Need help for a friend I've run across. David Ayers owns a pretty quaint, small produce store in the historic district of my city. He had been struggling for the first couple of months until he made a sandwich board sign for his store as a way to attract the attention of drivers.

Unfortunately the evil city board says he's in violation of a code with the sign because they are only allowed in the downtown district (he's about a 1/2 mile outside of the downtown zone). So he has to take down the sign that has given him a considerable amount of business.

My co-worker Rick wrote a story on David's struggles today and as expected he'll get a nice surge of business for the short term, but that will die down pretty quickly. I'm hopeful it'll stay busy long enough for him to purchase a refrigerator (as it is, he keeps his "cool" fruits in a big cooler) but I'm not over optimistic.

Thankfully my former classmate is the current city commissioner and Seth is working on finding him a waiver to get an overhang. But that could take time.

So what can David do to draw attention. He's got a little wagon decorated with some of the fruit, but it doesn't draw like the sign did. Any suggestions?

I can't say I'm surprised with the latest confessions of Jason Giambi, it was more than obvious that he was a product of steroids given the fact that he had no baseball skills other than hitting a home run. Once off the juice, Giambi was noticably lighter and very sick, dealing with a parasite and a benign tumor. He was also an extremely shitty ballplayer.

In all honesty really no different than Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa, two other obvious roiders. None of them could run, field, throw or had any real business out on the field other than socking a curveball 500 feet and in actuality they couldn't even do that without help. In Sammy's case he needed roids AND a corked bat. As for McGwire, he's 65 pounds lighter now (!!) than he was as a player. And no he didn't go on the South Beach Diet.

Let's be honest though, no one cares about Giambi's plight. Picking on Giambi is like playing the easy level in Madden, my only hope is that Selig forces the Yankees to pay every penny of his salary since they were stupid enough to sign him.

But the people don't want Giambi and I doubt we'll hear too much on Giambi past a few columns and stories this week.

Everyone wants Barry Bonds. Why? Bonds. Well we always like to target the best and Bonds is certainly that. He's actually a great baseball player, a seven-time MVP, former gold glover, 500 stolen bases, a five-tool player into his 30s. He's also not a very nice person, he's ornery, he's old school. He doesn't smile a lot.

So I'll be watching this Giambi stuff to see how soon before they forgive him. It's not like he had a Hall of Fame career and he's as big an asshole as Bonds is (although he talks a little more). I mean Bonds will NEVER admit to anything, he'll shut the media off before he does that. But I'm interested to see when the baseball fans forgive Giambi for disgracing the sport, since he's not the guy they want to see thrown to the fire.

Okay for Brent, Maese and anyone else interested. The first part of the Vegas trip is BELOW my Christmas Rush post because I started it first and kept it as a draft. I'd move it up top but I'm too lazy. I'll do part II soon enough because that's when the fun begins.

But for now, I'm going to make some breakfast, so you can read this story I heisted from Mudge. I think the story can become a nice little contest... i.e. name your Hooters-knock out bar. How about "Boobs" or "Milk Jugs"...