Ah, summer jobs. My favourites were:

1. working for Len Wiebe's trenching and excavating company in Morden, Man. - all outdoors, lunches at the Fireside Inn in Carman, plenty of beer after work and an entire summer spent digging through backyards in various southern Manitoba towns laying cablevision cable and, of course, plenty of beer after work;

2. working as a ticket-taker at Colert Beach, located on scenic Lake Minnewasta or, as we called it, Lake Mini-Washtub and where I believe we almost lost Calvin McEllroy's $500 Austin Mini one night when we forgot to put on the emergency brake and let it roll down the hill. It was a great car, one of those where you'd pull into the service station and ask the guy to fill it up with oil and check the gas. At any rate, the job was a kick because I was all by myself in a stinking hot little hut for eight hours a day but I had a nice little pad outside to catch some sun, read the Sporting News (boxscores were a big deal when you were a baseball fan in the mid-70s in a town of 3,500), was smart enough to know that if I let the local bikers in for nothing they'd not only check on me on the way back to make sure everything was cool or handle any issues that might arise, they'd also ensure that proper liquid refreshment were available on a steady basis because, well, I wasn't 18 years old yet and they were. Anyhow, I'm rambling because I always think of Reds Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Brennaman when I think of Colert Beach because I could pick up the Reds games through all the static crackle on the radio during my last hour of work. Brennaman and the Twins Herb Carneal were my guys, and Brennaman, of course, is in town this week with the Reds.

So I asked him Tuesday if he'd ever wondered what was up with these Canadian baseball G.M.'s?

"Kevin Malone," he responded with a laugh. "I was thinking about that today."

You know, of course, that Toronto Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi is in the middle of a bizarre "thing" with the Reds Adam Dunn. In brief: Ricciardi called out Dunn on his Wednesday radio show, Dunn called him a clown, Ricciardi apologized publicly, Dunn said he didn't care, Ricciardi said he received a call on his cellular phone from Dunn and apologized again, Dunn said he didn't call him, Ricciardi said "Well, I spoke to somebody who identified himself as Adam Dunn," and Dunn said he's sick and tired of it and doesn't want to talk about it anymore but, well, he didn't talk to Ricciardi.

When Malone was G.M. of the Montreal Expos, he burst into Brennaman's booth at Riverfront Stadium - while he was on the air, doing a game - and yelled at him for criticizing Carlos Perez and Pedro Martinez for throwing at Reds hitters. Uh-oh. It so happens that Brennaman's daughter was helping keep score in the booth and her father told the engineer to close the microphones, ordered his daughter to cover her ears, and then tied in to Malone. The men later met outside the booth but Brennaman was properly outraged and Malone, to his credit, was deeply embarrassed.
So are we at the bottom of all this? Ricciardi says he deleted the incoming number from his cell phone, but that he noticed the area code was something like 519. Thing is, that's a southwestern Ontario number and with the Reds in Yankee Stadium ....

Look. My guess is that Ricciardi has a Rogers cellphone and that even with the deleted number, he knows a guy who knows a guy and that somebody - some place - in a team owned by Rogers could get to the bottom of this. I don't believe Ricciardi is lying, because there's no percentage in it. He's called Reds G.M. Walt Jocketty. He's asked for Dunn's cell phone and he's apologized profusely and publicly. Dunn, I don't know. But he sure comes across as someone tired of it. Ricciardi's right: if it's a prank, it's some kind of prank. Reminds me of the kind of thing that used to happen almost daily on some of Montreal's French-language morning radio shows.