My Sick Mind

You'd be surprised how often I sit here (where I'm sitting now) without a clue of what to put here, either because I've nothing to say or what I have to say I've said before. It's over two years of this stuff and there's only so much going on in the world. Usually, I just start rambling and see if I can make it to the end: Last night I ordered some clothes from American Eagle over the Internet. Today I received a coupon in the mail for 15-percent off my next shopping order. When I got home from work on Friday night I spent a few minutes gathering up stuff and changing clothes for a bike ride to the local gym. I went downstairs to fetch the bike and found the rear tire was flat. That's a pisser. Upon further inspection I found that the tire had a quarter-inch gash in it, which is where I reasoned the air escaped. Rocket science. So, I had to use the car to buy a new tube and tire and while I'm out, go to the gym. What puzzles me is how I got the bike h...

I love thunderstorms. It seems, like other things, that they were better when I was a kid. We get them infrequently around here. Maybe I should move to Arizona or Ohio. When one is on the way, I perch my camera on the tripod and wait. Having southern exposure may be nice for sun worshippers, but for lightning worshippers it sucks. Once in a while I get lucky, but like Dirty Harry, it's not all that frequent. Mostly, we get that flashy-thingy lightning and not the bolts that look cool on camera. To get one in the east is a big bonus. Lucky to be here. By the way, those jeans from yesterday - $89.50. That's why I don't shop at Abercrombie & Fitch. If you want to see my butt crack, I'll show you for a lot less than $89.50. I see that the recent upsurge in the price of gasoline has prompted some school districts and local governments to go to a 4-day work week. At first that sounds like nirvana, but it's really just 4 10-hour days. Most people I talk to think tha...

“Sexy and casual, the perfect pair of jeans,” was the e-mail title. Yes, I’m hip and smart because I get e-mail from Abercrombie & Fitch. Do I shop there? Hell no. The ad says, "Low slung for the perfect fit." Really? What I found interesting about the ad is the new trend toward the ass crack. Women have started showing it and now I suppose it’s the men’s turn. I’m not sure we always want to see crack, and I don’t think we’re trustworthy enough or comfortable in our self-assessment to know whether or not we should be showing crack. The guys in the ad don’t seem to have a problem with it, but they’re professional models who are paid not to eat too much and spend their days grooming and lifting weights. I don’t know any models. Most of the people I know wouldn’t benefit from a pair of pants that don’t get pulled all the way up. I see guys wearing those pants and they always look like they’re going to fall off. The thing to do is to wear your boxers on the outside, or so...

This Larry Mendte/Alycia Lane deal is interesting to me on several levels. For the uninitiated, a local news anchor (Mendte) has been charged with reading his co-anchor's (Lane) e-mail several hundred times over the course of three months or so. Without going into details, which you can read here , the interesting line in the local paper that caught my eye was when the prosecutor said, "This is the tip of the Mendte iceberg." That's fascinating to me, because as we all know, deviant behavior isn't an isolated incident. There's a lot buried under the surface. When you add in the fact that Larry makes $700,000 for reading and his wife (Dawn Stensland) makes about half that much, you'd have to stop and ask yourself how much money people need to be happy. Apparently, Larry was unhappy because Alycia made $50,000 more than he, and as a result he began hacking into her e-mail (or Mendte-mail as I want to call it) in an attempt to discredit her and make himself...

No witty banter today. It's late, so here are a few photos from my trip to see the Phillies at Shea Stadium on Tuesday night. The Phils pulled out a dramatic 9th inning comeback, scoring 6 runs in the ninth inning to win 8-6. Sadly, I wasn't driving and was made to leave in the 8th inning when the Mets were ahead 5-2. Somehow the drama was lost on the radio. Somebody needs to explain to me the logic of driving almost 3 hours to see a game and leaving before it's over. It was pretty much a glorified business trip with a baseball game attached. The tickets were given to us, but cost somebody $118, so I figured I'd better pay attention to the game. As it was, I only got about $113 worth. Clicking on them a couple of times should bring them up to full size, if you're interested in full size. The Great Outdoors. Pre-game, as dusk falls on Flushing. The view from my seat in the Diamond Club. La de da. Free food and beer. They're building the new joint just bey...

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch author, philosopher and scholar (1466 - 1536) I think about that quote every time I see a big fuss made over someone merely because there is no one else over which to fuss. And I think about that every time I see Danica Patrick. She's kind of cute and all, but for a race car driver she's a hottie. If you put her on a runway modeling clothes they'd call security to get the audience member off the catwalk. Chances are, you work with at least one other woman as pretty as she, but because she is in an office with a lot of other women, she doesn't stand out. Put her in a fire suit and see what happens. Go to her web site and there's a full-screen presentation, complete with a song (which I think is called "Super Girl") and it's clear that it's all about glamour, Indy car-style glamour. Marketing is a cruel friend. It can be used and it can use us. Sometimes we...

Yesterday, during the Phillies/Marlin game on Fox, the announcers declared John Baker the Pepsi Clutch Performer of the Game . That's great, only it was a 7 to 4 game in the bottom of the seventh inning. Don't you think that there might yet be a clutch performer to emerge or do you think that Pepsi wanted their name on the broadcast before most of America tuned out? I'm thinking the latter. What it amounts to is a commercial and not a real award. Why not just put up a big PEPSI banner on the screen and get it over with? We need more junk on the screen, right? Meanwhile, over on ABC we're watching The Open. America calls it The British Open, but the rest of the world calls it The Open. The announcers (them again) tell us that we're "watching ESPN on ABC." Huh? I thought I was watching ABC. In fact, I was watching ABC. ESPN had a fishing tournament and billiards. This cross-marketing thing is amazing to me. I know that ABC owns ESPN and Disney owns them b...