Niners Nation After Dark: Carson Palmer Sells His House (What is this, TMZ?)

Welcome back to Niners Nation After Dark, where the drinks are always flowing and there's no last call. OK, that's not entirely correct. Last call is at 2:45 because at 3:00am y'all have to move this over to the Golden Nuggets.

So, earlier this offseason Cincinnati Bengals QB Carson Palmer indicated that he either wanted to be traded or he was going to retire. Yesterday, there was a random story floating around about Palmer deciding to sell his home in Cincinnati. Apparently he's preparing to list it for sale but it's not yet at that point. This has led to some discussion on the twitter-sphere and elsewhere as to whether the 49ers should be making a run at Palmer.

There is one tidbit of information to consider before assuming Palmer is ready to come to San Francisco. Apparently this past December Palmer purchased a half-acre lot of land in Del Mar, California, just north of San Diego. This doesn't mean he's off to back up Philip Rivers in San Diego. It's just one more bit of information to have in hand as you work to assess where Palmer might be headed. In reality I don't think either sale means anything. After all, Barry Bonds sold his home in the Bay Area but continued playing for the Giants as he rented a place up here during baseball season and lived down in Beverly Hills during the offseason (I have a friend who has a friend who lived in the same complex as him down there).

I bring this up because posting about this makes me feel like a slightly less sleezy version of TMZ. I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures in life is checking out TMZ's website. I don't know why I check the site out, I just do. There's something about the train wrecks that are celebrity lives that draws me in. I feel dirty but I can't help myself. Anybody else with a similar guilty pleasure? And no LondonNiner, we don't want to hear about your twisted perversions!

You could carry this over into sports. One of my sporting guilty pleasures is that I actually am kind of a Tony Romo fan. It's a guilty pleasure because he's a member of the Dallas Cowboys. But I've read some stories about him that make it hard to root against him. My favorite story was when Romo helped a couple fix a flat tire on the side of the road. Another was when he went to the movies with a homeless guy. Maybe these aren't stories about huge fundraisers to raise money for some worthy cause, but they're little things that make me think he's a generally good guy. He may be a member of the Cowboys, but I can't help but be a fan.