An open letter to New York Mets ownership

Editorial by: Joel Noe

Editors Location: Lyon, France

Written in response to: Mets Merized Online | metsmerizedonline.com

Dear Mr. Wilpon,

I am talking to you as a die heart fan of the ballclub you own, I am talking to you as someone who majored in finance and accounting, I am writing to you as a web developer of many e-commerce sites and online marketing strategist of ten years, and mostly I am writing because I love the team with my soul and think all the above mentioned traits have led me to the following logical statements.

Over the last few years you have publicly stated that you are broke and keep losing money because of a lack of ticket sales and so on. To satisfy a crumbling fan base you lead us to believe that we are rebuilding for the near future and indeed we are now in a position to do so if only we get more power and better defense up the middle. Furthermore, you have started out this off-season with a reasonable signing of a player that will most likely return more than the actual dollars spent to get him here and I applaud you for that.

However, as a fan who has stuck around for the hard times and a painful rebuilding process that is only now starting to bare fruitful moments I do know that many fans as I are afraid that you are not willing to trade or take on a significant amount of dollars to get us in position to win a championship in the next few years. Similarly, ever since you have been burnt by high price deals with some hefty seasons attached to it you are gun shy to pull the trigger and get us someone who can help us now as well as in the near future and further ignite the passion the burns in all of us that call ourselves Mets fans. Therefore, I am here to think this trough with you and see what business practice is best for a brand like the Mets to gain economically and in productivity.

First one needs not even state that the best way to gain revenue is by putting together a product that is a winning brand. Why? For what you gain by peaking people’s interest in your product is enormous. Take for example the English soccer team of Chelsea and the number of merchandise sold that increased by 62% after the team was sold to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2003 and he invested over £100 million on new players and thus Chelsea became a winning brand. Perhaps you would argue that this is due to the popularity of the English Premier League and while that might be true to some extend I’ll ask you if you know how much merchandise sales have increased for Russian football team Rubin Kazan which in 2006 under new president Alexander P. Gusev have shelled out money to bring in big name international players and for the first time in its history made it into the EUFA League as a formidable team? The answer to that is: 88% increase and around three million jerseys sold worldwide.

Should you want to narrow this to just baseball and look how much winning teams sell worldwide in a sport that is just now getting its bearings in European markets, well, you have found the right person. I live in France ever since 2011 and when first arrived here I have seen almost everywhere people wearing either Yankee caps or Tigers jerseys. Moreover, I have seen less and less people wearing Yankee caps over the last few seasons. When I stop and ask someone why the Yankee cap most people say they know nothing about baseball but they were in NY and they bought it since it seemed to be the most popular item. Why dear Mr. Wilpon should a young kid in England who wants to be up to style want to wear a Yankee cap and the beautiful blue and orange of the Mets? Why do I see the rabbi who does not want to expose his Kipah in France wear a Yankee cap and not a Mets cap?

Let us shift focus on the actual product on the field. We do have some up and coming stars which will be the cream of the best for the next few years to come. Harvey, deGrom, Wheeler, Familia, Mejia, Duda, Black are all coming into their own and few are to come the same way. Now please assess when the best window to win a championship or at least make it to the World Series for this group is.  It is either in the next few years with the help of a major power bat or in the longer term with time when your finances will be in order and then either retain the core in addition to signing some big free agents then. Now, what would you say is more logical? Spend the 20 million plus for one impact player now and win a championship in the next few years or be forces to let them go in free agency in a few years? If you wish to return profits on the Mets it is clear that we Mets fans will never let get away with not winning a championship with this core and then lose all our stars without winning anything. You got away with it when Reyes left but can you imagine if you have let Wright go? All this transpired while we had no chance of winning anything but I can assure you if you think that we will be a silent as the Marlins fans think twice.

Therefore, 20 million now and a championship is much cheaper than having to sign four or five to maximum contracts that you will be forced to do so if you wish to have the fan base support behind you and turn the Mets into a profitable entity.

I do not care who that player is as long as it is a 70% chance that he has the impact Mike Piazza had for the team. Remember how overpaying for Pedro has turned out to bring in sales in tickets and merchandise? Hear the call of your fans or I can guarantee you that you will never again make a profit of us Mets fans.

Sincerely

Joel [Rocky] Noe a die-heart fan.

Rare ‘Jewish War Heroes’ comic from 1944 found in box of donated used books

Reported by: Joel Noe

Source: National Post | Canada
First Reported by: Sarah B. Hood | National Post
Images: comicbookplus.com | National Post




Sylvia Lovegren knew she’d found something unusual while going through a box of used books, but she had no idea how rare it would turn out to be. A volunteer with the Friends of the Kelly Library at St. Michael’s College, Ms. Lovegren helps sort the 70,000 to 100,000 books donated to its fundraising sale every year.

She made the discovery while examining a collection of books relating to the Second World War in case some should be priced above the normal top price of $5. “I opened one up and I thought ‘what is this little piece of paper thing in here?

“It was just tucked inside the pages, and it looked like a comic book, and it had a very graphic design on it.”

Titled Jewish War Heroes and dated 1944, “it was in very good condition, so I thought it was something that had been issued much later,” she says. “But when I looked it up, I found that it had actually been issued during the war — and it was rather scarce. You can get a digital copy of it, but actual copies of it are very hard to come by.”

As Ms. Lovegren discovered, the comic book was the first of three issues published by the Canadian Jewish Congress to highlight the courage and dedication of Jewish soldiers at a time when some Canadians were claiming that Jews weren’t doing enough for the war effort.

In her 2012 book Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses : Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War, Ruth Klein reveals that the comic books were among numerous strategies of the CJC’s War Efforts Committee “to counteract the myth about Jewish ‘shirking.’”

Ms. Klein writes that the committee opened recruiting centres in Toronto and Montreal and kept careful track of enlistment figures, which were then circulated to media. They also held rallies across the country, circulated a monthly journal called Jews in Uniform and provided practical support to soldiers in the form of “comfort boxes” sent overseas and servicemen’s centres in Canada.

The first issue of Canadian War Heroes documents the career of Hamilton native Bert “Yank” Levy, who wrote a well-known book on guerilla warfare techniques, and even made the cover of Life magazine in 1942, as well as two recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (Brigadier Frederick Hermann Kisch and Alfred Brenner); General Morrice Abraham Cohen, an aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen, and Soviet submarine captain Israel Fisanovitch.

Ms. Lovegren has only located a few other copies of the comic book. “There are two library-bound copies in Toronto; this one was still pristine, without anybody fiddling with the binding,” Ms. Lovegren says. “Other than that, there is a copy in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and one in the National Library of Israel. It’s a very important little artifact. It was very thrilling to find it and to realize what it was.”
It would be tricky to fix a price on such a find, says Peter Birkemoe, owner of Toronto comic book shop The Beguiling. “With any Canadian wartime comics, it is more difficult than most comics, because there aren’t published records of sales figures like there are for things that trade hands more often; particularly for older comic books where the number of existing copies is fewer than 100.”

At auction, he says, if there was competition between bidders interested in Canadian or Jewish items, or collectors attracted by its rarity, “your low end would be in the $1,000 range; your high end would be close to five figures.”

This isn’t the first treasure that’s turned up among the donations, says Caroline Di Giovanni, President of the Friends of the Kelly Library. Past highlights include valuable nature prints, books relating to Marshall McLuhan and unique music memorabilia from Father Owen Lee, a regular panelist on the Texaco Opera Quiz. This year, notable donations include music scores, books on heraldry and Gaelic language and “a complete collection of 19^th-century Trollope books,” says Ms. Di Giovanni.

Saturday is the final day of this year’s sale. Jewish War Heroes will be on display but not for sale; the library will likely keep it.

French, German leaders visit Nazi massacre site in central France

Reported by: Joel Noe

Source: France 24 | France
First Reported by: News Writes | AFP

French President Francois Hollande and German counterpart Joachim Gauck on Wednesday pay a landmark visit to the ghost village of Oradour-sur-Glane where 642 people were massacred by Nazi troops during World War II. 

Gauck is the first German leader to visit the site in west-central France, where ruins from the war have been preserved as a memorial to the dead.

At a joint press conference Tuesday ahead of the visit, Hollande praised Gauck's visit as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.

"You have made the choice (to visit the site), it honours you, and at the same time it forces us, once the past has been acknowledged, to go boldly into preparing the future," Hollande said.

Gauck said he had accepted the invitation to visit the site with "a mixture of gratitude and humility".

He said he would not shy away from pointing out to others during the visit that "the Germany that I have the honour of representing is a different Germany from the one that haunts their memories".

The ruins they will visit include a church where women and children were locked in, before toxic gas was released and the building set on fire.

Some 205 children aged under 15 were among victims of the June 10, 1944 atrocity which left deep scars in France.

After the war, French General Charles de Gaulle, who later became president, decided that the village should not be rebuilt but remain a memorial to the barbarity of Nazi occupation. A new village was built nearby.

In 1999, French president Jacques Chirac dedicated a memorial museum which includes items recovered from what became known as the 'Village of Martyrs'.

They include watches stopped at the time the owners were burnt alive, glasses melted from intense heat and other personal items.

The highly symbolic visit follows a 1984 commemoration when then French president Francois Mitterrand and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl joined hands while attending a memorial service for fallen soldiers at Verdun.

The Battle of Verdun (February-December 1916) claimed the lives of more than 700,000 soldiers and came to symbolise the horror of war for both the Germans and the French. 

Hollande and Gauck will make speeches and visit the village square, where the residents were rounded up by German troops ostensibly to have their identity papers checked. The women and children were then locked up in the church while the men were taken to a barn where machine guns awaited.

They will be accompanied by two of the three living survivors, including Robert Hebras, 88.

Hebras, who was 19 at the time of the massacre, survived as he was buried under the corpses of others who were machine-gunned.

"I was consumed by hatred and vengeance for a long time," he said, adding that Gauck's visit came at an opportune time.

"Any earlier would have been too soon," he said, adding: "We must reconcile with the Germans."

Germany in 2010 reopened a war crimes case into the attack when a historian discovered documents implicating six suspects in their 80s.

The suspects, aged 18 and 19 at the time, allegedly ordered the inhabitants to assemble in the village square.

Prosecutors eventually identified 12 members of the regiment who were still alive after trawling through files of the Stasi secret police in the former communist East that came to light after German reunification in 1990.

A case has been opened against seven of them. The other five have already served sentences in France.

Gauck, a former East German human rights activist, has already paid two visits to the sites of Nazi mass killings in Europe; the Czech village of Lidice near Prague in 2012 and the Italian hamlet of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in March this year.

Body found floating in Lake Ontario, reportedly wrapped in garbage bag

Reported by: Joel Noe

Source: Canadian Post | Canada
First Reported by: Kim Brown | National Post

The Toronto Police Marine Unit recovered a body from Lake Ontario Wednesday afternoon.
Police have identified the person as female.

Officers were on routine patrol when they found the body shortly after midday. Reports say the body was wrapped in a garbage bag.

The woman was floating about 30 metres south of the sea wall at Yonge Street and Queens Quay.
The homicide squad is handling the investigation.