Skip to main content

Playing Ball

Most of the world is obsessed with some sort of balls. Many times its personal. Not being much of a fan of any activity involving a single ball (even Highballs I do not stop at just one - you dirty minds) I did indulge myself by watching some baseball this weekend. You see the local bay area team is in the World Series (another misnomer for what constitutes Americans playing in America, although I am told they have bought and sold foreign born players). Amazing to see the players get rock star treatment for use of their ball and socket, which is to say they make millions playing ball. And get paraded on the street if they pick up the World Series Trophy. Now that is one way to make your millions. Or you can play ball a different way - figuratively and be the executive of a major corporation in America or some other country. In America you at least are morally and legally obliged to disclose that you made millions. Whether you pay tax on that is another matter entirely. Here you play ball with politicos and environmentalists and other Special Interest Groups whose interest may or may not be in making their own millions. Sometimes I read that the CEO of such and such corporation took a $1 salary yet ended up making millions after the books closed for the year. If that is not a neat magic trick without using a ball I do not know what is. These executives do have to bring their spouse to a variety of balls however. Some of them do not and are apparently promptly dispatched from their million dollar payday jobs. Some also end up with a ball and chain for failure to avoid getting caught when the government busts their balls. The latter may or may not have any bearing on what ballgames they played when in office. In other countries you can play ball (literally and or figuratively) and make millions and not even have to or want to disclose it. But that is a different ball game. A good example is Bollywood!

Comments

  1. Baseball appears safer than cricket, where guys are now going to jail for match-fixing quite regularly. Cycling is another dangerous sport, going by the fate of the 'man on the moon'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. some seek Armstrong tactics others resort to Strongarm tactics

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New England is gleaming in the fall

 This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest.  Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one.  Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list.  Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD  - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

 Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

 We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid.  The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access.  That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei