United Artists (And Capitalists)

Money Games With Sprocket Holes

Here's something from Pleiades that you ought to check out.

Wyler, a notoriously difficult director, was one who secretly relished the responsibility and autonomy he was given by the Mirisch brothers, Relyea says.

As Wilder wrote in his 1970 book, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily: "All the Mirisch Company asks me is the name of a picture, a vague outline of the story and who's going to be in it. The rest is up to me. You can't get any more freedom than that."

Relyea worked with Wyler on The Children's Hour starring Audrey Hepburn, and during the halcyon days was assistant director on such films as The Great Escape and West Side Story. He left to work as an independent producer and watched as the Kerkorian-led MGM and UA was sucked into one of Hollywood's greatest disasters, Heaven's Gate.

Michael Cimino's 1980 film followed his stunning The Deer Hunter and he made it with all the hubris of an over-praised talent. His indulgences bankrupted UA and spawned one of cinema's best books, Steven Bach's Final Cut.

"I just couldn't believe it," Relyea says of Cimino's scandal.

"It's so wrong because you are owed responsibility. If William Wyler can adhere to that, then everybody should respond to that.

"To think of the damage, observing from the outside, when you take a fine studio like that and take it under with one picture."

Relyea returned to MGM-UA in the '90s to supervise films including Tomorrow Never Dies, The Birdcage, Get Shorty, Legally Blonde and Rob Roy. The business has changed dramatically in his 50-year career.

"I don't know what the word studio means now," he says.

"I'm not sure any of them will exist (in the future). There's going to be distribution companies with names you and I recognise but I think in terms of a studio being run by an Irving Thalberg or Jack Warner, I don't think that's going to come back, I'm afraid.

"Sony and Time Warner or Transamerica, they're not in the motion picture business, they're in a lot of businesses," he adds.

"I don't want to sound like they were the good old days because they weren't always good, but I'm just wondering if when one guy was saying, 'My gut instinct tells me this could make a good picture,' we weren't getting better product. That's what history tells me."

I cut and pasted that bit because it shows the double edged sword of letting directors have control. Some of them are Willie Wyler, some of them are Michael Cimino. The hyper-industrialised model has yielded a non-stop procession of comic book fodder with built-in audiences and therefore minimal risk taking. I know I took the Oscars to task for not reflecting what the audiences actually thought with their wallets, but you have to say that the film business today is less adventurous than decades ago.

Anyway, this all got me to be thinking...

Back in 1990-1991, US$40million was considered astronomical. Bruce Willis was mercilessly pilloried for his vanity project 'Hudson Hawk', which was a quirky stinker that had that price tag. Within 12months James Cameron would rewrite the budget rule book with 'Terminator 2', which came in at US$120million.

This is back in the day when a big budget movie in Australia were like... err..., there was exactly one: 'Blood Oath', had a fraction of 'Hudson Hawk'. At that point in time, the Australian Industry began its contraction, and under the misguidance of the FFC, proceeded to make quirky movies with no market appeal at about A$2-5million, when the international budgets exploded. You could say it was the moment that Australian cinema got relegated out of the first division of international cinema.

I don't know why people missed that the playing field changed dramatically with the advent of the super-budgets. It seems awfully obvious in retrospect.

Belatedly, 'Australia' went out to the world as the super-budget film from Australia and promptly tanked. Some would say this justifies not making films with huge budgets. I would think it says it jutifies not making films that brown off audiences.

Capitalism On The Brink

Watching Stocks Fall


Back in 1997, I had a conversation with my old man about the Dow Jones. The gist of it had to do with whether it would break 10,000 by the millennium. It didn't even take that long. In the last day, it has fallen to 1997 levels. One of the things that lent it a great deal of in-credibility was the fact that the share prices were rising in spite of the fact that dividends were not.

The point of investing in shares as a proper capitalist venture is that you expect to share in the venture's profits. Dividend are those annualised share of profits. This is capitalism in its purest form. Forget what the new paradigm might be or what bonds traders might say, the point of the share market is to connect investors with the right ventures. The fact that share prices kept climbing in spite of the fact that they weren't paying a great dividend didn't seem to matter, and the company bosses insisted that the rise in share value reflected their good work; and that the investor should be the one to benefit equally for having the share price rise, left my father incredulous in 1997.

That is to say, my father would have much preferred getting the 6% in dividends rather than in the increase in share value. Since then, we may have seen a continued bubble on shares, thanks to the need for funds handling Superannuation monies to park investments *somewhere* and why not put them in shares? Those rises in share prices we've seen since 1997 may have had nothing to do with good corporate management, or innovations being rewarded, but just a blunt sum result of people's superannuation money building into a momentum with nowhere to go.

Let's face it, it's actually hard to do the proper capitalist thing. It takes hard work from all involved. It's easier to cut costs than to develop a new profitable venture. In the rush to create apparent profits, first world industries have been farming out manufacturing to places with cheap labor, thus cutting out the option of being competitive in the long term. Now that times are tough, there's not much in the way of management that can save those firms. What good is a company whose share prices have collapsed and their dividends are still only giving at best 1% return?

It's even more dire than that for capitalism itself. Thanks to the stopped flow of credit, the Detroit 3 are on the brink of elimination, taking with them a whole armada of sub-contractors. Whatever its ills and misdeeds, the US automotive industry represents one of the few last lines of manufacturing in America. If those 3 companies go down, and the suppliers who make parts go down with them, just how much manufacturing power is going to be left in the USA?

Yes it's true they've been making cruddy cars for years and years and have only themselves to blame as they inch ever closer to oblivion, but you have to think somebody has to prop them up. Like who? Try the oil companies. After all, it was the automotive industry's tacit alliance with the oil money that made them deny global warming, or not pursue alternative energy sources or fuels, to essentially lollygag all the way into this millennium without addressing fundamental issues about just what a car is in the scheme of life. When you think about it, the oil companies ought to be the ones who fork out the money to prop up their old allies-in-global-warming-denial. However, that is a side issue.

Here's the thing that really irks me in all of this Global Fried Chicken thing. What if all the major manufacturers of most anything simply go under? What if all the car manufacturers of America, Japan, Europe and Asia simply vanish? What then? And when administrators come in to sell off the assets, who is going to be there to buy them that can make a better car than the existing manufacturers? And what if it wasn't just car manufacturers, but computer manufacturers and chip manufacturers and electronics manufacturers and anybody nd everybody that actually assembles anything gets hung out to dry by the failing financial system?

Is it possible? Probably not, but then I didn't think what we're seeing now as probable.

So going back to the capitalist thing... this is where I think we've run into problems. We've mistaken speculators for capitalists. The definition of a capitalist isn't somebody who speculates on the prices of things. That's a speculator. The middle man who buys low and sells high - the distributor in most instances - is a mercantilist at best. The True Capitalist is the guy who goes and secures the capital to assemble the means of production. That's it. It doesn't matter whether it's Apple, Nike, GM or Microsoft.

When banks foreclose on these guys, while themselves getting bailed out by the government for their bad debts, this isn't just some crisis of confidence. This is the moment on which the whole premise of what capitalism is, and was, and ever should be is put at risk by all the speculating punters, all the parasitic middlemen, all the bond-traders and day-traders and short-sellers and 'financial engineers'. All that stuff should get a new and separate term: Financialism.

True Capitalists make stuff - and sells them for a profit. They should print Tee-shirts with that slogan, just to remind people. It's not a bad thing. It's very creative, and challenging. It's by no mistake that Nintendo is posting record profits even in these times. They make some seriously good stuff. True Capitalism is a good thing that brings much wealth to many people.

And you know what? As a film maker and sometime musician, I am more of a capitalist than a guy who has been pulling down a job in the finance sector. This is why I get really really angry at the way things are going. Governments are giving banks too much credit for being banks and not enough to manufacturers. It's amazing things have gotten away from the original concept so far. Maybe when the shares bottom out, people will get the proper perspective back. You want to be capitalists? First, you gotta make good stuff, second, sell them for a profit, and third, payback the investors, and only then collect your profit. That's the only way. The rest is all just 'Financialism'.

I Hate Awards Shows

The Oscars Particularly Suck

My gal loves watching the Oscars, which is fine by me, but I can't sit through these things. I think I was a kid when I quickly got over them. I think I sat up late watching to see if Star Wars would get best picture back in 1978. It sure as hell didn't. Kid disappointed. A few years later I sat up to see if 'Blade Runner' would win in its one category: Production Design. It didn't. It got beaten out by 'Gandhi', which was the 'worthy' film that year. For crying out loud, one of the most important pieces of Production Design of ALL TIME got beaten by a movie that essentially just had huts in India in it. No offense to India, but it's a crap choice - and nobody is talking about 'Gandhi' being an important work of cinema today, so we can all say that was an utterly crap moment in the long history of utterly crap moments in what we know as the Oscars.

So it was then that I got it firmly in my head that there's a whole bunch of idiots in The Academy' that line up to hand over Oscars to films not on merit or achievement but a more ethereal, indescribable, intangible worthiness of theme. You could make 'The Dark Knight'  and make $533m at the box office, but hey, the worthy films are big costume dramas based on true stories or important novels. It's great if it has a Holocaust story, because uh, a certain demographic feels compelled to hand out awards to those films that make sure the the NAZIs continue to be portrayed as the ultimate psychopathic evil on the planet. Nobody makes a film about Stalin's gulags, let alone hand out Oscars for those. Where's the love for the other oppressed peoples?

But it's even stupider, dumber, sillier and crazier than that. Spielberg's best films for me are things like 'Jaws', 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', the Indy Jones movies. I think most of the movie watching world of the last 30 years would agree with me whole-heartedly. Did he get an Oscar for those? No. He got to be a billionaire through those, but he gets an Oscar for 'Schindler's List'.Now, I'm happy for Mr. Spielberg, but it's so condescending and patronising you wonder which planet these people inhabit.

Martin Scorsese, who has to be one of the most important directors of ALL TIME didn't get his Oscar for best director for 'Taxi Driver' or 'Raging Bull' or 'Good Fellas' or 'Casino' or 'The Last Temptation of Christ' or for that matter 'Gangs of New York'. No, he got it for his effort in directing a remake of a Hong Kong movie 'Infernal Affairs', as 'The Departed'. How fucking warped is that? Why didn't they just give him the lifetime achievement award instead, and save themselves the embarrassment?

Apart from the bad viewing that it is every year, the way the Academy votes is like a drunken hypocritical sentimentalist with no sense of proportion and context. It's as if they're not seeing and hearing the same films as the rest of the damn world. The truly crazy thing is that this thing is the pinnacle of all Awards ceremonies and Awards shows. How could I ever bring myself to watch this stuff?

Heath Ledger Wins Posthumous Oscar

Good on ya mate! You're missed already.

Interesting Times For Business Types

BrisConnections Is A Misnomer

A Bris as you know, is the circumcision for little Jewish boys, and connection is, well, the opposite of cutting. Thanks or not to its oxymoronic/self-defeating name, BrisConnections finds itself in weird times. They issued shares in July, which promptly went and tanked. By November, the shares were less than 10c, and at some point they were trading at 0.1c. Enter a bunch of net traders who thought, look, how low can it go beyond 1/10th of a cent? They're still building the damn road and it is underwritten.

Thus the theory would have it that the more you bought, a killing was there to be made. There was one catch: the trust units were issued with an obligation to pay $1.00 per unit this year and then another $1.00 next year. This meant that unit holders like Nick Bolton who bought 47million of the units were up for 95million or thereabouts in obligations over the next 18months.

Bolton had just become the company's biggest shareholder and, thanks to brokers at Westpac, armed himself with 47 million part-paid BrisConnections units worth 0.1¢ each, and picked up $94 million of associated liabilities.

Bolton choked back tears as he spoke. "I have no comment to make at this stage, but I will talk at a later date," he said, before telling us that he bought the shares in an on-market transaction, and had not spoken with anyone at BrisConnections.

For months, BrisConnections company secretary Tamira Herbst tried to contact Bolton about his shareholding and staggering $94 million debt.

Goldman Sachs JBWere was engaged by BrisConnections to try to find an institutional buyer for his stake.

Emails and letters were sent to Bolton. Phone calls were made. A couple of people even braved the rather downcast looking labrador Bolton had posted at his front door in St Kilda, in an effort to speak with him.

All to no avail — he ducked the calls and the messages.

"If you speak with him again, please tell him to get in touch," said BrisConnections' key PR adviser, Mark Gold, in November. Herbst put in the same request.

Even BrisConnections chairman Trevor Rowe was stunned when Bolton, now the self-proclaimed champion of the BrisConnections underdog, finally took his call last week.

"I did speak with that fellow late on Friday afternoon to endeavour to understand what he was proceeding to do," Rowe said. "I was surprised he took the call, given our past efforts to get through to him."

At last, the face of young Nick, in all his morning-haired glory, has been revealed, and he is starting to look very much like the Corey Worthington of the business world.

Instead of hosting a rowdy house party, Bolton has instead gatecrashed the BrisConnections boardroom by calling an extraordinary general meeting to try to have its trusts wound up.

Understandably, this move by Bolton brought chuckles and derision from all quarters of the business world. Anna Bligh's Queenslan Labor government has to build the damn thing. There are others like Nick Bolton who are trapped with these 'obligations'. It seems to me part of the problem is that BrisConnections floated trust units that had $2.00 liabilities attached, so no matter what the price of the units, it was going to be minus $2.00 of its value at any point in time until the obligations phase were paid up. So, in floating trusts at $1.00 per unit, saddled with -$2.00, they effectively put a minus $1.00 units on the market.

No wonder the value dropped like a brick the day they were issued and rightfully so. I'd immediately short something like that if I knew it was coming down the pike. I'm sure the financial engineer types who put together the trusts would argue my minus-1-dollar-value-issue by telling me what I haven't factored in, but basically if you go by ROI, like most penny-ante day-traders do, it just doesn't matter.It's a 1-2=-1 equation from the get go. So people can line up and say how stupid Nick Bolton and his ilk were in buying these units; it goes without saying the people who originally devised them were just as dumb.

Now, what happens from here is the interesting bit. It's clear the penny-ante day-traders left holding these units can't afford these payments. Nick Bolton's ploy to wind up the trusts will probably fail, but what happens if:

1. These guys all unite, then


2. They send in an activist as a board director to raise hell, and,


3. They flat out fight it out in court to get out of paying?

BrisConnections could spend years in court trying to squeeze the 780 million out of people who simply "don't got them"; and these people still might declare bankruptcies to get out of paying. What would they do then? Is there a possible upside to any of this for BrisConnections or Macquarie?

You can see the headache. This is delicious. Here's some more from the SMH:

Bolton's move to wind-up the company was announced to the market this morning, after documents were lodged on Thursday, and have met with an angry response from the company's board.

BrisConnections chairman Trevor Rowe described the move to call a meeting to vote on winding up the trusts as ''a misguided and ineffective attempt to avoid its future obligations to BrisConnections''.

In order to have Brisconnections' trusts wound-up, Bolton will need 75% of the vote.

According to Rowe, unitholders will still be liable to pay the two further $1 instalments, even if Bolton is successful at the EGM.

''BrisConnections is very concerned that unit holders may misunderstand the impact of a winding up on the liability of unit holders,'' Rowe said.

''Winding up the trusts will not remove the obligation on unit holders to pay the outstanding amounts on their units including the next $1 instalment that will be called on 2 March, 2009. Regardless of the outcome of the meeting, unit holders will remain liable.

''Clearly, this proposal is not in the best interests of all unit holders and will be vigorously opposed by BrisConnections directors. In the event of the winding up proceeding BrisConnections would have no alternative but to cease trading which would leave unit holders in the position of still needing to contribute additional amounts into an entity which can never generate income.

''The consequences of winding up BrisConnections would result in complete destruction of future unit holder value,'' Mr Rowe stated.

Mr. Rowe would say that - it's in his interest. But if the unit-holders unite, they could make a LOT of trouble for  Mr. Rowe. This is going to take a lot of delicate negotiating to get Nick Bolton and people who are in a similar position to get them out of their unit-holder position - in other words, buy them out of their fingertraps. Or they might try and bully them all the way, but something tells me that you can't bully people who have their backs to the wall. They fight like hell. So, uh, good luck with that BrisConnections. :)

Heck, I'm tempted to buy 500 units at a total of $0.50 myself to get ringside seats for $1000 - which I might not have to pay if Nick Bolton's side wins.

Say It Ain't So - Redux

Okay, I Admit It, I Stayed Up Late To Watch The Grilling

So I watched the statement on video, and I watched the other bits of the Q&A. A-Rod really does himself no favors. He's a terrible interviewee in that he looks evasive all the time. It makes it hard for anybody not to lend the basic charity of understanding to his statement. Instead it provokes more questions than answers, and frankly, do we want more dodgy answers to what is already a dodgy situation? I think I've had my fill.

For A-Rod's part, we have to concede a few things to him. He's given the most outspoken admission in Baseball apart from Jose Canseco. He's come cleaner than McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, Palmeiro, Clemens, and even Pettitte and Giambi. Asking for more detail is a little unfair given that he was outed through the inaction/incompetence/faith-breaking of the MLB and MLBPA combined, and the US government that subpoenaed those results.And it's only because some body leaked them that we're all here saying "say it ain't so A-Rod and where's your fucking mea culpa?"

That's right: Let's not forget that the public was not to be privy to this information from 2003, and now that it is, we're collectively making A-Rod pay for all those 104 names. It's way too rich for the press to claim some kind of high ground as it accuses A-Rod of being evasive. And those 103 other guys sure are getting off lightly. They need to send A-Rod a very big Christmas hamper for taking ALL the heat.

As for the Yankees, they seem to be getting very tired of these PED-admissions-biennale. Giambi's "sorry, but I can't admit to what I did" thing was one thing; Pettitte saying, "yes I did, but only once' was another; now with A-Rod saying "I was young, naive and stupid, I wish I'd gone to college where they teach you this stuff" routine must have had the Yankee brass' collective stomachs churning. I like how Cashman said he liked it when A-Rod emphasised the 'stupid' part more than the 'young' part. Indeed, good sir.

Many people give Brian Cashman a hard time for being the GM of the team with the highest pay-roll, as if he's got some wasy, cushy job; but it's in these moments that I think he's gold. He sure doesn't sugar-coat things. If having to organise these horrible moments for the press with a marquee, mics, PA, etc. every couple of years, front up and keep a straight face when you want to chew the players' heads off for their stupidity... I think it would be tough. Really. You have to take your hat off to the man.

Phil Pepe sasy it's a different kind of Bronx Zoo now, but it's  a Zoo all the same. I tend to agree with that easy summation too. I think about those guys now and it seems a world away. I mean, imagine if it turned out Reggie Jackson was on steroids when he hit those 3 homers in that World Series game in 1977? This is a little bit like that hypothetical. Pardon the jokey pun, but this is the Bronx Zoo on steroids. :)

If one had 10 lifetimes, in one of them I think we'd all like to have been an elite athlete. I would've loved to have been the slugging 3B for the Yankees. I wanted to be like Graig Nettles, y'know? Crack some homers, crack some funnies at the journos. He was the man!

When the current guy filling the job description turns out to be a media-circus scandal-sheet-headline and bad-PR rolled into one entity, you wonder how such an endowed human being who is living  dream, turn his dream into such a nightmare? I mean, how do you fuck up something so good, so right royally A-Rod?

*Ugh*. But today is another day. The players are filling into spring training. There are sounds of balls being hit. The guys who got signed look good, the injured guys from last year look fresh, the guys looking to make the team look keen and pretty soon it will be the regular season!

What do the Yankees have going? They have a lineup that has A-Rod and Tex in the heart. It might be the best combo since Mantle-Maris. You'd think this thing has got to score a lot of runs. I hope they kill the league pitching. I really do - as I do every year.

A-Rod Apologia Part 25,701,932,947,462,514,234

Groan

A-Rod has his big press conference today. It's pretty grim. He says evil cousin Kevin gave him the drugs and he took it unquestioningly. We're all having our credulity stretched to breaking point, but that was the gist of it. It's so stupid that it creates more questions than it solves. Considering he had a bunch of people advising him how to handle this press conference, it looks like it was a bit of a stinker.

This is A-Rod's Statement.

Here's the NYT's take from Tyler Kepner.

Rodriguez began the news conference by reading a prepared statement and took questions for about 30 minutes. He paused for 38 seconds near the start when he tried to address his teammates, from stars like Derek Jeter to rookies like Phil Coke. “Thank you,” Rodriguez finally said.

“I saw tears in his eyes,” said Manager Joe Girardi, who sat at a table with General Manager Brian Cashman and Rodriguez. “I thought he was disappointed that it’s come to this. For him to look over and see his teammates, he was moved. I think he really felt like they were part of his family.”

The Yankees are tied to Rodriguez through 2017, after signing him to a 10-year, $275 million contract in December 2007, when Hank Steinbrenner was more visible atop the organization. (Steinbrenner attended the news conference but his brother, Hal, did not.) Rodriguez has stressed that he has been clean since joining the Yankees in 2004, and said he had never taken human growth hormone.

He did admit to using an over-the-counter supplement called Ripped Fuel when he played for the Seattle Mariners, his team from 1994 through 2000. Ripped Fuel contained the substance ephedra, which increases energy and burns fat.

In 2003, Steve Bechler, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, died after he had been using ephedra. The federal government banned the over-the-counter sale of ephedra in 2004. Major League Baseball added it to its list of banned drugs in 2005 and began testing for it a year later, along with other stimulants.

It is not clear what substance Rodriguez was referring to when he said that he had used the drug “known on the streets as boli or bollee.” Rodriguez said his cousin bought the drug legally in the Dominican Republic.

What can you say? Cousin Kevin who straps Tommy to a chair injected him with steroids? Here's a blog entry from Peter Abraham about how Brian Cashman was handling this situation.

Then we have Brian Cashman, who clearly would like to find a Wayback Machine, go back to 2007 and get rid of his third baseman.
Here is what Cashman said when asked about A-Rod saying he was young and stupid:
“Those are the facts he gave you, it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. I like the fact more that he was stupid rather than young or naïve. It was a bad decision that may cost him on so many levels.”
Then there was this:
“We’ve invested in him as an asset. And because of that, this is an asset that is going through a crisis. So we’ll do everything we can to protect that asset and support that asset and try to salvage that asset.”
An asset? Brrrrrr.

Yeah that would be right. I imagine Brian Cashman feels a deep betrayal, and it's goin to take one heck of a MVP season from A-Rod to get himself out of Cashman's doghouse.
I also want to link to this piece which kind of gives you insight on how gormless Bud Selig has been about this issue.

In a lengthy telephone interview Monday, the commissioner of baseball strongly disputed the widely held perception that he was in any way complicit in the proliferation of steroids in major-league baseball during the past 15 years.

"I don't want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn't care about it,'' Selig said. "That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I'm sensitive to the criticism. The reason I'm so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we've come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible.''

Selig pointed to the reduction in the number of positive steroid tests among major- and minor-league players during the past three years, as well as the institution of amphetamine testing as evidence that baseball's 2005 drug policy is working.

He also defended his efforts to stop the use of performance-enhancing drugs as far back as 1999, the year after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two now-suspected steroid cheats, staged a seasonlong home run derby that helped pull baseball out of the tailspin it went into after the work stoppage of 1994.

"I'm not sure I would have done anything differently,'' Selig said. "A lot of people say we should have done this or that, and I understand that. They ask me, 'How could you not know?' and I guess in the retrospect of history, that's not an unfair question. But we learned and we've done something about it. When I look back at where we were in '98 and where we are today, I'm proud of the progress we've made.''

Selig said he pushed for a more stringent drug policy during the labor negotiations of 2002 but ultimately settled for a watered-down version out of fear that the players association would force another work stoppage.

"Starting in 1995, I tried to institute a steroid policy,'' Selig said. "Needless to say, it was met with strong resistance. We were fought by the union every step of the way."

It's a bit like a guy arriving late by train claiming the train broke down, but he jogged in the direction of the destination while the cariage was being fixed. This is the same Baseball Commissioner's office that had Kennesaw Mountain Landis unilaterally ban the Black Sox back in the day.

Why didn't Bud get tougher? Why did he wait all those years before he gently nudged the subject towards the Union? It wasn't as if the warning signs weren't there. It should have been one of the non-negotiables. When the premier slugger on the premier team gets busted for steroids, it's a little late, don't you think? The Yankees are having to wear a lot of the Steroid smear thanks to the players it signed on the basis of their steroid fueled performances. If I were Hank and Hal, I'd be a little pissed off about how Bud's timidity in tackling the issue ended up as the Yankees' PR nightmare.

As a guy who roots for the laundry, this is just all too alienating. It also brought this question to mind: If a model inflates her boobs and ends up on the Sports Illustrated calendar, does anybody cry foul for her performance getting enhanced?

It's professional sports. It's not amateur sports or the Olympics. The records are all tainted, so those don't matter. Maybe we're all barking up the wrong tree? Maybe what needs to happen is a way in which PEDs are administered rationally and reasonably to help Pro athletes perform with PEDs without coming to harm?

Jose Canseco is now vindicated. He wants an apology.

Jose Canseco believes he was the only player telling the whole truth about steroids. Who used and when. For how long.
He was called a liar and a huckster for admitting in two books he juiced for nearly the entire length of a 462 home run career and describing how he injected teammates with illegal anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.
Now that players he named in his tell-all memoirs, like Alex Rodriguez and Rafael Palmeiro, have admitted using performance-enhancing drugs or flunked drug tests, Canseco wants an apology from baseball for treating him as an outcast.
"It's time for somebody in baseball to say to Jose Canseco, 'We're sorry you got treated the way you did,"' said Canseco's attorney, Dennis Holahan.
The former Bash Brother wants more than forgiveness from baseball. He wants to educate the sport, too. Canseco offered to help baseball move on from the steroid era and end the use of banned substances with education about the dangers of drugs, starting at the high school level.
Holahan sent a letter last week to union head Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, the union's chief operating officer, offering the former slugger's assistance.
Holahan's letter explained how Canseco regretted writing his 2005 book, "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big," and wanted to restore his "good name."
"Nevertheless, after being vilified and labelled an informant and a liar, all allegations, in both of his books, have now been proven to be truthful, including the recent news about Alex Rodriguez," Holahan said in the letter obtained by The Associated Press.
Holahan held a conference call on Friday with two union lawyers, including Steve Fehr, and spoke again with Fehr on Tuesday to discuss the letter.
"We want some kind of joint response to the situation and some plan to move forward where Jose is included, instead of excluded," Holahan said Tuesday night.

Frankly, I don't blame him. If Bonds was allowed to hit his home runs on PEDs and everybody turned a blind eye, and Canseco had to limp away with 36 homers to go for 500, just because he was vocal and open about steroids, the man deserves an apology from somebody. It wasn't like he couldn't play any more at that point. They, as in the owners and front offices shunned him to put a lid on the steroid talk, hoping he would go away. Clearly, they betted wrong.

What a fucking mess.

I found this on BTF. The original's been edited back, but it's worth grabbing the full quote.

Group mentalities are easy. Too easy. We’re the Yankees, we all wear the same uniform, we all have one goal, we all will man up and support our guy. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s the same blather you hear from high school football coaches; from college basketball coaches; hell, from Klan leaders and gang leaders. We are one. We stand together. Be a man. Fight the power.

Bulls$%#.

Being a man (which, for the record, is one of the dumbest phrases ever; is “being a man” different than “being a woman?” Are we tougher, stronger, more courageous than women? Hardly) means having guts to go against the uniform and the expected behavior. Of course the Yankees are going to stand behind Rodriguez—because 95% of these boobs have never taken a stand in their lives. The foundation of their existences centers around repetition and precision; doing as told and being robotic in response and output. That, more than anything, is why I’d rather my daughter and son become bowling shoe cleaners than pro athletes. I want them to be blessed with conviction and decency, not mindless adherence.

So, New York Yankee players, line up behind a man who cheated; who lied; who shamed the game. Line up behind someone who has shown you and your profession no respect.

Line up behind him—because he would line up behind you.

Totally agreed. It shits me quite a bit that the Yankees are trotting out their star players to 'support' A-Rod. Support him for what exactly? To hold his hand through this tough time, having cheated and totally fucked up the public trust for the game, the franchise and any respect somebody might have had for the rest of them? This reflects badly on EVERYBODY - the players, the owners, the front offices, the coaches, the MLB, the MLBPA, the agents, the journalists who covered them and the fans. Yeah, us, the fans.

I want to close off with this photo of the guys from Peter Abraham's blog:



Interesting expressions on the dynasty four, huh? Mo, Andy, Derek and Jorge. Imagine what they're really thinking.

Freedom of Expression Blues

Freedom Of Speech In Retreat

I guess I'm cranky when I get the flu, and very impatient too.

One of the big issues for me at this blog is actually the freedom of speech issue, whether it be letting artists do their thing (like Bill Henson) or letting cartoonists do their thing, or letting authors do their thing - I mean, I want to do my thing, get into it you know? Like a Blog Machine. Count it in now! - yes, even let musicians sing about sex and drugs.

So here's an article in The Economist that's worth checking out.

TWO decades ago, on 14th February 1989, Salman Rushdie received one of history’s most notorious Valentine greetings. Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) calling for the death of the Indian-born British author in response to his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. Khomeini called on all “intrepid” and “zealous” Muslims to execute the author and publishers, reassuring them that if they were killed in the process, they would be regarded as martyrs.

Rarely had a book stirred up such intense feelings. Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator and William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, were stabbed and shot respectively, although both survived. Bookshops were bombed and the tome was burned in public across the world. Mr Rushdie, fearing for his life, was forced into hiding.

Horrific though these consequences were, many argued that freedom of speech itself was at stake. To cave in, by withdrawing publication or sale of the work, would represent the crumbling of a defining principle of liberal societies. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran over the threat to kill a British citizen. At no point did Penguin, the original publisher, withdraw the book. It remained possible to argue that Mr Rushdie’s intolerant detractors, despite their violence, had lost their battle.

Yet critics today, such as Kenan Malik, a writer and broadcaster, argue that the detractors have gradually won their war. Mr Malik and others suggest that free speech in the West is in retreat. Other publishers, faced with books that were likely to cause widespread offence, have been less resolute. In 2008 Random House was set to publish “The Jewel of Medina”, a misty-eyed account of romance between Muhammad and his wife Aisha. The firm reversed its decision after a series of security experts and academics cautioned them against publication (one American academic described the work as historically inaccurate “soft core pornography”) warning it would be dangerously offensive. Gibson Square, another publisher, took up the novel and saw its offices firebombed in September 2008, 20 years to the day after the publication of “The Satanic Verses”. “The Jewel of Medina” has since been released in America, but it remains under wraps in Britain.

There are always reasons people list that one shouldn't just write anything, because it might cause offense or that it might be vilification. Now, that is a very general thing. I don't condone vilification either, but I'm not willing to say one shouldn't make any negative critiques whatsoever. Part of having any blog is to call it like you see it, and you can't really be doing it under the threat that the Ayatollah of Iran might declare a fatwah against you or that they may burn effigies of you in those countries with turbans an angry bearded men. The world over knows they burn effigies of people at the slightest of perceived slights. Clearly they don't have better things to do, and it speaks to their station in life.

In any case, this paragraph irritated me.

Two decades after the fatwa was imposed on Mr Rushdie, it appears that many Western artists, publishers and governments are more willing today to sacrifice some of their freedom of speech than was the case in 1989. To many critics that will be seen as self-censorship that has gone too far. But a difficult balance must be struck: no country permits completely free speech. Typically, it is limited by prohibitions against libel, defamation, obscenity, judicial or parliamentary privilege and the like. Protecting free expression will often require hurting the feelings of individuals or groups; equally the use of free speech should be tempered by a sense of responsibility. But that sense should not serve as a disguise for allowing extremists of any stripe to define what views can or cannot be aired.

Did you notice they slipped in the word 'obscenity'? Obscenity laws are precisely the point at which artistic freedom of expression threaten to get shut down. Whether its the Tipper Gore-led mother of prevention trying to gag Frank Zappa, or the wowsers that hound Bill Henson, or for that matter the NAZIs with their label 'academy of degenerate art' to punish the Modernists, clearly get way too much say on the base of 'obscenity' laws. Hlf the time good comedy works through offending the common prejudices, whether it be racism or class snobbery or simply manners.That's how it's done: by risking obscenity.

It irritates me greatly that having argued that Freedom of Speech might be in retreat in the west, they throw artists under the bus. It's deadset wrong.

Just A Quick Note

Binfield For Bankers

I've been meaning to post this one up from Pleiades.

Announcing the hearings last week, Barney Frank, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said that public patience with Wall Street bailouts had worn thin.

"As I've said to a couple of the bankers, 'Here's this problem: People really hate you, and they're starting to hate us because we're hanging out with you,'" Mr Frank said.

Yesterday, he urged them to be "cooperative, not grudgingly, not doing the minimum" as the US government seeks to impose a new culture of responsibility on an industry that has become known for its enormous pay packets, corporate jets and lavish junkets.

"Understating that there is substantial public anger and alleviating that public anger not with mumbo jumbo but with reality is essential if we're going to have the support in the country to take the right steps," Mr Frank said.

Public anger boiled over last month when it was revealed that the total amount of bonuses paid out to staff for 2008 was $18.4bn – a figure that prompted President Barack Obama to describe the pay-outs as "shameful" while banks were being propped up by taxpayer money, and led him to impose a pay cap of $500,000 on executives of banks that need more emergency cash.

"It is abundantly clear that we are here amidst broad public anger at our industry," Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, said.

The chief executives before Congress included Vikram Pandit, the head of Citigroup, which received government guarantees of more than $300bn after coming close to collapse in December.

Mr Pandit made $216m when Citigroup bought his hedge fund business to lure him to a top job at the company and paid him bonuses to sign on as chief executive in 2007.

Yesterday, he took the lead in promising that Wall Street understands the new realities of life with the government as a significant investor. "I've told my board of directors that my salary should be $1 per year with no bonus until we return to profitability," he said. "We will hold ourselves accountable and that starts with me," he said.

Outside the House of Representatives office building where the hearing took place, about a dozen protesters taunted Bank of America's Ken Lewis. "Hey, Ken Lewis, feel our pain," they chanted.

"I feel more like corporal of the universe, not captain of the universe at this moment," Mr Lewis said inside, after coming under intense questioning from the California Democrat Maxine Waters.

Yep. Blinfields for Blankfein!

Look Back At Mr Anger
Heres' something I missed too. It's a little old, but it has a nice mention of our man, Mr. Angry Mac.

I could point to the artistry of his game as a get-out clause, as a way of justifying my admiration for someone whose behaviour I've deemed not good enough in others.

If an overpaid soccer player carried on the way McEnroe did at times, this column would be outraged.

I don't have a decent excuse for this double standard, except that no one is perfect. And I'm not talking McEnroe here.

In truth McEnroe was so bad at times that there is no way of justifying any worship of him. It is what it is, and I even found, and still find, the McEnroe the world sees as likeable.

I suppose it is like life itself, that people's attraction to others is not always completely rational, and can be irrational.

McEnroe will always be up there, alongside other personal favourites like the English cricket batsman David Gower, our own cricket maestro Richard Hadlee, Christian Cullen, Bryan Williams, film clips of George Best and Muhammad Ali, the Swiss Miss Martina Hingis, and the anticipation I feel whenever Wayne Rooney gets near the ball, as providing my most cherished viewing of sport.

Those aforementioned favourites are easily explainable of course. I beg forgiveness on this one though, because I could watch McEnroe - bonus tantrums included - for hours.

It's a pretty cute column worth the read.

The Weirdness Of World Interest

I'm not berating you the reader, but it is somewhat disturbing that the interest in a 13 year old dad outweighs the interest in Paul Kanjorsky telling how we came 3 hours from the total meltdown of our economic system. I mean, for every person interested in what Kanjorsky said, there are 7 people who wanted to know about Alfie Patten. I mean, that's a little nuts folks. :)

Kanjorsky on C-Span

3 Hours From The Economic Apocalypse

Check This Out:

I was there when the secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve came those days and talked to members of Congress about what was going on... Here's the facts. We don't even talk about these things.

On Thursday, at about 11 o'clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to a tune of $550 billion being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two.

The Treasury opened up its window to help. They pumped $105 billion into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks.

They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened.

If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.

Now we talked at that time about what would have happened if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.

Here's the video. Make sure you watch it to the end. It's jaw-droppingly frank and the metaphor at the end is in no way encouraging.

Ron Paul's Questions

Here They Are:

Text of Ron Paul's speech, by request.

I have a few questions for my colleagues:
What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interests?
What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of meddling in the affairs of others and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?
What if propping up repressive regimes in the middle east endangers both the United States and Israel?
What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan is directly related to the hatred directed towards us?
What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personal in the middle east since 9/11 is not a fair trade off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan people are killed or displaced?
What if we finally decide that torture even if called "enhanced interrogation technique" is self destructive and produces no useful information and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?
What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?
What if all war time spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?
What if we finally see that war time conditions ALWAYS undermine personal liberty?
What if conservatives who preach small government wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?
What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?
What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost ALWAYS based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?
What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?
What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?
What if a military draft is being planed for for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?
What if the American people learn the truth that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?
What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?
What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?
What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?
What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?
What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded? Nothing.
But what happens if my concerns are justified and ignored? Nothing good!

Thanks to Pleiades.

Youtube entry of the speech is here.

Alfie Patten, Dad At 13

Self Explanatory

Here's the news.

A 13-YEAR-OLD British schoolboy has fathered a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend, making him one of the country's youngest parents.

Alfie Patten, whose voice has not yet broken, admitted he had not thought about how he and girlfriend Chantelle Steadman would support baby Maisie Roxanne, born in Eastbourne, southern England, last Monday, as "I don't really get pocket money". "When my mum found out, I thought I was going to get in trouble," he said.

Alfie's dad, Dennis, 45, said his son was fully committed to his new paternal role. Alfie was 12 when the baby was conceived.

Pocket money! On ya Alfie. What's in a name, right?

UPDATE: To put this story to rest, DNA tests have shown Alfie is NOT the father.

The schoolboy alleged to have become a dad at age 12 is not the baby's father, according to a British tabloid.

The Mirror says that Alfie Patten, now 13, discovered he was not the father of Chantelle Stedman’s baby girl, following a DNA test.

Alfie was photographed last month holding the newborn, Maisie Roxanne, and said he "adored" her.

The story sparked a heated debate about family values and under-age sex.

British politicians, including Conservative leader David Cameron, bemoaned the nation’s declining moral standards, while the story captured worldwide media attention.

But The Mirror reported that "half a dozen" boys claimed to have slept with the 15-year-old, who fell pregnant at age 14, which prompted Patten to take a paternity test.

This proved he was not the father of the now seven-week-old girl, the paper said.

No comment.

Shark Attack 13/02/09

This Time In Bondi

Within a couple of days of the previous attack, we get news that another person has been attacked by a shark. 

A BIT of skin was all that connected a surfer's left hand to his arm last night after a shark attack at Bondi - the second shark attack in Sydney this week.

The surfer,  Glenn Orgias, 33, of Dover Heights, suffered deep cuts to his arm when he was attacked by the shark while surfing the break off South Bondi about 8pm.

Oh dear. Surfing at 8pm? Isn't that like feeding time for sharks? Doesn't the woman at the start of 'Jaws' get it because she's swimming in dusk? Or was that dawn?

The bit that got a laugh out of me was this bit: 

It was initially understood that there had not been a recorded shark attack at Bondi since 1929, when Colin Stewart, 14, was killed and four weeks later John Gibson, 39, the son of a Melbourne department store owner, lost his life. 

But Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald said there had been attacks there in 1951 and 1936.

1929... let's see now... Hmmm wasn't that the year of the great stock market crash? Who knew sharks played the stock market? Judging from most financial types, I probably shouldn't be surprised. :) 

It was pointed out to me today that Sydney Harbour's brimming with fish stocks so it is unsurprising that more sharks are drawn to the harbour. Chalk that up as another explanation.

From The Mailbox

Bank Of England May Print Money

Today's happy links all come in fro Pleiades. They're doozies today.

What happens when you "print money"? you start inflation. So the theory goes. So now that the economy is headed for a deflationary spiral, the Bank of England is considering printing that stuff.

Mervyn King indicated that the Bank is poised to move beyond relying on further interest rate cuts to combat recession. It will give a green light within weeks to a strategy of “quantitative easing”, the modern equivalent of printing money, he made clear.

The Governor’s strong hints that the Bank will shortly embark on this radical action to breathe life into the stalled economy came as he unveiled its bleakest assessment yet of Britain’s prospects.

The Bank ripped up already grim forecasts issued only last November to predict that the economy will shrink at an annual rate of as much as 4 per cent during this summer — more than twice as fast as it had expected just three months ago.

Mr King warned that the odds are now heavily tilted towards an even more brutal decline in the economy than the Bank is now factoring on. On the Bank’s new worst-case scenarios, the pace of the slump could accelerate to see GDP shrinking at an annual pace of up to a staggering 6 per cent.

“The economy is in a deep recession,” the Governor said. “But the length and depth of the recession will depend to a significant extent on developments in the rest of the world, where a severe economic downturn has taken hold.”

You sort of wonder if it's better to have crappy paper assets right now than cash in England. Interest rates are next to zero and if they print money, the cash you have in hand i going to be less valuable. You have a better chance of retaining value if you go and buy some crappy stocks or bonds. It's kind of unfair, but King says it would be worse if they didn't do this. So much for the virtues of saving.

Testosterone Is To Blame?

I find this incredibly sexist, but if it's women putting men down, it's okay.

Iceland, which suffered a humiliating economic collapse, has turned over key levers of finance to women. It now has a female prime minister, and women lead two of its major banks. The Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, 66, has vowed to exercise "prudence and responsibility" as she cleans up the male-dominated system that sank the national economy.

"Men, especially young men, made a mess of things," said Kristjan Kristjansson, the Prime Minister's spokesman. "There is a strong discussion that women would have taken a more cautious approach in the financial sector. You could call the financial sector almost like a men's club."

Einar Mar Gudmundsson, an influential Icelandic writer, said: "These financial vikings who made the country bankrupt were in a way like little boys playing with toys." He said he would like both men and women to be involved in reconstructing the nation's financial sector.

In France, Michel Ferrary, a professor at the business school Ceram, recently conducted a study that concluded that French companies with the greatest percentage of women in management have performed the best during the crisis.

For example, he said, BNP Paribas bank, whose management team is nearly 39 per cent female, has weathered the crisis far better than Credit Agricole, where women make up just 16 per cent of managers.

John Coates, a researcher at Cambridge University who once ran a trading desk on Wall Street, recently conducted a novel survey that analysed saliva from 17 male traders in London's financial district. Coates concluded that traders made the highest profits when they had the highest levels of testosterone in their spit. The downside, he said, was that elevated testosterone also led to riskier behaviour, a formula for disaster as well as profit. "If you had more women on the trading floors, you would probably eliminate some of this instability," Coates said.

And at that point I thought this is nuts. It's sort of a post factum argument that just because there were all these men at the helm, it must have been their masculinity that cause the Global Fried Chicken to run amok. I mean, if somebody argued that 17 years of economic growth in Australia correlated with lots of men running the economy and their testosterone levels, there'd be an outcry at the inherent sexism in such a claim - and they'd be right. Post factum, you coul argue that there were't enough Koalas in charge of investment firms, or too many white people who are taller than 5 foot.

Something To Look Forward To

Michael Moore is going to take on Wall Street in his next doco.

Michael Moore, whose documentaries skewered General Motors and the US health-care industry, is searching for current and former bankers to spill the beans on Wall Street for a new film.

An e-mail from Moore today asked for volunteers to "step up as an American'' and shed light on the financial collapse that has resulted in almost $US1.1 trillion ($1.6 trillion) in losses and writedowns globally.

"Wall Street better gird itself,'' said Howard Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Associates Inc. a New York-based public- relations firms that advises hedge funds, private-equity firms and banks. "The Huns are invading.''

I imagine the dice will be loaded from the start and his leftie sympathies will sit weirdly with his Americanism as he grapples with one of the essential cultural insitutions that define 'America' as we know it. Still, it's a topic worthy of dissection - much more so than A-Rod and steroids or what have you.

Fairly or unfairly, I hope he skewers them all. I doubt those bankers will get much sympathy from anybody.

So Jose Canseco Says...

He Just Wants To Help

The original steroid monkey who got himself unwelcome to all the major league clubhouses because of his steroid-proselytising, now says he wants to help MLB.

“I think I have the ear of the nation now,” Canseco said Tuesday. “I think everyone realizes I have not in any way, shape or form tried to create smoke and mirrors like Major League Baseball has and the players have. I have been excruciatingly honest about what’s going on in baseball.”

Canseco’s attorney, Dennis Holahan, said he was sending a letter to Fehr and Gene Orza, the union’s chief operating officer, offering the former slugger’s assistance. Canseco, who has admitted using steroids, offered few specifics about what he planned to discuss in his proposed joint meeting, other than he was concerned about the “welfare of baseball.”

“The goal is to come up with a plan to rid baseball of steroids once and for all,” Holahan said.

In Canseco’s 2005 book, “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” Canseco claimed he introduced Oakland Athletics teammate Mark McGwire and other stars to steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. He wrote about injecting himself and McGwire in bathroom stalls, and how the effects of the drugs were the reason he hit 462 career home runs.

In his 2008 book, “Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and The Battle to Save Baseball,” Canseco said he introduced Alex Rodriguez to a steroids dealer.

Canseco declined comment on Rodriguez’s admission Monday that he used banned substances from 2001-03 while playing for Texas.

Major League Baseball said it was willing to listen to Canseco’s offer.

“Let’s take a look at the letter and see what’s inside the letter. It will be interesting,” MLB spokesman Rich Levin said. “We’d be glad to get correspondence from Mr. Canseco and we’ll deal directly with him.”

People laughed when he wrote his books and claimed even A-Rod was a user. I think people laughed at him because we thought if we derided him hard enough the issue would go away. It hasn't and so far his claims about Clemens and A-Rod has been proven to be correct. Well, Clemens keeps denying, but that wasn't the surprising bit. Who knows if Canseco is simply looking to get paid or because he genuinely wants to help. Maybe the MLB should listen. After all, they're eating humble pie with a side order of Crow pretty hard right now.

Roberto Alomar Has AIDS?!

A Weird Week In Baseball

If the A-Roid scandal wasn't bad enough, we find out today that Roberto Alomar has full-blown AIDS.

The shocking claim was leveled by Ilya Dall, 31, who said she lived with the ex-Met for three years and watched in horror as his health worsened.
In papers filed in state and federal court, Dall said Alomar finally got tested in January 2006 while suffering from a cough, fatigue and shingles.
"The test results of him being HIV-positive was given to him and the plaintiff on or about Feb.6, 2006," the $15 million negligence suit says.
Nine days later, the couple went to see a disease specialist who discovered a mass in the retired second baseman's chest, the court papers say.
Alomar's skin had turned purple, he was foaming at the mouth and a spinal tap "showed he had full-blown AIDS," the suit says.
Alomar, 41, who quit baseball over health issues in 2005, could not be reached for comment.
His lawyer, Charles Bach, would not say whether Alomar is HIV-positive. "We believe this is a totally frivolous lawsuit. These allegations are baseless," Bach said. "He's healthy and would like to keep his health status private. We'll do our talking in court."
Alomar's father, Mets bench coach Sandy Alomar, said the claims were news to him. "That's the first time we ever heard of that," he said from Puerto Rico.
He didn't think his son could keep a serious illness secret. "I imagine I would know," he said.

It could all be crap, of course, but Wikipedia is taking it as fact.

In a 17-year career, Alomar was a .300/.371/.443 hitter with 210 home runs and 1,134 RBI in 2,379 games. He is 51st all-time with 2,724 career hits.
On February 11, 2009. The New York Daily News reported that Alomar was sued for allegedly having unprotected sexual intercourse with his ex-girlfriend and not notifying her of his HIV status. It is now known that he has full blown AIDS
In April 2005, Alomar told his ex-girlfriend he was suffering from erectile dysfunction and confided "he was raped by two Mexican men after playing a ballgame in New Mexico or a Southwestern state when he was 17.

I'm more than a little weirded out by this. Roberto Alomar's career is characterised by 14 years of Hall-of-Fame type work as second baseman, followed by 3 yeas of utter crap work in NYC, Chicago, and Arizona. I should know. I had him on my fantasy teams, year after year. The radical collapse in ISO, BABIP,  contributed to a calamitous drop in his BA. He went from being an excellent ballplayer to being below average overnight. He never recovered. It was as if suddenly, the guy just couldn't hit or field for love or money, and became nothing like the elite player he was in the prevous years.

It was one of the most unfathomable collapses in a career, but if he was suffering from an early onset of AIDS, it sort of makes sense. This is sad news.

UPDATE:

Roberto Alomar is denying he has ful blown AIDS.

Roberto Alomar said Wednesday that he is in good health, a response to allegations made in a civil suit against him in which a former girlfriend claims he insisted on unprotected sex for four years despite having AIDS.

"This is a very private, personal matter and I greatly appreciate all the support I have received in the past few days from my family, friends and colleagues in baseball," the former All-Star second baseman said in a statement. "I am in very good health and I ask that you respect my privacy during this time."

Ilya Dall, a former girlfriend of Roberto Alomar, filed a civil suit Jan. 30 alleging that Alomar demanded unprotected sex with her despite showing obvious signs of AIDS, and that the 41-year-old Alomar later tested positive for the disease. Dall has not tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. She is seeking at least $15 million in damages.

"As for the lawsuit, it is filled with lies and I am deeply saddened that someone I cared for would make such terrible accusations and try to hurt me in this way," Alomar said in his statement.

Earlier Wednesday, his father told ESPN that Roberto is not ill.

"The only thing that I can tell you is that this is news to us," Sandy Alomar Sr. said. "When a person is sick like that, wouldn't he have to be in the hospital? I haven't seen my son sick like that. I am confident that he is fine.

"We are a family. We are very close, a family that is united. I am sure my son is fine. Other than that, we are going to let the lawyers handle it."

Alomar Sr. said he saw his son on Monday when Roberto ended a visit with the family.

"He was well. He wasn't sick," Alomar Sr. told ESPN.

There you go. He didn't collapse because of AIDS. His career didn't collapse because of AIDS, he probably just went from extreme hitters parks to extreme pitchers' parks. Who the hell really knows?

News That's Fit To Punt

Adelaide Film Festival

It's always good to see some good news on the Australian film industry. Pleiades as usual was on the lookout and found this piece: by this account, the Adelaide Film Festival is doing well.

The AFFIF has provided something much more than a programming edge, says festival director Katrina Sedgwick. It has nurtured commercial successes and allowed risky projects to come to fruition.

The first feature it supported was Sarah Watt's debut film, Look Both Ways, a humble comedy-drama starring William McInnes and Justine Clarke that went on to earn a respectable $2.7 million at the Australian box office in 2005 and to be judged the Australian Film Institute's best film.

The fund has since backed such disparate projects as Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, Tony Ayres's The Home Song Stories, Kriv Stenders's Boxing Day, Michael James Rowland's Lucky Miles and de Heer's silent black-and-white comedy, Dr Plonk.

"I'd love it if they were all blockbusters, but the nature of supporting creative endeavour is it's full of risk." says Sedgwick.

She points to Lucky Miles and The Home Song Stories as films deserving of much bigger theatrical audiences. "But for our purposes, the fund is first and foremost about supporting great creatives and great teams to create things that have great artistic value," she adds. "On that basis, we've been pretty successful."

Certainly the fund has helped bolster the South Australian film industry. Richard Harris, chief executive of the South Australian Film Corporation, says the fund is "highly significant", particularly when used as a co-producing fund with the SAFC.

"Personally, I'm very excited about what we've managed to come out with, and what's also great is that a film like My Tehran For Sale is a film that would have been very difficult to make in any other state. It provides a real point of difference for us to other states."

Well, that sounds nice.

Not to be too mean, but a film that grosses $2.7m at the Australian box office is not "respectable". If I were truly mean, I would say it was more "miserable" than "respectable". I know the festival has to talk up the film it funded, but you get the feeling this was another one of those 'worthy' film projects that make you groan.

Believing In Evolution

It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday this year - he was born on 12th February 1809. So tomorrow, make sure you get into your monkey suits and dance up and down!

I find it hard to believe that there are people out there in the first world who still believe in Evolution. Some say it's unproven (insert guffaw here) or that it's "only a theory" (so is gravity!) or that the good book says the Lord made the world and they are fundamentally mental enough to take gospel as gospel.

I have to say I really take every opportunity to disparage such idiocy at every opportunity because there's no point letting the unenlightened try to turn the clock back to the dark ages. Let's face it, the dark ages were called the dark ages precisely because there wasn't much enlightenment, and reason alone lets us get out of the idiotic shadow of religious dogma.One can crack any number of jokes about religious types but I'll skip that.

Today I came across this article in the Economist.

In the most recent international survey available, only Turkey is less accepting of the theory than America. Iceland and Denmark are Darwin's most ardent adherents. Indeed America has become only slightly more accepting of Darwin's theory in recent years. In 2008 14% of people polled by Gallup agreed that “man evolved over millions of years”, up from 9% in 1982.

Devout's okay. Educated is better. I'm a little shocked Switzerland is so low. America being on a par with Turkey is not very surprising, but it is disturbing. They're medievalists with nukes. Think about that.

Sydney Harbour Shark Attack 11/02/09

Here We Go Again

This time it was right smack bang in Sydney Harbour where a Navy diver got attacked by a bull shark.

Able Seaman Paul Degelder, 31, of the clearance diving team based at HMAS Penguin at Balmoral,  is in a serious but stable condition following the attack at Woolloomooloo Bay, in Sydney's inner east, just before 7am today.

A NSW ambulance spokesman said he suffered severe injuries to his right hand and leg and is serious but stable in St Vincents Hospital.

Able Seaman Degelder was taking part in the Kondari Trial, a test of new technologies to protect ports and ships from terrorist attack, which began on Monday.

A spokesman for the Defence Science and Technology Organisation said it was likely the trial would be cancelled today.

A defence spokesman said it was the first recorded attack on a navy clearance diver.

He said no shark repellent equipment was used as the equipment was only used in water deemed to be a high risk of shark attack.

Sydney Harbour had been assessed as being low risk, he said.

There was also no sonar equipment being used.

The spokesman said the attack would be subject to an investigation.

Hmmm. As long time readers know it's been this blog's contention that shark attacks are a lot more prevalent and frequent than common wisdom had led us to presume. I've certainly been dissuaded of the notion that only a few peopledie in shark attacks, decades apart. It's not true. It's more like a couple a year, with 4-5 attacks a season. So far we've seen about 4 attacks this summer without any deaths, which is very lucky. I would hve expected a death by now.

More On The 'A-Roid Scandal'

He Admits It Now



In the confusion that followed the allegations, A-Rod seemed to be avoiding a comment, but he came out swinging by admitting to years of use, to Peter Gammons.

"When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure, I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day," Rodriguez told ESPN's Peter Gammons in an exclusive interview in Miami Beach, Fla. An extended interview will air on SportsCenter at 6 p.m. ET.

"Back then, [baseball] was a different culture," Rodriguez said. "It was very loose. I was young, I was stupid, I was naive. And I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time.

"I did take a banned substance. And for that, I am very sorry and deeply regretful."

So I guess that covers that. Dan Szymborski who does the wonderful ZiPS projection system amongst other things has this opinion piece at BTF.

In 2004, Major League Baseball, under the terms of an agreement with the MLBPA, started instituting penalties for players that tested positive for certain drugs that were believed to be drug-enhancing.
25 years before, Major League Baseball also came to terms with the MLBPA on a drug-testing deal, though cocaine was the more worrisome issue in the eyes of the public. Unfortunately, Bowie Kuhn subsequently announced that he was the final authority for anything not specifically outlined in the drug-testing arrangement, forcing the union to opt out of the agreement at their earliest allowed juncture. Future commissioners further muddied the waters, ending any hopes for a new drug-testing agreement, most notably Fay Vincent, who attempted to circumvent the contract agreed to with the MLBPA and then taking the further, reprehensible step of actually threatening Gene Michael, Buck Showalter, and Jack Lawn in order to prevent them from testifying to the arbitrator. There simply was no reason for players to trust the owners at this point.

But are the owners to blame for the various performance-enhancing drugs used in baseball and other sports over the last 50 years? Nope.

Any blame, if there is blame to be distributed, should be pointed directly at how we, the fans, view athletic excellence.

We expect our athletes to be supermen. Hurt your hamstring and have to miss games? You're a slacker and should get back into the game. Torn labrum? Stop being a sissy and bear it, Don Drysdale didn't need no MRI! Stress fracture in your foot? Rub some dirt on it.

For fans, the belief has always been that athletic excellence is something that an athlete should risk everything for. Playing in pain, running into walls, brutal crushing tackles, are the currency of fandom's love and abiding respect.

I think it's a very good piece, largely because it reaffirms my own thinking on this subject which has been growing for some years.Yeah, I know, there's nothing like something that reconfirms your prejudices, except it's not a prejudice. I've been forced to think about this for a long time. Thank you Bud Selig, Donald Fehr and all you muthas who dragged their bleeding heels in the MLB and MLBPA.

One of the more interesting observations I have seen around the traps is that the players have always been the players: members of a competitive, privileged  club, who are always looking for an edge. in other eras there were amphetamines and stimulants. It is just that the ethical standards have changed around them, and they are being exposed for being dinosaurs.

It's not exactly Ben Johnson either because the game didn't ban it, so the guys who did it, did so with a tacit non-disapproval, which amounted to a tacit approval. How weak is that? And as for Ben Johnson (an Tim Montgomery who broke Ben Johnson's number and turned out to be on PEDs too), nobody can take away from him the fact that he ran as fast as he did. Even Carl Lewis who was given the Gold in that race as Johnson was disqualified, turned out to have a PED taint in his career. Nobody can deny Big Mac and Bonds and A-Rod hit those jacks and they went over the fence.

And the people cheered. It was all 'good'. Remember?

I had a conversation with Walk-Off HBP and he said that the abject hypocrisy of the sports media was simply astounding. Because he carried Barry Bonds in a Keeper League for years and years, he read the entire posts to do with Bonds' career in the years he was lauded for hitting the homers, and then reviled for being a steroid user, often by the very same journalists who did the lauding.

In Walk-Off HBP's opinion, it was obvious Bonds and Big mac were ALWAYS abusing steroids, so it was laughable that it when they were being lauded and reprehensibly hypocritical when they were being condemned. Besides which what exactly do steroids do for you in Baseball?

Walk-Off HBP's theory is that being anabolic, they help recovery and therefore allow the athlete to perform at their peak more often than without. Everybody thinks it is about the strength, but that is hardly how it would impact the game, in Walk-Off HBP's opinion.

Steve Goldman has this piece in the Pinstriped Bible.

ESPN has posted a very deceptive bit of statistical analysis. It's a two-column table. It says that in the three seasons that Rodriguez cops to using, 2001 through 2003, he averaged .305, hit .52 home runs, and slugged .615. In the other 10 seasons of his career, he batted .309, hit 39 home runs, and slugged .574. Looks pretty damning -- the guy picked up 13 home runs a year on the juice! However, those statistics are not park or league adjusted. More important than any juice is the fact that Rodriguez went from a difficult home park to a very generous one. In his last year in Seattle, Rodriguez hit .272/.406/.502 at home with 13 home runs in 265 at-bats, but .356/.433/.702 with 28 home runs in 289 at-bats. In 2001, those numbers nearly reversed themselves. He hit .361/.439/.677 at home, .276/.359/.567 on the road. The splits for 2002 and 2003 are very similar.

If you do the necessary adjustments, Rodriguez's offensive production ranks this way (I'm using Equivalent Average as my stat of choice):

1.    2007
2.    2005
3.    2000
4.    1996
5.    2001
6.    2008
7.    2002
8.    2003
9.    2006
10.    1998
11.    2004
12.    1999
13.    1997

The point here is not to let Rodriguez off the hook for juicing, but to have some fairness in our response. If we accept that he has been clean since 2003 -- and I admit that believing any ballplayer about anything is a huge problem right now -- then it is impossible to say that his best work has been the product of any artificial sweeteners.

Yeah, that's a big maybe too, Steve.

The Dude at Audio Darnok mentioned to me he had to take steroids for a week because of a sinus problem. He said during the week he took the steroids, he felt like he was charged up and ready to go all the time. He didn't experience roid rage but he said he felt like he was bouncing with endless energy. He reported that just having it seemed to focus his mind and become superhuman in his ability to stay with tasks. He joked that the music mixes he did that week were definitely "performance enhanced".

I still don't know what to make of all of this. I don't really care about the record books. I don't care about Hall of Fame chances. I don't care about the straight and crooked numbers. Now, I just think the Yankees ought to win and that's that - and for that to happen, A-Rod just has to hit and hit and hit. Yay for the pinstriped laundry.

Oh, and doesn't Derek Jeter come out looking great again, just as every time A-Rod has a moral failure? If it ever came out he was on PEDs, I think I'll have a stroke. :)

A Deflationary Spiral To Come?

The Lessons of Japan In The 1990s
When the so-called bubble burst in Japan in 1989, it wasn’t predicted that it would bring on a decade of economic malaise. The origins of the bubble itself were deceptively simple. Many corporations with headquarters in Tokyo found themselves sitting on land that was accelerating in worth thanks to real estate speculation and rampant borrowings in order to speculate on property.

Even the mighty manufacturers that had powered the growth for many years found they were worth more as property owners than what they were doing as manufacturers. This led to even more borrowings against the property value which in turn led to the asset grab by Japanese businesses around the globe in the 1980s.

It’s quite like the Storm Financial group strategem where people re-mortgage their houses to take out massive loans and then place heavily leveraged bets on the stock market with cheap credit. And there are a lot of people caught up in the current GFC who are in this situation.

Eventually when the property bubble burst, whole swathes of the Japanese industrial sector was left holding this massive debt. Successive Japanese governments made stimulus plans which went to these corporations but failed to deliver much results. This was because much of the stimulus package money was spent on paying back debt.

The debt kept growing and the economy kept deflating. It took over a decade for Japan to digest its debt and creep back into positive growth. If this is anything to go by, it is conceivable that the countries that went through the recent property bubble are going to be in trouble for a lot longer than one government term.

How Mitsubishi Survived The Lost Decade
A couple of years ago, I went and visited the Mitsubishi rocket factory in Nagoya. The Rocket corporation arm of Mitsubishi Aerospace is built on the exact site where they once manufactured war planes in World War II. They’re even still using the very same wind tunnel they used to test the Zero Fighter back in the 1930s.

When Mitsubishi hit the snag in the early 1990s, they refused to let their workers go. They decided to do it tough by paying the debt and cutting costs, but they refused to let any of their engineers go. This was because if they let them go, there was no way of getting them back again.

Mitsubishi staff told me they hardly knew anybody that was let go in the restructuring craze of the 1990s. They did however say it took the company a long time to work through the debts. Not that what Mitsubishi did is applicable or repeatable by anybody else. They are  a massive company that services so many needs of the Japanese government, from rockets to warships to satellites to pencils.

Can the process be duplicated everywhere? That’s unlikely. What one can learn from their experience is that not every worker in the system is interchangeable with another worker within or without the company. While one wouldn’t the lifetime employment system, it’s worth considering that losing people has more far-reaching  consequences than the mere spreadsheet balance of costs.

NIETS
During the lost decade, Japan went through round after round of ‘restructuring’, both their debt as well as labor force. By the turn of the millennium, Japan had gone from ‘lifetime employment’ to a swell in the ranks of young casualised labor derisively known as NIETs. NIET allegedly stands for Not In Employment or Training.

Because Japan culturally has a strong work ethic, the general population regarded the generation of NIET workers as somehow deficient in their work ethic or desire to contribute to society. Much social discussion was made in the media that the NIET should somehow be taught a lesson and made to take a real job. Of course, the point of the rise of the NIET was that the large corporations that once took on a work force had ceased to do so in the lost decade.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see just how derogatory and inflexible Japanese society is towards its casualised labor force. The whole first world has been casualising its labor force for along time. With the recent downturn, they have been the first to be shunted out the doors from their Japanese employers.

We are going to see an acceleration towards this hyper-casualised work force in countries where there are big debts to be paid down. The labor force flexibility is going to be fully exploited in order to get maximum efficiency to pay down the debts as fast as possible. Careers and the very word itself might pas into history as a quaint notion as droves of people move interchangeably between industries and sectors.

The post-modern, post-industrialised world’s casualised worker is isolated, and ideologically dumb. They simply make up the numbers and are cast aside as the times grow worse. There won’t be a unionising or collectivising of these people because labor unions see them as scabs rather than their fellow working man.

The world of workers and labor forces in general are going to be very strange in the coming years.

A-Rod Was 'A-Roids'

Wouldn't You Know It? Jose Canseco Was Right

Jose Canseco was out to out everybody with his books. One of the big names he claimed was on steroids was A-Rod, and A-Rod in turn shrugged as if to say it was so preposterous it didn't warrant an answer. Now, there are leaks that A-Rod was one of the players who tested positive in 2003, the year MLB commenced anonymous testing.

In 2003, when he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, four sources have independently told Sports Illustrated.

Rodriguez's name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball's '03 survey testing, SI's sources say. As part of a joint agreement with the MLB Players Association, the testing was conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.

When approached by an SI reporter on Thursday at a gym in Miami, Rodriguez declined to discuss his 2003 test results. "You'll have to talk to the union," said Rodriguez, the Yankees' third baseman since his trade to New York in February 2004. When asked if there was an explanation for his positive test, he said, "I'm not saying anything."

The MLBPA issued a statement on Saturday, saying "Information and documents relating to the results of the 2003 MLB testing program are both confidential and under seal by court orders. We are prohibited from confirming or denying any allegation about the test results of any particular player[s] by the collective bargaining agreement and by court orders. Anyone with knowledge of such documents who discloses their contents may be in violation of those court orders."

Well, that's great because it's out in the open now. Who knows who the other names are, but it's A-Rod that's been hung out to dry. The MLB's labor relations man Rob Manfred released this statement.

"We are disturbed by the allegations contained in the Sports Illustrated news story which was posted online this morning. Because the survey testing that took place in 2003 was intended to be non-disciplinary and anonymous, we can not make any comment on the accuracy of this report as it pertains to the player named.
"Based on the results of the 2003 tests, Major League Baseball was able to institute a mandatory random-testing program with penalties in 2004. Major League Baseball and the Players Association have improved the drug testing program on several occasions so that it is now the toughest program in professional sports. The program bans stimulants, such as amphetamines, as well as steroids.
"Any allegation of tipping that took place under prior iterations of the program is of grave concern to Major League Baseball, as such behavior would constitute a serious breach of our agreement.
"Under Commissioner [Bud] Selig's leadership, Major League Baseball remains fully committed to the elimination of the use of performance enhancing substances from baseball. As the Commissioner has said, we will continue to do everything within our power to eliminate the use of such drugs and to protect the integrity of the program."

Well, that's great too but there's no way to un-fuck this goat. A-Rod's been named and that's that. He's either got to come out swinging with full denial in the face of contrary evidence like Roger Clemens or he has to come clean like Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi. It's just so wonderful that the Yankees keep on having to hold press conferences for guys who essentially cheated to get inflated numbers and went on to collect big money from their payroll. I imagine Brian Cashman is groaning in bed holding a pillow over his head. I wouldn't want to face the coming Monday either.

Even if he comes out and says "I did it, sorry", his projected legacy is going to be tied up with this stuff. Sitting on 553 HRs, he's likely going to leave a big HR total. Now he's going to be in the Barry Bonds/Mark McGwire territory of having big tainted numbers.

My personal take is that I've stopped being angry about the steroid abusers. I can't sustain my fury at the cheats when I know that it was widespread and that the Owners, the MLB and MLBPA turned a blind eye to it for many years. The tacit non-disapproval, and by its own corollary extension, a tacit approval, created the conditions whereby athletes flocked to bulk up or try and gain an edge. If A-Rod was no different, then at least we know, that's what it takes to get a  Shortstop to hit like Lou Gehrig.

Look at that chart closely. The blue squiggle is the average Isolated Power of MLB hitters through all that time starting from 1926. There are ups and downs that correspond to various periods of the game, but the eye-catching thing is how the league average ISO pops over .150 in 1993. That's the year McGwire posts an ISO of .393, at Age 29. Late bloomer, don't you think? His previous high point was .329.

It's obvious in hindsight but that's just what it is: hindsight. Even A-Rod's graph looks 'interesting' in retrospect. He's been posting a flat .300 ISO since 1999 with the exception of 04, 06, 08 as a Yankee. 2003 in particular marked the end of a 5 year run of around .300 ISO. It's incredibly fishy - in hindsight. Is this proof? No. But it should have sounded alarm bells the way, say Bernie Madoff's fund sounded the alarm for Harry Markopolos.

Still, even when McGwire was smashing records and when Bonds was smashing McGwire's records, it seemed abundantly obvious these guys were on something. All of them looked like monsters compared to the sluggers I knew from my childhood. Old images of players like Jim Rice and Reggie Jackson in their peak years look small by comparison to these guys hitting.

As an audience I guess I just learned to turn a blind eye to it. For that I think I'm equally to blame as the athletes, the ownership, the MLB and the journalists. Our collective acceptance of these numbers enabled the athletes to cheat. It's a bummer when you realise that. It's too late to innocently say, "Say it ain't so."

UPDATE:

There was this lovely article in the NYT.

Go ahead. Laugh. Dismiss tarot cards as a mere superstition. But I am a baseball fan. Superstition is my middle name. I have my lucky “Property of New York Yankees” T-shirt that is ripped and faded and belongs in the trash. I have my lucky black Yankees cap that my friend Judith bought for me, the one with the rhinestone-studded NY. I even have my lucky turkey burgers that my husband throws on the grill for dinner whenever I’m panicking during a game, which is always. Who am I to rule out anything?

“Let’s start by asking the cards who you are to the Yankees,” Patricia said as we sat together in her living room, the oversize, brightly colored cards spread out face down on a table.

I slid a card out of the deck and handed it to her.

“Ah, the Time Space card,” she said, nodding. “Apparently, you have a karmic connection with the Yankees. They’re not just a team to you. They’re your destiny.”

Wow. No wonder I spent hours obsessing over whether Joba should start or relieve.

“We signed three high-profile free agents,” I continued. “We paid a lot of money for them, too, so I’d like to find out how they’ll do this year.”

“How much money?” Patricia asked before taking a sip of water.

“Almost half a billion dollars.”

She did a spit-take.

“But they’re great,” I assured her.

“Which one would you like to ask about first?”

“C. C. Sabathia.”

“Then the question is: Who is C. C. to the Yankees this season? Pick a card, Jane.”

I selected one and gave it to her.

“The Fortune card!” she exclaimed, beaming. “He’s going to be very, very successful — definitely their ace in the hole.”

She clearly meant ace of the staff. Holy cow!

The Yankees are going to have an auspicious year in spite of everything.