Major League Jew Attempts A Comeback

Jewish ballplayer, and former New York Met David Newhan is attempting a comeback after a scary neck injury.

Mazel Tov, David! I could use a few more Jewish utility men on this year's Major League Jews fantasy team (coming soon).

The World's Last Unsecured Password

I want to apologize to all my family and friends (and assorted random contacts) for spamming them this week. My email was hacked. More specifically, my AOL email was hacked.

Yes, I can hear you laughing. AOL email??? What is this, 1998?

I moved onto Gmail a lifetime ago, but I still kept my AOL account around for the purposes of signing up for things. Everyone these days asks for your email address, and I didn't want my Gmail inbox stuffed with "Special Offers" and "Membership Information." My AOL account, therefore, became a haven for junk.

It was also very vulnerable.

Back when I created the account, sometime around 1996, people's awareness of internet security wasn't high. In 1996, celebrities accounts hadn't yet been hacked for nude photos and spam emails were still written using complete English sentences. When AOL prompted me to create a password, it didn't insist it be 8 characters long, including a capital letter, a number and a special character. It just asked for a password.

So I typed one in. Benf. Short for Ben Folds Five, a band I liked a lot in 1996.

According to mathematics, 456,976 guesses is all it would take to crack my password. From 1996-2011, it had gone uncracked. 15 years. But apparently, someone did it. I'm very careful not to click spam links, so I'm pretty sure I didn't give a spammer that way in. It was just a matter of time before my pathetic password fell victim to someone who undoubtedly looks nothing like Angelina Jolie from the movie "Hackers."

So R.I.P., last unsecured password in the world. You were a relic of a bygone era, when the internet was a much more innocent place. I'll miss how quick and easy it was to type you in, and how easy you were to remember. I'll remember you always.

Benf. 1996-2011

So I Guess That's The End Of The Mile-High Club?

The FAA has ordered all airlines to disable emergency oxygen masks in airplane bathrooms, for fear that terrorists may use the oxygen to ignite a fire.

This means that every time you go to the bathroom on a flight from now on, you'll be risking your life if the plane decompresses.

So add emergency lifesaving equipment to the list of things the FAA has made us safe from, which includes shampoo bottles larger than three ounces and nail clippers.

Unfortunately, the FAA has done nothing to prevent the obvious terrorist threat posed by obnoxious kids that kick your seat.

It's Time To Overthrow Our Ticketmaster

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... the masses have finally risen up to overthrow their corrupt and heartless dictators. But there remains one brutal tyrant who continues to oppress millions of people, shattering their hopes and dreams, coddling the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class.

I'm talking, of course, about Ticketmaster.

I've written before about my frustrating experiences with Ticketmaster. If it was up to me, I'd never use the service ever again. But Ticketmaster holds, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly over the online retail of concert and event tickets. If you want to see the Yankees, Ticketmaster is the only place online where you can buy tickets at face value.

Ahem, I mean, try to buy tickets at face value. Because you won't be able to. Because Ticketmaster isn't designed to sell tickets. It's designed to force the majority of people to look elsewhere for tickets-- resellers TicketsNow (owned by Ticketmaster) and StubHub.

If that wasn't the case, why make it so difficult to see what tickets are available? Stubhub uses an easy system in which every ticket that's available is listed-- one can click on the section you want and presto-- a list of the tickets for sale in that section are presented.

Ticketmaster, however, uses a blind system. There's no way of telling how many tickets are left, or in what sections. You can be "waiting in line" for a few minutes, only to be told in the end that there are no seats available. And when that message "No Seats Available" pops up, you're not offered with great alternatives. You're given a choice of splitting your order (looking for one seat in one section, one in another section) or going back and restarting the (long) process over again.

How many times do I have to type in a complicated, non-English CAPTCHA before Ticketmaster accepts I'm a human being?

What benefit does hiding the available tickets provide? Nothing for fans. But for ticket resellers and powerful ticket brokers, the system is a boon. Let's say Ticketmaster wants to make a bigger profit. Will they make it by selling tickets at face value? Or will they make it by holding a bunch of tickets, then dumping them on their reselling site, TicketsNow, where they can charge scalper prices? If the system weren't blind, it would be obvious that Ticketmaster was withholding certain seats for resale or for powerful ticket brokers. The closed system helps Ticketmaster avoid scrutiny.

The ticket buying experience on Ticketmaster isn't anything like buying tickets at a normal ticket booth. If you wait in line at a ticket booth, when you reach the front, you're leaving with a ticket. This is not the case when you wait on the Ticketmaster website. You can spend all day on the site (which I can attest to) and even though nothing is listed as sold out, you still can't get anything.

The only way to easily get tickets is to put "Best Available" as your choice. You'll undoubtedly be offered the best seats in the house-- for tons of money. As such, the system rewards the rich, while those trying to be economical are madly scrambling to find the few available seats scattered in other sections.

I had this experience today, at 10:01 AM. Yankees tickets went on sale at 10:00. But everything except the worst of games (Toronto, 1:00, weekday) were already gone (though you wouldn't know it unless you tried, repeatedly).

Then I looked at the tickets available on StubHub and TicketsNow. Every section was available... for marked-up prices. Funny... I actually wanted to go to a game, not resell my tickets for profit. But I couldn't do it on Ticketmaster. I wonder how all these resellers got theirs? Did they snap up tickets seconds before me? Or did somebody give them a little help? I wonder???

As long as Ticketmaster keeps us blind, we'll never know.

A Radical Idea... Blow Up The NFL

 

They may still call baseball "America's Pastime," but the truth is, football is king in this country. The NFL has been wildly successful in fielding the sport and making it a year-round obsession for fans. From the draft in April to the Superbowl in February, it's football that produces the biggest parties, tailgates, and crowds.

But if the NFL and the NFL Players Association don't agree to extend the collective bargaining agreement deadline by midnight tonight, it may be time to consider a radical option.

End the NFL.

I'm not talking about the end of professional football. What I'm talking about is a passing of the torch-- from 32 owners who don't give a damn about fans or players, to 32 new owners who would respect the fans and instantly agree to adopt the previous collective bargaining agreement that has made football the most successful and financially sound league of all American sports.

A de-certification of the players union and a lengthy lockout from the NFL owners would effectively put the NFL "out of business," transforming every NFL player into a free agent, at liberty to bring their talents anywhere. The UFL and CFL have struggled to grab a foothold in the American football market for quite some time now... could they take advantage and create a new American football league?

Already, posters on UFL message boards are drooling at the prospect.

At issue is this: do you believe it's the NFL executives and owners that make the NFL so great, or the players?

Certainly, a new league or expanded UFL/CFL would undergo growing pains. You don't go from a second-class outfit to "the big leagues" overnight. But NFL-caliber talent attracts NFL-caliber dollars. What would happen if Coach Bill, Tom Brady and the rest of his New England Patriots teammates decided to all join the Hartford Colonials? Would all those Patriots fans stick with Bob Kraft? Or would they throw on "New England Colonials" jerseys? I'd say the latter. Other teams can follow suit, joining existing UFL/CFL teams or new expansion teams, headed by investors who have been itching for a piece of the NFL pie for years. There's plenty of places to play football other than NFL-owned stadiums. How about the Lions playing in Michigan Stadium? They'd probably have MORE fans fill the seats there than currently do at Pontiac.

Of course, players wouldn't be bound to stay with their previous squads. What if a group of Pro Bowlers decided they wanted to start a team in South Beach, ala LeBron and company? Forget about the sad sack Miami Dolphins, welcome to the juggernaut Miami Sharks.

Coach Pacino

Certainly, ticket sales, a tv deal,and a wave of new merchandise would all raise money for the fledgling league and help pay salaries. The UFL today pays their players a pittance... but only because the league earns a pittance. With legions of football fans having nowhere else to turn, a new league would have a market of hungry fans willing to spend the money they once spent on the NFL.

No, it's not likely. But why are we trusting 32 people with a sport we love? Especially when they've shown they value money over the sport itself?