Zen and the big score
Visit Wrigley Field late in most Septembers and what do you get? Regrets. Same goes for Comiskey Park.
There’s a new regret.
Did you ever abandon a partner only to find later he or she has inherited a billion dollars, solved whatever problem it was that made you decide to hit the silk in the first place and turned out to be a wonderful person?
The White Sox must be feeling a little of that now.
Seattle’s Mike Cameron, an eight-year veteran of the Sox organization who never quite learned how to sparkle in Chicago and was traded in 1998, hit two home runs in the first inning in Thursday’s outing against Chicago, and two more later in the game. No one has done that since 1993.
He missed a fifth homer by the width of the warning track in the ninth inning.
The secret:
“I wasn’t thinking about anything,” Cameron said.
The game: a Mariner rout, 15-4.
Doesn’t add up anymore
For 67 years, UAL Corp., the parent of United Airlines, has turned to the same company for accounting and auditing services, but no more.
UAL announced Thursday it was dropping Arthur Andersen as its accountant, joining a long list of companies that have decided to abandon Andersen since the former accounting giant ran into huge troubles because of its relationship with Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy company.
Andersen has lost some 300 clients, including many of the blue bloods of Chicago-area business, since the Enron debacle brought a sharp focus to the accounting company’s business practices and its shredding of documents central to the Enron investigation.
UAL officials said they just weren’t certain Andersen would survive the scandal. Deloitte & Touche LLP will become UAL’s auditor effective June 1.
Another ’90s icon collapses
Ah, the 1990s.
We would all get millions in stock options that struck at $2 in companies that were in the marketplace at $100 a share. We would cash in and become the stuff of legend.
Crash.
It all ended quite abruptly back in the darker days of 2000 when it became clear that people were not going to change their lives to make them all about the Internet and information technology. We probably don’t really need stoves that can be turned on by cell phones.
All that money burned to ash, and a lot of careers burned with it.
But it took longer for some than for others.
Just last week, Bernie Ebbers found his own sneakers melting as WorldCom Inc. directors asked him to resign as CEO. Ebbers, fueled by tech mania, had changed WorldCom into one of the nation’s premiere telecom success stories, gobbling up companies in stock deals. Telecom frenzy is now officially dead. Too much capacity, too few customers, a very old-fashioned bugaboo.
Fiber optic networks, one of them built by WorldCom, are not much in demand, either.
Put it all together and you get collapsing stock prices and vast debt, along with an object lesson about the `90s and the fleeting nature of success in the modern era.
What are they (we?) thinking?
Wahoo! Cars are going to get even more powerful!
Oblivious to OPEC price manipulations, fuel economy pushes by the federal government and the sense among some that swinishness is so, so … ’80s, automakers have decided this year to go for muscle over mind, again, it was reported last week.
How does a 10-cylinder, 500 horsepower pickup truck sound? Dodge Ram SRT-10 would be the one.
For most of us, it makes a sucking sound as the fuel disappears.
Prediction: It will be the used vehicle to avoid in 2008. Dodge says the idea is to get the SRT-10 to run more quickly than the Ford F-1509 SVT Lightning, which goes from zero to 60 m.p.h. in just 5.8 seconds. You leave a lot of manure in your wake in a pickup with that kind of pickup.
It’s not just the people at Dodge.
Porsche’s first SUV has a 450 horsepower engine. Even Volkswagen, with its sturdy line of Jettas and Golfs and Passats, is going upstairs in the power market. It is planning an 8-cylinder Passat soon. Next year, VW will offer Phaeton sedans with 8 or 12 cylinder engines of 300 to 400 horsepower.
Who is to blame?
Actually, us. Gasoline doesn’t eat up much of the average American’s budget. So look for bigger and bigger cars until gas prices become European in scale, at which point, bring on the Minis.
