My Sick Mind

Baseball's annual exhibition game, the All-Star game is next week. Today, I received an e-mail from Major League Baseball with a link to buy tickets to the game. Well, I was born during the day, but it wasn't yesterday . I figured there was a ruse afoot. Sure enough, clicking the link set me up with the "Official Fan to Fan Ticket Marketplace" (i.e. Legal ticket scalper) StubHub. The oddly named ticket re-seller. If I wanted a ticket stub, I wouldn't buy one from a scalper. Those, I can pick up off the floor. Being the curious guy that I am, I clicked it . Prices ranged from a low of $365 to a high of (sitting down?) $29,500. That's right. And it wasn't just one guy, there were 19 sellers asking at least $10,000 for a seat to the game. I'll leave it to you to digest those figures. What galls me about the whole StubHub scam is that the professional leagues (the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) along with the King of ticket scammers, Ticketmaster (Ticketbastar...

I think we may have covered this ground, but it bears repeating. These are actual images from Ticketmaster's verification screen. I'm supposed to be able to read this and type it in. These are even worse than the Blogger ones. Leave it to the Ticketmaster gang to come up with colors and grid lines. Bastards. I just want a ticket to a show. Can't you devote at least some of that massive ticket surcharge to finding a better way to verify that I am not who you think I am? Because, I already know what I think you are . .

THE NEWS: The Police are set to embark on their first tour in 23 years! To celebrate their 30th anniversary, Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland will trek through arenas and stadiums across North America this summer. I checked my thesaurus to see what words were synonyms for "trek", since it's an odd descriptive for anyone not traveling by foot. I found hike, tramp, slog, trail and trudge. That sounds like a lot of work. I sure hope they're being amply compensated. So, there I go, over to the Ticketmaster site (Circle 4 of The Nine Circles of Hell) to check out the ticket prices, to let me know how much celebrating I can do. Plus, I figure if the boys are going to trudge all over the United States, they had better be making enough money to afford gorp . At the aptly named Palace at Auburn Hills, the geezers are accepting $227, $92 and $82. That should be enough to keep them waist-deep in gorp, even at New York prices. At the Madison Square, the tickets start at...