My Sick Mind

"If President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school." - Lenny Bruce Lenny was being a bit outrageous, as he had a penchant for, but his idea is interesting. Perhaps Barack Obama was taking a page from Lenny's book when he held his first post-election press conference: Obama made a remark as he revealed his thinking in what is becoming one of the highest-profile issues of this transition period: What kind of puppy will he and his wife, Michelle, get for their daughters as they move into the White House. Because Malia, 10, has allergies, the family...

My neighbor has his Christmas tree up. It was up two days ago. I'd like to cat burglar the joint and throw it in the trash with a little note that says: It isn't Thanksgiving yet, but I'll just leave it be. The trouble is, I have to look at it every day when I get home. When I got to work on Monday morning, Christmas MUZAK was playing over the speaker. Thankfully, somebody complained and they switched it off because it takes three days to get a gun permit in New Jersey and I didn't have that kind of time. Three weeks ago the Christmas junk was out at The Home Depot, which is probably where my neighbor got his plastic tree. The commercialization of Christmas has crept back to Hallowe'en and it won't be long before it's back to Labor Day - the unofficial end of summer. I'm figuring a Sarah Palin presidency will bring that about, along with the end of civilization. And we have this from Leesburg, Virginia on what turned out mercifully to be the end of ...

It must suck to be one of those hard-line Republicans . Like the final days of a failed marriage, they're realizing that their world is crashing down around them and the only thing that saved them from a complete disintegration on Tuesday was that there weren't more House and Senate seats up for grabs. On the other hand, it feels great to be in Philadelphia these days. The city and most of the region are as hard-line Democrat as it gets and we've finally managed to wave off the foul stench of loser that we've worn over the past 8 years or so. Or the past 25 years if you're a sports fan. Just when we thought it couldn't get any better than the Phillies winning the World Series, Barack Obama goes and wins the election. Can life get any better? I submit that it cannot. Just remember which way to turn your onions.

My father died in 1967. In those days, there was a lot of racial strife over issues like civil rights. Viewings and funerals I suppose, were different. I remember, in a sea of white faces of family and friends, one black man came to his viewing to pay his respects. He was a co-worker of my father and came over to this 9-year old to shake my hand and offer his condolences. At the time, I was probably in some contorted state of emotional shock, but in the days that followed I came to realize that, in that small instance that people are the same in more ways than not. My father wasn’t the type who treated people differently because of who they were. In fact, he taught me that I should treat everyone the same – whether they’re cleaning the toilets or running the place. That’s a valuable bit of knowledge to pass along to a child. (In my adult years, upon speaking up to our company’s CEO, I related my father’s teachings to one of our Human Resources people and was told that “your father w...

It's 10:20 and I need some sleep. CNN has run the numbers on that fancy electronic map that they play with and have not come up with a viable scenario in which John McCain can overcome his early deficit of electoral votes and win tonight. So, I'm off to bed because I'm tired and a rested America is a strong America. Besides, if I can't believe election projections with 15 percent of the votes counted, whom can I believe? I'd better damned well be hearing "President-elect Barack Obama" when I wake up on Wednesday morning. Otherwise, I'm going to have a lot more sleepless nights and tonight's early-in will have been for naught.

That's the projected map from Yahoo , a noted political web site. Never mind that the percentages don't add up to 100. That's math, and we aren't doing math. Isn't it surprising that the south would vote for an old white man? If you follow this map, the key states are Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida. Sound familiar? It also sounds familiar that there remains the possibility that Obama could win the popular vote and lose the election. I think, if that happens they should stop calling it the popular vote. But that's for tomorrow. As for today, I'll be at my local polling place bright and early (or at least early) casting my electronic ballot and hoping that they count them right. We're blue here in New Jersey, and Philadelphia is about as blue as they get, so I feel that my work here is done. There will be stories about voter confusion, voters not being able to cast ballots because there aren't enough machines and machines that eit...

I saw this sign on Broad Street on the way to the ballpark on Friday. I wondered how much the boots cost after they were gone. I would think that the price goes up drastically. I think about crap like that. Baseball diamonds aren't diamonds - they're 90-foot squares. I don't know why they're called diaminds. I guess because it sits on one corner, unless you're sitting along the baselines, in which case you could clearly see it is a square. Diamonds don't have 90-degree angles. "Baseball square" sounds strange. At the Alice Cooper concert on Saturday night, I wore one of my red Phillies t-shirts because, well ... anyway, I started to notice that I was one of about 3 people wearing something brightly colored. The rest of them were in some sort of grey, black or muted color that made me think that there were a lot of wanna-be goths in the crowd. I'm a trailblazer. I walked around the condo in alternating states of panic and serenity all day Sunda...

Today, I underwent the shopping equivalent of a full-body cavity search - buying printer cartridges. I'm one of these lucky people who has a printer with 6 cartridges - 5 color and 1 black, which they tell me is a color. That's like "off" listed as a blender speed - but I digress. The bastards are less than a half-inch wide and probably hold a teaspoon of ink. If I print 3 CDs and a concert ticket I'm off to Staples for more ink. It's a scam, I tell ya. The cartridges come in vacuum-sealed plastic bags, like they're going into space or something. If that isn't bad enough, I took the recently emptied cartridges to Staples to have them recycled, and the kid at the counter told me "We don't take Epson," like the ink was made from radium or something. When I asked him why, of course he didn't know. Somebody from Staples, leave a comment and tell me why. I'm losing sleep here. Then, I took the car for a bath. The thing that fascinat...