- What’s the best way to spend that spare $583,500 you have
lying around? If you’re the wealthy, anonymous soul who just picked up a sweet
piece of sports memorabilia at Christie’s auction house, the answer is you buy
a used "Shoeless" Joe Jackson game bat that you’re probably going to
slap inside a display case and never actually lay hands on. This unidentified
online bidder made their big buy on the first of a two-day auction of baseball
memorabilia from the National Pastime Museum, an online museum based on a
private collection of baseball artifacts, photographs and memorabilia. The bat
even has a name, “Black Betsy,” and is one of two existing bats from Jackson’s
career - but the only one with his full signature in script stamped into the
barrel. Jackson was famously was accused with other Chicago White Sox teammates
of accepting payments for throwing the 1919 World Series and even though he was
acquitted, he was acquitted but still banned from the sport. The good news for
the bidder who paid more than half a million dollars for this bat is that
should his or her significant other or family complain that he or she spent
that much money on a display item to impress guests, all this person needs to
do is point out that the auction record for a game-used baseball bat is a 1923
Babe Ruth bat that sold for $1.2 million in 2004. This bidder paid less than
half of that amount, allowing him or her to classify it as an outright
bargain……..
- Many of us suspect - rightly so - that a lot of our fellow
travelers at the airport are morons. Fernando Giron, a business traveler flying
from Sacramento to Los Angeles, proved as much when he managed to evade the
multiple airport security and administrative measures designed to prevent
people from not getting on flights for which they are not a ticketed passenger
and board the wrong plane. Instead of flying to LAX, he got on a bird bound for
DFW and didn’t realize his mistake until it was far too late. “I did look at
the monitor. I saw the gate and I thought I was in the clear,” Giron said.
“When the pilot made the announcement that the weather was going to be clear
and a smooth flight to Dallas … everybody was shocked, the crew, the people at
the counters, the people at the doors; they had no explanation for what
happened.” As a business traveler, Giron has often traveled the one-hour path
from Sacramento to LAX, so he apparently does now how to find and go through
the correct gate. Sure, the gate for his actual flight and the one he actually
boarded are right next to each other, but it’s unclear how he managed to get
diverted to the incorrect plane. “What I
don’t understand is that they scanned my boarding pass and that I was able to
go all the way to the plane,” Fernando said. What say you, American Airlines,
about this disconcerting error? “We are aware of the incident and we are
investigating with our Sacramento team how it occurred. Our customer relations
team will contact the passenger directly,” the airline said in a statement.
Thanks for talking and saying nothing at all, AA, just like the true corporate
titan you are………
- Speculating on when popular hip-hop artists will drop
their new album has become an unofficial sport within the music business. Frank
Ocean and his peers have taunted fans and critics with extended waits for their
latest projects, often taking a year or more beyond their original (rumored)
target date for a release and if Kendrick Lamar is to be believed, he’s
trending in the same direction. The rapper has suggested that his new album may
not be ready for some time, which is even worse news because his previous
release was something of a rip-off. “Untitled Unmastered” consisted simply of
demos and improvised songs from the recording sessions from his critically
acclaimed “To Pimp A Butterfly,” so Lamar really didn’t give the world much of
anything new. When asked about the actual, legitimate successor to “Butterfly,”
he said the new album is still at the planning stages and that it’s too soon to
hint at how it might sound. “I have ideas, and I have a certain approach. But I
want to see how it manifests. I want to put all the paint on the wall and see
how that goes,” Lamar said. “‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ will always have some type
of DNA in my music. But me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. That’s a
gift and a curse, but more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box. My
ability to express and still make the connection wherever I go, that’s my high
point. That’s something I pride myself on.” All of that sounds like a recipe
for a nice, long creation process and an extended wait for the masses…….
- Anyone who’s been in Germany, Austria or the other
countries most directly affected by the atrocities of the Third Reich during
the World War II era knows there are certain things you just do NOT do. You don’t
espouse the hatefulm genocidal beliefs of Adolf Hitler and his crew, you don’t do
the Nazi salute with your arm and hand and you don’t say the words, “Heil
Hitler” for any reason. That lesson has been administered the hard way for an
Austrian police officer found guilty by a court in the eastern city of
Eisenstad of saying "Heil Hitler" while on duty at the border to
Hungary. The officer, who was not identified in line with Austrian
confidentiality laws, denied uttering the phrase, but the court still found him
guilty of contravening anti-Nazi laws by and sentenced him to a suspended nine-month
prison term. He was convicted on the basis of testimony from fellow officers,
one of whom said he heard him speak the words, while the other testified that
he was present when he later apologized for saying them. If your co-workers are
narcing you out, either you’re a bad guy and they don’t mind seeing you go down
or you’re a really bad guy and they’re willing to make sh*t up just to see you
go down, but either way, it’s not a positive sign. Prosecutor Christian Peto
told the court that after stopping a car on the border with Hungarian license
plates earlier this year, the accused officer literally started his official
observational duties by uttering the offending words, so he either has a really
warped sense of humor or he harbors a rather discomfiting love for Austria’s
most evil native son……..
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