escape blame for whoring himself out three years ago and then not putting up more of a fight for himself this week. Ridiculous. Love baseball, hate the greed.
A couple of interesting magazine tidbits I found while flying home from Chicago last week:
– For those of you who tihnk Google can do no wrong and are ready to scrape your bank account clean to get into Google’s upcoming IPO, I strongly advise you read this article. Personally, I wouldn’t touch their IPO with a ten-foot pole. I’m going off memory here, but I believe they are valuating the company somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion, which is slightly more than Yahoo last time I checked. Overvalued? Remember, Yahoo has multiple revenue sources and many businesses. Google has, by and large, one source of revenue – paid search. I shouldn’t pick on Google alone, either – most search engines have but one source of revenue – it just so happens that revenue is currently the hottest and hippest form of advertising. Additionally, my aversion to Google’s IPO isn’t necessarily specific to Google – I tend to avoid IPO’s in general. Now that I think about it, I don’t dabble much in the stock market at all. Take my words with a grain of salt, but I think common sense is common sense here.
– Also, while thumbing through the Google article at O’Hare, I picked up the inaugural copy of Tracks magazine, a new music publication targeted towards adults. I was completely underwhelmed. I should have known because they put Sting on the cover. I don’t feel like Sting has written or sung an important song since 1983. The whole magazine, in fact, feels like fake white-boy blues to me. You know what I mean? It’s almost too carefully put together, constructed with all brains and no guts whatsoever. I’ll probably leaf through another issue or two, but my first impression is not a good one.
Song now playing: Kings Of Leon – “Happy Alone”