The Tiger, the Herd and the Doggie

In a pre-Masters press conference on April 6, a seemingly goateed Tiger Woods answered an eclectic mix of questions from a herd of 207 reporters crammed into an interview room. Regarding his car crash —“It’s a closed case;” about sponsors leaving — “Do I understand why they dropped me? Of course I made a lot of mistakes in my life;” and Tiger admitted, “What I’ve done over the past years has been terrible to my family. And the fact that I won golf tournaments I think is irrelevant.” That’s why he’s back at the meaningless Masters and has been established as the favorite.

There weren’t any reporters that day to cover the death of 93-year-old Al Ross although the Associated Press wrote his obituary. In 1948, Ross opened his first Doggie Diner in Oakland, California, and eventually ran thirty of them. The diners had displays of huge dauschunds with rotating heads.  Ross also put on the dog, hanging out with Frank Sinatra and collecting boats, airplanes and racehorses. The diners closed in 1986 and in 2000, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declared that one 700-pound, seven-foot-tall head was a city landmark. It was given a $20,000 facelift and moved to a median strip near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. 

California for Sale Buy e-Bay

The gubernatorial race in California might end up being the most expensive and could surpass the $148 million spent eight years ago in the New York race won by Republican George Pataki. New York seems to set the standard in buying your way into office and in the 2009 campaign for mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg was re-elected when he bought the title with $108 million of his own money. Now e-Bay’s former CEO, billionaire Meg Whitman, has reached into her own petty cash drawer and has thus far donated $59 million to win the Republican nomination. That sum is just to win the primary over a mere millionaire who has been penurious by only contributing $19.2 million of his own money to his campaign. Whitman, who says she is willing to spend more than $150 million to become governor, believes that every citizen should vote and claims to have been a stalwart in Republican politics for years. The Sacramento Bee reported that she was not registered to vote before 2002 and there was no evidence she had ever registered as a Republican before 2007.