--Quite a weekend of baseball.  I was at a party and missed the fight, but I caught plenty of highlights.  I’m glad Varitek went after A-Rod.  What a potty mouth.  It was pretty funny that the announcers feigned ignorance as to what A-Rod was saying.  Geez guys, he wasn’t saying “vacuum.”

--And then Ricky Williams retires to smoke pot!  As a Pats fan, I could not stop giggling.  If he wants to retire, that’s his choice, but why didn’t he announce it before the draft or before Eddie George and Antowain Smith were signed?  He probably went to Asia to avoid furious Dolphin fans.

By the way, the Dolphins offence will rely on AJ Feely and Travis Minor.  Mull that over.

--I picked up the Van Halen “The Best of Both Worlds” 2 disc greatest hits set over the weekend.  Seemed like an easy thing to put together: Dave on Disc 1, Sammy on Disc 2.  So of course they screw it up by alternating between Dave and Sammy on both discs, which hurts the listening value tremendously.  Roth-era VH and Hagar-era VH are greatly different beasts (Dave was better, of course, but I thought the high points of the Sammy days were pretty damn great), and listening to them switch back and forth is very disconcerting.  How do you screw up a home run like this?

Even more egregious are the three new tracks (with Sammy on lead vocal).  Bands pull this stunt all the time—offer two or three unreleased songs on a greatest hits album so fans who already own all the material feel obligated to buy it.  Standard practice is to dump these songs at the end of the album, but TBOBW dumps them at the beginning of disc one, right after “Eruption.”  Plus they tack on some live tracks of Sammy singing Dave song.  Are they trying to aggravate their fans?