Paul Allen is poor

Yeah, yeah – we don’t normally post on the weekends unless it’s something of great importance, but we’ve decided to break that rule today.

Blazers owner Paul Allen, #6 on Forbes list of the richest people in the world, has posted on the team’s website that he needs public funds to help keep the team running.

For something run on the team’s homepage, it’s a pretty frank discussion about what’s happening with their arena deal, the city, etc. We were all aboard the “just stop eating million-dollar-bill sandwiches and put some cash into the team” train initially, but then we got to this:

Q: Can’t you afford the losses?

While I have deep pockets, it’s sickening to know the [business] model is broken, hemorrhaging money. To ignore a problem of this magnitude is unacceptable. I would rather that money go to community charities, education or health and science research.

He says that he literally loses a couple hundred thousand dollars every game straight from his own pocket, which to most people is a lot (to us it’s merely “some”).

Most troubling to us, and the reason we’re writing this now, is reading about where that money could be going. Namely, science. Here’s a bunch of stuff we’d probably have by now if it weren’t the continued existence of the Portland Trailblazers.

* Phasers
* Monorails in Los Angeles
* Clones
* Quality NBA blogs incorporating exclamation points in the title
* Monorails in Cleveland
* Robot servants who will eventually kill us
* Phasers that kill people
* Robots with phasers
* Monorails driven by killer robots
* Monorails to Mars
* Monorail-phasers

Basically, if someone would just hook us up with a Lazer Tag toy and take us to Disney World, we’d be happy. Finally, finally, happy…after all these dark years of life.