Armando Sucks and the Fans Let it Be Known

I actually didn't mind the signing of Armando Benitez but like most of Brian Sabean's moves, it sucked. I'm not saying this because I'm an A's fan. I use to work for the Giants. I'll admit it. When I first got out of college, I was a freelance sports writer but I also needed some extra money since I was making more money expensing my miles than the articles I was writing. Getting back to Benitez, the Giants should have traded him in spring training instead of waiting until now. Or else a guy like Sabean can only get a middle reliever and be forced to pay more than 93% of Benitez' remaining salary for year...about $4.7 million of the $5 million owed to the finger pointer. But the fans are happy, they basically booed Benitez out of town.

Okay, I'll be honest. I wasn't too happy that the A's got stuck with Jason Kendall and his salary for Arther Rhodes...but Billy's still got a much better track record than Sabean.

Let's Be Sirius, Modern Day Monopoly is not Satelite Radio

Despite the rumblings of the Sirius and XM radio merger being a monopoly, that's very much irrelevant in my hood. With so many music and audio choices from iPods, MP3 players and all the other online ways of getting your music including music videos on Youtube or MySpace, Yahoo! Music, MLB GameDay Audio and one of my favorite's, Pandora, there is no monopoly in music and talk radio. And now with USB ports available everywhere, you can carry up to 16 GB of music, video, games, pictures and other files on a flash drive key chain and plug it into newer TVs, gaming consoles or your computer. That's way better than taking music that you can only listen to on one device. So who cares, let them merge and go down together in flames.

The real monopoly, at least in Richmond, CA is Comcast. Unless I subscribe to Direct TV, I'm stuck with Comcast as my only cable provider that wishes to charge me $50 for 15 channels I do want and 60 channels that I could care less for. I can't even find another Internet service provider in my area.

Comcast Triple Play? Only for new customers. I called to see how I can take advantage of any packages for being a "loyal" customer and I basically got the big middle finger. Shouldn't current customers get discounts? But if you operate a monopoly in a region, you can screw your existing customers and give discounts to new customers. I was however, offered a discount to upgrade, which would cost me more money. And here I thought I called to save money.