What was that again?

There have been a few phrases, words, or sentences I've heard or read recently that made me think twice. They will be presented and discussed.



"Market Value"

I was reading about Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel wanting to get "market value" from the Patriots, which means that he wanted to get paid more than others who produce less than him. In most situations, I would agree that this is a good salary rule: If you produce more than somebody else, you should get paid more than that person. In professional sports, where salaries are ballooning, it makes for some interesting contracts. Take Barry Zito's 7-year deal for $126 million, which has not paid off for the Giants. Now, pitchers who produce more than Zito, or even have the potential to produce like him, will get deals that approach or surpass those numbers. I guess my point is this: Is there that big of a difference between getting paid maybe 6 million a year and wanting 8 million a year? Yes, I suppose it is 2 million dollars, a large sum of money, but 6 million is still far more than some 99% of the US population makes in a year. I can see a person arguing that they produce more than a coworker and deserve a raise from $12/hr to $15/hr, but the numbers these professional athletes argue over have six zeroes behind them!



"Tide of Iron"
Tide of Iron is a board game I purchased recently. It is a scenario-based World War II game, that I supposed could be described as Risk on steriods. Risk would be somewhat skinny, rookie year, 1987 bash-brother Mark McGuire, whereas Tide of Iron would be 1998, bulging arm vien, gum-chewing, muscleman Mark McGuire. I believe Tide of Iron is a great name for the game, as from the shore, the D-Day invasions must have turned the beaches into a tide of iron, but then the game itself has no scenarios that involve those battles. It deals with events that happen after D-Day, some almost a year after the operation. So, it's a great game, but the name doesn't exactly fit the game.

"We play everything"
That is the station motto for 100.3, The BUS, based out of Des Moines. They claim to play everything, but they don't. What you can hear on the BUS consists of most of the songs you can hear on any oldies station (93.3 here in Iowa), classic rock station (95), or 80s/90s pop station (102.5). They have some self-righteous DJ recordings that they play before songs and frequently talk about how their songs are played at random, even though there are a few heard daily. Well, they don't play everything, a wide variety of songs for sure, but nothing that approaches the all-encompasing "everything". They play no jazz, few blues songs, no country, no opera, no classical (Roll Over Beethoven doesn't count), no rap, no hip-hop, nothing you regularly hear on college radio stations, no Christian, no bluegrass, and no metal. Surely, many other genres are excluded. Well, I'd still prefer to listen to the BUS at work over any other radio station, but their self-proclaiming radio shorts really annoy me.

"All projects equal"
I went to my brother's senior art exhibition, where a woman served as a judge to give out awards. You know how you have to let people who didn't win feel good about their work? She tried to do that, but ended up not making sense. She said that all projects were equally good, but a few stood out from the rest. Seven pieces won awards, one first, one second, one third, four honorable mention, but they were all equally good... I wish I could take a math course that she taught where she would show how 1=2=3=4=4=4=4=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5... I'm not on an angry guy grammar or semantics rant here, I just thought what she said was humorous, then came up with the math parts in my head.

I'm sure I've come across more of these, but they were the few that I remembered to write about.