My Sick Mind

I love cable TV. With all my heart and soul. I love paying for TV. I think it's great that I can get a bill in the mail for things I don't use, like Lifetime, Telemundo and The Hallmark channel. I am, however, oddly attracted to strange channels like Weatherscan. I can get radar, weather conditions and a forecast without having to wait for The Weather Channel's "Local on the 8's." Imagine my surprise when I flipped on the TV and it was gone, along with the MLB Network and ESPN News. Perplexed, I called Comcast to find out why the screen said "Access denied." The phone rep told me that they were part of their Digital Preferred package, and I only had Digital Standard. I wondered why I've had the MLB Network since its inception and I've had Weatherscan since I bought the digital converter box a year and a half ago. They seemed like odd channels to have as part of a "preferred" package, and as far as I was concerned, they were just ...

Lately, I’ve been noticing how prevalent loud rock music is. Being old enough to remember when rock music was evil and a certain path to Hell, I now find it amusing that the stuff is almost everywhere we go. At the gym on Monday night I took notice of some Metallica tune rumbling through the plastic ceiling speakers and just below were several people old enough to be my parents, and they didn’t seem to mind at all. In the 1960s (where I come from) such an onslaught would have elicited complaints to the management and demands that they “turn off this infernal rubbish!” Today, nobody bats an eye – or ear. Walk into your local Wawa (or similar convenience store) and the stuff is blasting over their speakers. Go to a sporting event and it’s playing over the P.A. system, introducing players and providing between-innings entertainment. It’s playing at restaurants, bars and places where the majority of the people remember buying 45s and watching Jack Paar on TV. Rock music isn’t social an...

Joe Biden talks and people listen. WASHINGTON – Joe Biden said Thursday he advised his family to stay off airplanes and subways because of the swine flu, a remark that forced the vice president's office to backtrack, the travel industry to cry foul and other government officials to try to massage Biden's message. "I would tell members of my family — and I have — that I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," Biden said on NBC's "Today" show. Within two hours, Biden's office issued a statement backing off the remarks and suggesting he was talking about travel to Mexico. Right. The subway is a great way to get to Mexico. Paso subterráneo. Cincuenta centavos, por favor. It would be nice, once in a while, when one of these people says something and gets called on it, that he backed up what he said instead of backing off. Try this: “That’s right, I said it, and if you didn’t hear it the first time, I’ll say it again.” Backpedaling and adjus...

WASHINGTON — The acting head of the Centers for Disease Control said Monday that people can best protect themselves against the swine flu threat by taking precautions they were taught as kids, like frequently washing their hands. Asked what individual steps should be taken, Richard Besser replied: "The things that we learned when we were little, covering a cough ... staying home when you have a fever, frequent hand-washing. If people do these things, it will decrease the spread in our communities." I'm not sure, because I'm not too bright - but I think covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze is a lot like spitting into your hand, and I wouldn't want to think we were being advised to do that in order to prevent the spread of a disease. Are we?

I watch a lot of baseball on TV. During the summer there isn't much else worth watching unless you enjoy watching the Mythbusters crew build a 7-foot Lego ball that amounted to a rolling anti-climax. But I digress. One of the things I see during the games are the incessant cell phone geeks on either side of the baselines calling their pals to let them know that they're goofy smiling faces are on the TV: Cell Phone Geek: Hey, can you see me? Wait ... I'll wave. [waving] Friend at home: Oh, is that you? You're a little blurry. Wait ... OK, keep waving so I can tell if it's you. OK ... now I see you. Wave some more. Cell Phone Geek: I'm still waving. Can you see me now? Oh ... something happened. No, there I am again, right? Friend at home: Yes, I can see you now. I just turned the game on. Who's winning? Cell Phone Geek: Oh ... I don't know. I was calling people. Friend at home: Great. All right then, let me get back to the Mythbusters . They'...

It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an automotive engineer) to figure out why General Motors (note the "general" in their name) is in trouble or why the others are scrambling to figure out why they're losing money hand over clenched fist. Look no further than the hybrid car market. Let's start with the Nissan Altima and its little brother, the Nissan Altima Hybrid. The Altima has a base sticker price of $19,900 and gets (EPA estimated) 23mpg city and 31mpg highway. The Altima Hybrid has a base sticker price of $26,650 and gets (EPA estimated) 25mpg city and 33mpg highway. The higher city mileage is because it's running on battery power. Even so, the extra $7,500 doesn't make sense when you figure in an extra 2 miles per gallon of gasoline. You'd have to be a hard-core tree hugger to shell out $7,500 and get literally nothing in return other than the satisfaction of running a car on batteries for a short time. By comparison, the Versa and Sentra ...

We're supposed to believe in Global Warming and I guess I do, although my frame of reference is limited to the 51 years I've spent here. I can tell you two things: (1) We don't get as much snow as we used to and (2) I used to ice skate on a nearby lake and now, the lake doesn't get frozen enough to support my cat on ice skates, which would be quite a sight. Occasionally, we hear about ice breaking off some northern outpost, and they tell us that it's as big as Texas or something, and we think, "Jeebus, as big as Texas?" Holy crap - an entire redneck state is headed this way. The only thing we don't know is how long ice has been breaking off. Maybe it's been breaking off for decades and only now we're hearing about it? Or maybe the planet really is warming, I don't know. Either way, I think it's a good idea to take care of the place. That, plus the fact that it's April 26 and we're in the second day of a three-day wave of 90-p...