I have already chronicled The Wall Street Journal subscription saga and need not go into any great depth upon that aspect of my relationship with the newspaper. The Wall Street Journal was nearer to the door than to the elevator this morning, and I picked it up when I returned with the three hounds from their morning terror attack on unsuspecting commuters alighting from a bus from one of the southern suburbs.
Piquing my curiosity was one of the articles cited in the header, "A Mystery Multiplies Over a Math Prize: Why isn't a reclusive Russian pursuing a $1 million award?" which could only be a story about Poincare's conjecture, which is wholly irrelevant to the real world unless you play with rubber bands and variously-shaped objects; but "The Perils Of the 'Friend-Trip'" on W1 is where I started the my Journal journey, except I got sidetracked and read the scathing review of M. Night Shymalan's latest offering, Lady in the Water; but rather than read on about Monster House, I was drawn to the article about American Floyd Landis' redeeming ride through the final mountain stage of the Tour de France to move within striking distance of the two riders ahead of him in the overall race, an article describing in sketchy terms the American rise to power in the cycling world, which ended on W6, where below that was an article about the home run barrage in Major League Baseball in which six players are on target to reach the heady 50-homer plateau, where few have ended the season.
I don't know why I turned the page, but I did go to W8, where a drawing of Andre Agassi's bald pate caught my attention. Did you know that he and wife, Steffi Graf, have listed their San Francisco-area home, which they bought a few years back for $24 million, for sale at a bargain $23 million? And so much for cheap real estate in Mexico ... some guy married to O.J. paid $3 million for a place in Careyes, Mexico. I'm sure he could have found something bigger and cheaper elsewhere in Mexico, but what O.J. apparently wants, O.J. gets.
There's a picture of a house in Pennsylvania, the only house Dorothy Parker, who wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born, ever owned, which is for sale. Here's what puzzles me: Asking price*$3.85 million. Why is that asterisk there? I looked all over for the meaning of the fucking asterisk, even checking the asterisk definition in the Dow Jones Real-Estate Index, which tells me that a starter home in a place called San Bruno, California (94066) is $680,000. A starter home? How the fuck can someone afford that? Anyway, I don't know why the editor stuck the asterisk there ... and in such a prestigious newspaper.
I lost interest ... and ended my journey through THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Friday, July 21, 2006, edition.
Posted by Bill at July 21, 2006 11:50 AMyour points are all well taken, and there's too much going on at NBL for me to have anything to say that's any more constructive than this: San Bruno is a suburb - and not an especially interesting one - immediately south of San Francisco. It's between South San Francisco ("The Industrial City") and Colma ("City of the Dead"). San Bruno gets no parenthetical enquoted nickname. And "starter" means you need to do a lot of work to it, just to have a crappy house in an ugly neighborhood directly under the SFO flight path.
damn I hate renting...except for the alternative...
Posted by: dan at July 25, 2006 04:49 PM