756 With A Big Asterisk

Love him or hate him, Barry Bonds made baseball history tonight after hitting the record breaking 756th homer. He topped that off later with his 757th career dinger. Regardless of what Mr. Bonds says, his record will always be tainted in my mind and the minds of many others.

Let's get one thing straight. Before he bulked up into a monster slugger, he was already on the road to the Hall of Fame. You could take all the performance enhancing drugs you want, but it's not going to help you hit a 90+ MPH pitch. The man was born with talent. What's in question is whether he could've accomplished the feat of breaking the long standing record set by Hank Aaron 33 years ago without performance enhancing drugs.

Of course there's no definitive proof that links Bonds to the use of performance enhancing drugs, but there's enough questionable evidence that makes you go hmm. He claims that if he did take performance enhancing drugs, it was administered to him without his knowledge. For anyone to go through such a physical transformation, especially a professional athlete, and not know what he/she is consuming is just ludicrous in my opinion. The training and dieting (I don't mean weight loss dieting) required needs to be well thought out. Even if you rely on high priced trainers and nutritionists to help you get there, you still learn much about what you're doing to your body.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think. Unless some indisputable evidence surfaces, Bonds will go into the history books as the man who holds the home run record and the asterisk next to that number will eventually fade.

What The D#@k

If you're into photography or know someone who is, check out the funny work of Aaron Johnson called What The Duck. What started as a blog filler for the band he was in turned into a popular Web comic strip among photo geeks like myself. You can catch all of his work at the What The Duck website by clicking on the duck below.

Canada Ignores White-Collar Crimes

With the recent verdict in the only Bre-X criminal case, Canada has once again shown just how lax its laws are towards white-collar crime (and every other type of crime for that matter). John Felderhof, the geologist involved, was found not guilty. He was the only person to ever be charged with a crime. Bre-X president David Walsh died of a brain aneurysm and fellow geologist Mike de Guzman supposedly fell to his death from a helicopter while flying over the jungles of Indonesia. Not a single other person involved with the company was ever charged. It's hard to believe that no one else could have been involved with one of Canada's biggest investment fraud.

Unlike our American counterpart, the Ontario Securities Commission did not feel the need to toughen regulations in the market, even after the collapse of Nortel. Here's an example of a company that operated for who knows how long with false financials and no one got as much as a slap on the wrist for their involvement. The CEO at the time, John Roth, walked away with well over $100 million after he cashed in stock options in 2000. Millions of Canadians suffered a financial loss either directly or indirectly as a result of the Nortel blunder and Mr. Roth gets to retire comfortably. Even after the replacement of key executives, inaccurate financial filings continued. No one has ever been held accountable in Canada.

I'm pretty sure that nothing would have happened to Ken Lay if Enron had been operating in Canada.