Thank You, Sam Zell

Who would think that the most promising businessman in my industry is a real estate mogul who has the nickname the "Grave Dancer"? (Which, by the way, he bestowed upon himself, making it even lamer in the way that all self-coined nicknames are.) It comes from his great delight in buying undervalued assets -- or "other people's mistakes," as he wrote -- and then turning big profits from them. Newspapers seem to fit the category these days and luckily the GD, also one of the country's wealthiest men, thinks so too.

Well, thank you, Mr. Sam Zell, now executive chairman of the Tribune Co., for having a fairly optimistic opinion of the newspaper business. Welcome aboard! Read here about what he said the day he took it over earlier this month. Most encouraging: "I’m sick and tired of listening to everybody talk about and commiserate about the end of newspapers,” he said. “They ain’t ended. And they’re not going to be." (He just needs a good copy editor, which any of the company's papers could provide. Or, if he's worth $6 billion-plus, maybe he doesn't need one and can use "ain't" whenever he wants.)

And read here about he actually wants to expand the Tribune's revenues, instead of cutting expenses over and over, to make it financially healthy again. How shocking: You mean, the long-term future of the newspaper business, any business, is growing it, not cutting its staff until the content, what it delivers to the customers, is so bare that it's no longer an impressive product and no one wants to buy it anymore? Wow, genius.

I even like his beard: It seems like I could run into him taking a nice shteam at a gym or something. Nice Jewish boy, too. (OK, maybe not so nice: real estate moguls rarely are "nice," though the New Yorker profile -- linked to above -- didn't make him out to be a total asshole.)

The way he structured the deal is a little lame, though. He only put up $315 million of his own money (as a loan to the company) of the $8.2 billion takeover -- about 4 percent of the total. Meanwhile, employees are the owners of Tribune now, through an ESOP. Never good to own part of your company, though: When it goes under, which is possible, the lenders, such as Zell, are first in line for repayment while the equity-holders lose their investment. (See Enron.) Damn straight he better be optimistic about newspapers under this arrangement!

Vamos al Estadio

My search for an awesome Argentine football jersey last fall accidentally led to me the bandwagon! Lanus won its first ever regular-season title this month! (Click here for the team's Web site and some of the photo highlights. You might want to turn down the volume for when the announcer shouts "Gooooooooool.")

They clinched the Apertura with a 1-1 tie against Boca Juniors, making it that much sweeter. (I really hated Boca when I lived in Santiago a few years ago -- they're the Argentine equivalent of the New York Yankees or Dallas Cowboys -- though their home stadium is "La Bombonera," or "chocolate box," which I think is one of the coolest things in the whole world.) Go Lanus!

Thanks to Pablo, wherever you are, for the post's title.

Evergreen Presidential Campaign News

OK, so fewer than three hours after posting an entry about Mitt Romney (link in case you need it at this point; in short, former Massachusetts governor and now a leading GOP presidential candidate), I've decided to take it down. Considering I'm a reporter in Massachusetts and always worrying -- seriously I check my apartment door is locked every night even thought it locks automatically when you close it -- some of the thoughts probably went too far.

Perhaps it raises an interesting question on what reporters can say in the public sphere even when they're speaking/writing personally, not professionally? It just all seems too constricting to me and that too many people -- most especially those like Romney, not that he would ever read this -- think that if a reporter expresses a weighted personal opinion, she can't ignore that and report objectively as a professional.

Two thoughts about Romney:

1. I wanted to write "I hope I have his hair when I'm his age considering almost every male ancestor of mine is bald," but then, nah, his is just way too plastic.

2. Lots of begrudging respect for his top press guy, Eric Fehrnstrom. Fehrnstrom's quite nimble with his rhetoric, and slyly pompous -- a true sign of a good flack. (Most P.R. people, i.e. the bad ones, are obviously and annoyingly pompous; the worst are flat unhelpful and sound unhappy when you call, as though their jobs weren't largely comprised of talking to reporters.) Fehrnstrom was especially impressive, I thought, throughout '06, when Romney had essentially already started the presidential campaign and was rarely in the state governing. (Something the Globe pointed out about once per month.) Whenever anything hit the fan, aside from the Big Dig tunnel collapse, whose response was beneficial to Romney's campaign, Fehrnstrom was there, fending off the press (usually Frank Phillips) in a very deft way. Anyway, I have to respect someone who's good at his job, even if I'd rather get hit by a car than have that job.

Breaking Presidential Campaign News

Fred Thompson, the Republican presidential candidate and former Tennessee senator, among other things, when asked by the Associated Press in a survey last week to name his most prized possession, answered, "Trophy Wife." Seriously.

Or, maybe not so seriously. When I first read this as a brief in the Times last week, I thought, "You have got to be kidding me. What an idiot." Apparently, much of the Internet has pondered the same, as bloggers, pundits, etc, have been trying to decipher how much of a joke it really was. I guess it's complicated -- his wife, 25 years or so his younger, is fairly attractive (see above right to form your own opinion), and this was probably filled out by his campaign staffers at least 40 years his younger while traveling on a bus somewhere in Iowa (does Thompson even do the bus-tour thing?), so maybe it was all tongue-in-throat.

But seriously: When your campaign crashes and burns three weeks after massive hype anticipating your formal announcement, and you don't campaign seriously, and you look tired all the time, and you're better known for your role on "Law and Order," and you offer no defined opinions except for general conservative niceties of lower taxes and smaller government, do you really want to tell the AP that your "trophy wife" is your most prized possession? Jeri, since you're probably not upset about all this, I hope he's a good lay and that Dick Wolf paid well.

I Need All the Friends I Can Get

Two funny notes from a day of errands yesterday:

1. While buying a new cell phone (see top), a Verizon employee transferred all my data from the old one to the new one. Very helpful, but as he did so, said, "You only have fifty-five contacts. I haven't seen so few in two years." Huh? Do I really have so few friends? What retail workers says this to a customer? You know, maybe I have high standards for putting your phone number into my "Contacts" list.

2. A couple hours later, at the liquor store around the corner, I went up to the cashier with a six pack of Smuttynose's Winter Warmer. (Great beer, by the way.) She says, "Look at your ears!" Well, it's tough for one to look at his own ears, but she went on to exclaim about how nice she thinks my ears are. (Decide for yourself; also at top.) And she went on for a good three minutes. It was a little awkward with my girlfriend standing right next to me -- the woman was an attractive one -- but much easier to play along with than someone questioning my social adeptness. Cashier worker, if you read this blog, maybe you can send me your cell phone number? No subtext or extra meaning to this, I just need all the numbers I can get.

Thanks to Camera Obscura for the post's title.

But of course!

My dad and I always thought that when Roger Clemens picked up Mike Piazza's broken bat in Game 2 of the 2000 World Series and fired it back at him (truly unbelievable to see live; photo, at right, of when Piazza was tempted to charge Clemens immediately after) that Clemens was hopped up on steroids.

Now, thanks to former Sen. George J. Mitchell, we know he was! (Link here; scroll down to page 167 of the main report to find the information on Clemens.) Quoting Mitchell: "During the middle of the 2000 season, Clemens made it clear he was ready to use steriods again. McNamee injected Clemens four to six times in the buttocks with testosterone labeled either Sustanon 250 or Deca-Durabolin..." It goes on to say Clemens received an equal number of injections of human growth hormone at about the same time.

Bill Simmons, aka the "Sports Guy" columnist on ESPN.com's Page 2, who amid lots of chaff has an equal amount of great wheat, also remembers Clemens' bat-throwing incident. (He also has several other insightful thoughts on Clemens' post-Red Sox career now that it's been tainted in his most recent column.) Really, why else would Clemens throw a bat at Piazza?! I seem to remember his explanation at the time being he thought it was the ball. Well, then why didn't he throw it to first base?

Baseball's steroids scandal has always had a mixed effect on me. Yes, my era's greatest pitcher -- Clemens -- and greatest home run hitter -- outfielder Barry Bonds -- have now been firmly identified as cheaters, with all the implications that has on the integrity, purity and inspiration that professional athletics/games might have. But they would have been great players anyway, certainly with some of the sport's most impressive statistics ever. Without steroids would Bonds have hit 634 total home runs, 478 or the record-breaking 762 he now has? Perhaps not the third, but somewhere around the first. The steroids perhaps enabled him to extend his peak from 1992 to 2004, when most players' would've ended six years earlier (and geez, at the age of 42, his OBP last year was .480!), but bring down the 73 home runs in 2001 to a more appropriate statistical mean of 47 and he breaks Hank Aaron's career record next year or early 2009. And aren't steroids supposed to make one's body break down?

Way to go, Sen. Mitchell, for synthesizing it all in the report, even if it doesn't break new ground beyond his interviews with the trainers Radomski and McNamee. (Though, those sources, break a lot of ground.) Eleven players on the 2000 Los Angeles Dodgers! Almost as many from the Yankees' World Series run last decade! (Full disclosure: I'm a Mets fan whose all-time favorite player is Mike Piazza. I mean, even Belle and Sebastian wrote a song about him!) I think my favorite part is the e-mail from Red Sox GM Theo Epstein -- only 33 years old! -- talking about reliever Eric Gagne. Mid-season last year, the Sox were thinking about acquiring him to bolster their bullpen, when Epstein wrote a scout, "I know the Dodgers [Gagne's former team] think he was a steroids guy. Maybe so." The scout replied, yes, so, and it turns out, very yes so. (See page 219.) Funny enough, Gagne wasn't taking steroids by the time he arrived with the Sox and he was the world's worst pitcher for those two months. Equally funny, the Mets learned the same lesson with reliever Guillermo Mota, who sucked dead frogs last year upon returning from a fifty-game suspension for steroids use. Who would think that after a player stops using steroids his performance would decline? The Mets, that's who.

Anyway, perhaps in summation: Clemens, Bonds and pitcher Andy Pettite -- Clemens' longtime pal, teammate, and now, admitted HGH user -- do not get Hall of Fame votes from me.

Oh, and what do you think former Sen. Mitchell does on, say, Monday? Vacation in the Bahamas? He doesn't seem like a Bahamas kind of guy to me. Trip to Paris? Enjoy the gigantic snowstorm heading his home state Maine's way? Do you think he shovels snow? I mean, you're a former senator who declined a Supreme Court nomination, negotiated a peace deal with Northern Ireland and wrote scathing reports of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and Major League Baseball. What does he do at 10 a.m. Monday when he rolls into the firm? (Which, by the way, is the same one as my dad's; how weird is that?) Check his e-mail, I guess.

Secret Backroads/Secret Handshakes (test, two, three)

On a recent long drive, I listened to Pavement's debut album, "Slanted and Enchanted," (the reissue) for the first time in awhile, months probably. I've always thought of it as the password to the world of good, often obscure art. If you love it, know it's catchy through all the noise, sloppiness and shouting (and love that too), then, "Welcome, let's go further. Do you want to go to that show Friday?" Perhaps Gerard Cosloy mans the door?

In honor of all the record signifies, this blog takes its name from it. (Well, at least one of the reissue's previously unreleased songs. As Dan Koretzky writes in those liner notes, I'm one of those "kids" in their twenties, gainfully employed enough to buy the record a second time.) Not exactly sure what this venture is -- shot into the twenty-first century, musing, venting, search for higher profile -- but here it goes.