AUGUST 2, 2007 --

Radio stations regularly give us commercials from people promising that they will speak to credit companies and get the companies to lower our crushing
interest rates.

Why won't the credit cards do that at our request?

(Indeed, by what legal concept are the credit card companies permitted to assail customers, unilaterally, with huge and heavy penalties? Any public official willing to explain?)

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There is, apparently, no end to MLB (major league baseball) cleverness in thinking up ways for additional income. LPR can recall when entire games had broadcast sponsorship.

For the New York Yankees, White Owl cigars and Ballentine beer sponsored radio broadcasts. Now, individual plays have sponsors.How things have changed. No more one-admission double-headers.

Free telecasts are few and far between. Well, when will fans at the ballparks get hit with surcharges for extra-inning games?

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Seems to LPR, by the intuitive factor, that the oil companies did extensive market research before hitting us with gas prices ranging from $3 to nearly $4 a gallon.

That -- as my late father Sol Zukerman would say -- no good is going to come of this is of no concern to the aggrandizing mindset.