The Minimalist's Thirty-Million-Dollar House

Near the end of May 2013 it was reported that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez’s Miami home had sold to an unnamed buyer for $30 million, making it one of the most expensive home sales in the city’s history.

Rodriguez bought the property for $7.4 million in 2010, and spent roughly the same amount on building the house, which was finished about a year later. Less than four years after starting construction, Rodriguez was able to sell the house for a profit of somewhere near $15 million.

Now, we don’t object to making a profit—in fact, if we someday sell our own home for an extra fifteen million dollars, then so be it. That bothers us even less than it bothers us for ESPN.com to describe a 20,000-square-foot house—one with nine bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, home theater, and an outdoor kitchen (as well as the more mundane indoor gourmet kitchen)—as “minimalist.”

See if you can guess which of these houses is the quaint,
minimalist bungalow formerly owned by Alex Rodriguez.

We do admit, however, to being a little puzzled. In one of the worst housing markets and worst overall economies most living Americans have seen—or at least can remember clearly—this house was sold after less than four years for twice its previous price. What kind of luck is that?

Honestly, who on Earth gets paid tens of millions of dollars in order to get something that’s just going to sit there, inert, doing nothing but getting older and more and more run-down, and may well have been built using illegal materials in the first place? 

What?

 Hey—

  
Oh wait—

Yeah, we remember who now. Alex Rodriguez.

A Young Man's Dream Come True

Czech-born hockey forward David Krejci had to have been excited when, on April 2, 2013, his Boston Bruins traded for his childhood idol, twelve-time NHL All-Star and two-time Stanley Cup champion Jaromir Jagr. It’s hard to imagine a young athlete who doesn’t dream of one day suiting up with his or her favorite athlete, and not only has gotten to play with his idol, but also is (as of this afternoon) only two wins away from winning a championship with him. That has to be exciting.


As it turns out, Krecji isn’t the only Bruin who gets to skate with the favorite player from his childhood:




Getting to hit the ice with Jaromir Jagr has to be a dream come true for Jaromir Jagr, even if the guy hardly ever passes him the puck or even looks him in the eye.

The best comment we’ve seen so far on this comes from Yahoo Sports:

“In Jagr's defence, who would he have named as his favourite player anyway? When hockey was invented, he was nine.”¹

NOTES
1. We’d probably find this even funnier if we weren’t just barely younger than Jagr, and weren’t getting awfully thin-skinned about our impending decrepitude. But, hey, this is the internet; we can hardly expect people to pass up the low-hanging fruit of an “old guy being old” joke. Besides, have you seen the guy? He’s forty-one years old—shouldn’t he have, like, died by now?²
2. See what we mean? Low-hanging fruit. Cheap jokes. Internet.

"The Invader" by Ehud Lavski

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We’re not sure whether posting this constitutes a violation of copyright or a perfectly appropriate, even desirable, sharing of an artistic creation that deserves wider publicity. We prefer to believe it’s the latter, although we’d find the notion of our little backwater blog actually providing wider publicity to be pretty laughable, if we had a sense of humor. Original artwork found online at http://elcomics.tumblr.com/.

Well, as Long as They're Already Dead, I Guess It's Okay . . .

If you’re too incompetent to keep them alive, then burying them
is, technically, part of the job description.

The above photograph of the office of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Bury, Greater Manchester, England, has been making the rounds of the Internet lately, even though the photograph dates from 2005, practically an eternity in terms of pointless and stupid internet fads. 

Mere months after the photo was taken, the sign in question was replaced with the more sensible “Helping Local Animals,” leaving a pun-starved public to hope, probably fruitlessly, that the RSPCA’s stateside counterpart, the ASPCA, happens to open similar offices in, say, Fishkill, Slaughter Beach, or French Lick.¹


NOTE

1. We thought about naming our all-time favorite Austrian town here, but the verb tense just didn’t quite click.

This is Your Childhood Taking a Crane-Kick to the Face

Noryuki “Pat” Morita was fifty-two years old when he starred as the aging but spry Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid with Ralph Macchio.

As of November 2013, Ralph Macchio, who starred in The Karate Kid as the young and initially ass-kickable Daniel Larusso, will be fifty-two years old.

We’ll repeat this for movie fans of a certain age: the Karate Kid will be fifty-two years old this year.

And this, movie fans of a certain age, is your childhood (left) taking a crane-kick to the face. Look how sad it is.

Irony, Illustrated

 

We’re not really sure whether this one passes the irony test, or, failing that, whether it passes for clever or super-stupid. As the entire message is, in fact, written in stone, it proves itself wrong and thus pretty pointless . . . but then again, the word “nothing ” is written in stone right here, so if read literally, the statement is technically correct . . . and pretty pointless.

All we can say for sure is that there’s somebody out there with a chisel and way too much free time.

Dumb, Illustrated