My Sick Mind

You remember Thursday , when I came up with the Crazy, Hairbrained Scheme of buying Red Sox tickets for express purpose of re-selling them on the Internet ? Of course you do. Well, the tickets went on sale at 10am and here it is 1:30pm and I find myself sitting in the Sox Virtual Waiting Room, which is a lot like a real waiting room, only the magazines are better. The screens have been refreshing every thirty seconds since then. I can't do that kind of high-powered math in my head, but suffice it to say, it's a lot of refreshes. The one on the left is for what they call "Sox Pax" - four-game packages to selected games. The one on the right is for individual game tickets. Neither have opened since I've been staring at them. So that it isn't a total loss, I'm doing some light housework and laundry. In their e-mail, the Sox call this a "highly anticipated ritual." It's a ritual, all right. They also say that fans will have the "chance ...

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. That's the saying. For the past three years, I've ranted over the strange relationship between after-market ticket seller StubHub and Major League baseball. They advertise on the teams' web sites and now the teams are encouraging fans to sell their unwanted tickets via StubHub. So I joined 'em. In the spirit of President-elect Barack Obama, I am embracing change. In addition to the 17-game plan that my friend and I have, I went on the Phillies web site last week and bought what they call a Six Pack - six additional games of my choosing of various seat locations. I picked up a Red Sox game, a Blue Jays game, a Braves game and a couple other plum items. I spent $326 on tickets that I plan on selling for much more than that to willing suckers via my newest, bestest friend - StubHub . The Phils had 51 sell-outs last year, and with the stink of "World Champion" fresh on them, it stands to reason that they'l...

I don't completely understand Facebook . I know where it is and what it is but I'm still working out the kinks. It seems to be some sort of social networking deal. I'm on there if you're interested, but you'll find much of the same content you find here, minus the witty banter. My workplace Internet bans the site, which makes it all the more appealing to me. Ads and surveys run along the right side of the page. One of them bought my eye. "The iPod of Shaving" it said. I'm intrigued. Especially because I'd like to see the Atra of Personal Stereos, but I must have missed that ad. There it is, on the right. It's called the Rolling Razor . Some sort of ring with a couple of blade heads. If it wasn't for the blades, I'd say it was some kind of sex toy. I don't know. Buy one and tell me how it is. It seems complicated, and I'm not sure I want to complicate something that I know I'm going to have to do again tomorrow regardless ...

Tis the season . I love Christmas music. So much that I find myself forced to listen to it all day on our company's MUZAK system. I've gotten to the point that I can recite the words, and the calming effect makes me forget how I'd like to crawl into the ceiling and start cutting wires. So, what better time to list my 5 favorite Christmas songs - in no particular order. You'll no doubt be singing some (or all) of these at your office Christmas party or in the back of a dimly-lit bar: 5 - Jingle Bells. A catchy little number about animal abuse. One horse pulling a sleigh full of (probably) drunk holiday revelers. The harder the poor horse pulls, the more they laugh. Written in the days before animal cruelty became a legal issue. A rarely sung third verse goes like this: A day or two ago, the story I must tell. I went out on the snow, and on my back I fell. A gent was riding by, in a one-horse open sleigh. He laughed at me as I there sprawling laid, but quickly drove aw...

I've been lifting weights at various gyms for over 25 years, and during that time I've noticed that one thing never changes - the propensity for people to leave things wherever they please. In spite of (or maybe because of) signs that say "Replace weights when through" or something to that effect, I find that I routinely have to remove hundreds of pounds of plates from bars almost every day. Today was another such occasion. Not only was there 135 pounds left unattended, but another 150 on a bar left on the floor, presumably for someone to trip over. To no one in particular I said, "People leave their crap all over. These are the same people who will yell at their kids for leaving their toys on the floor at Christmas!" Knowing I was right, I proceeded to roll the offending bar out of the way and take down the 150 pounds from the bar I wanted to use. There is a faction of the population that believes that they can leave their junk lying wherever they want bec...

There's a debate going on over in Friday's comments about the Sean Avery "sloppy seconds" comment. Of course, he's a clown and probably a jerk, but I don't know that that's the issue. The issue is that he said what he said on camera. Worse things are said on the field, but nobody has documented it. When it's recorded and presented to us, we act surprised. I've never figured out what we expect of our pro athletes. They're men who generally have no other skills, and if it weren't for sports they'd probably be making minimum wage, but they can catch a ball or skate really fast, so we reward them with millions of dollars. They get all the hot women and when they go out, they don't have to pay for dinner. We forget that they're clowns who are sometimes socially inept. Generally, they've been pampered and looked-after their whole lives because of their athletic skills. Most of them were given free educations (which they may or...