Where Am I Going To Put All Those Duckies?

Hip-Hop/publishing mogul Marc Ecko was the unidentified buyer who purchased Barry Bonds' 756 home run ball last week for $752,467 at Sotheby's/SCP auctions on Saturday (September 15).

According to Ecko, he will take the historical ball and allow the public to choose its fate.
Starting today, fans can go www.vote756.com and choose to "give the ball to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, permanently brand the ball with an asterisk before sending it to Cooperstown or put the ball on a rocket ship and launch it into space."

Okay, we get it. Marc Ecko is loaded. Money to burn..or to brand or shoot into orbit. Whatever. He has relieved New Yorker Matt Murphy.

Murph was up against it with the IRS. He catches a baseball. A freakin' baseball people, and all of a sudden he owes like 35k to Uncle Sam.

So he does the wise thing and puts it up for auction. He is, I'm sure, envisioning a nice check, 250k maybe, a trip to the Sod for him and a few of the boys. New cars for the brood, maybe payoff some loans. A few kegs of Guinness.....

So imagine his surprise when Moneybags Marc Ecko forks over $752,467k for the ball. He is, I'm sure, crapping his kilt. 752,467 dollars is a massive sum for a, well, ball. A baseball. Think about it. Any kid in your neighborhood has one. Go and take it from him/her. Hold it for a minute. It's a tiny rubber core, wrapped in twine, stitched up in horsehide. A ball people.

Ecko is even thinking about shooting it into outer space. I could think of many other things more worthy of shooting into the stratosphere, but that's neither here nor there. A post for another time. Maybe

What I did do is get a little list together of other things you could do with 752,467 dollars.

1. Providing you purchased from the Value Menu, and it cost you say, $14 per person, per day. You could feed 53,747 homeless people for one day. But, don't homeless people have it bad enough??

2. You could buy 94,176 six packs of Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

3. At current New Jersey prices you could buy about 312,226.9 gallons of regular gasoline. And, if you get 24 miles per gallon, say, you could drive 13,009.45 miles.

4. At current rates, I could pay my cable bill for the next 800 years. Of course, I'm sure it will be slightly less in the future the way these cable companies are going. Fekkers...

5. I could pay my mortgage 3.05 times over.

6. 760,o67 iTunes

7. You could take about 1,075 of your best buds to the next Superbowl. Or, take 126 of your pals to the Superbowl and rent 3 luxury boxes.

8. For the dog lover, if you felt inspired, you could buy 752 purebred Shetland Sheepdogs.

9. Depending on your health insurance, you could have Aortic Heart Valve replacement surgery about 3 times. (Trust me. Once is enough)

10. Again, depending on your insurance, you could get 25,082 scripts for Vicodin. That's 1,504,920 pieces of little, white happiness. Generic hapiness of course.

11. You could mail 2,894,103 postcards.

12. Figuring this years rates, you could spend the next 15.6 years at Harvard. They do have a very decent hockey program....

13. You could have Peyton Manning come to your next 3 birthday parties. Personally, I think Tom Brady would be a better bet. Even if you had to pay 300k. Tom freakin' Brady people!

14. You could buy about 251,664 rubber duckies.

15. I could buy a new Maserati Quattrophone for me and my wife. And one for Keith, one for Stacey, one for Skyler, and one for someone else.

16. I could buy my wife the Hope Diamond. 3 times. And have a little left over for say....

17. A cruise 'round the world on the QE2.

18. And finally, you could pay my water bill for 3,135 years.