My Sick Mind

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Award-winning entertainer, businesswoman and education advocate Dolly Parton has a new title. "Just think, I am Dr. Dolly!" she said Friday after receiving an honorary doctorate of humane and musical letters from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I think these honorary doctorates are insulting to people who have achieved real doctorates, and if I had one and heard someone call her Doctor Parton I'd have a fit. Besides, what does a person with a trillion dollars need with a doctorate anyway? The whole thing is ridiculous. Another new study... LONDON (Reuters) – Too much sunlight in places like Greenland where long summer days often cause insomnia appears more likely to drive a person to suicide, Swedish researchers said Friday. Despite a belief that suicides tend to rise in late autumn and early winter months because of darkness, the new findings suggest that places where constant sunlight in summer seasons is a fact of life may be just as ...

I dreamed I met George Harrison last night. I was in some town somewhere (dreams are like that) and somebody told me that George was across the street signing autographs and in general, meeting and greeting. Well, me being a Beatle fan and a fan of George in general, it was a natural match. I gathered up something for him to sign (I don't know what it was - dreams are like that) and sought out the line, which was long, but I was sleeping so how long could it have been? I stood there for a while, conversing with other line-standers over what, I have no idea. I was asleep. Once I got to the front, there was George at a table, handling items passed to him with great aplomb and greeting people with that George-like smile and casual friendliness that we all assumed he had - because he did. It was the long-haired and bearded George, not the one we had come to see over the last years of his life. The Bangladesh George - the good one. I handed him whatever it was that I had - I th...

LOS ANGELES – The illegal substance for which Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez tested positive and was banned 50 games was prescribed to address erectile dysfunction, not “an agent customarily used for performance enhancing” a source close Ramirez said Thursday. However, two sources said the substance Ramirez tested positive for was a gonadotropin. Major League Baseball’s list of banned substances includes the gonadotropins LH and HCG, which are most commonly used by women as fertility drugs. They also can be used to trigger testosterone production. Testosterone is depleted by steroid use, and low testosterone can cause erectile dysfunction. “Testosterone and similar drugs are effective for erectile dysfunction in that they jazz up your sex drive,” said Charles Yesalis, a professor at Penn State University who has testified before Congress on issues of performance-enhancing drugs. “But far more clinicians accept that affect with Viagra and Cialis. It’s hard for me to underst...

Kirstie Alley is fat again. Surprised? When Kirstie Alley stepped on the scale for the first time in 15 months, it wasn't pretty. "I started screaming," Alley, sipping homemade fruit-infused water in her Hollywood kitchen, tells P eople in the cover story of its new issue. "It said 228 pounds, which is my highest weight ever. I was so much more disgusting than I thought!" It turns out, she went off that Jennie Craig crap she was hawking for the past couple of years, and when she went back to the burgers and grape soda - Viola - the weight came back. That's why diets don't work and now it will be harder for her to lose the weight she lost the first time. It's quite the racket, the diet foods. People desperate to change their shape sign up for those programs and "feel great" but forget that they can't eat like that forever, so when they lose the weight and go back to the junk they were eating before, the weight invariably comes bac...

Sometimes I think I'm the only one paying attention. As the rain approached the area on Tuesday night and temperatures dropped, a small group (gaggle?) of bicyclists passed by the place on their way out to ... wherever ... a big circle, presumably. I'm guessing it was a small gaggle because at least a few others were paying attention. By 6:45 the roads were soaked with the drizzling rain and the chilled air was made moreso by the feel of damp danskins. It wasn't as if the rain suddenly appeared out of the blue sky. The skies were grey all day (dey) and it was just a matter of time (6:45) before the grey turned green (see photo above). As for me, I had a ticket to the Blue Rocks game in Wilmington, and my sore knees were welcoming a seat at a ballpark, but ... no. I knew better than to drive the 40 minutes to the ballpark because ... I was paying attention. The 8 bucks wouldn't make up for sitting in the rain for two hours. It's simple logic. I'm const...

1,216 of these things, dating back to April 1, 2006. A few of you may have read all of them. I suspect that if you have, your eyesight isn't what it used to be. I'm not sure what happens to them - if they just stay here in perpetuity or if one day the link will say "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." Mostly, they're rants about something or other that's in the news or some topical issue that's probably irrelevant by now. That's how it is with rants. They seem important at the time, but looking back, we wonder what we were so twisted about. Like all that paperwork and junk that we "save, because you never know when we'll need it." We don't need it. Today is Cinco de Mayo, which I think means that it's the fifth of May in Mexico. Actually, it translates to May five. The fifth of May would be Quinto de Mayo, but I digress. In America, it's another excuse to go out and get drunk. This time, it isn't green beer,...

As a frame of reference (pun) here's that Weatherscan channel that I'm paying extra for on my digital cable. At the bottom left is a 3-hour radar. The main screen rotates between a two-day forecast, current conditions and a bigger version of the 3-hour radar. Great, huh? Ten bucks a month for me to find out that it's 52 degrees in Lakehurst. Our local cable company obviously sees no shame in charging people for something as basic as the weather. I'm not sure if that's more shameful than my paying for it. It's important for me to know that at 10:00pm the visibility is 10 miles. Plenty of advance warning for those air-to-ground missiles being launched out of Lakehurst in the dark. But, I also get ESPN News. And I got the rose bushes. I definitely got the rose bushes. Ten minutes to Wapner. Meanwhile, over on Yahoo Sports, this little ad popped up. "Young women looking for older men." Something tells me that it wouldn't be necessary for young...

Experts. They're everywhere. I'm not sure how one gets to be an expert. I think they just materialize somehow. Some people are experts on stuff that nobody else wants to spend the time researching, so we say, "Sure - whatever. Thanks for the help." Like the NFL draft and horse racing. We can't be bothered doing all that research and event viewing, so we leave it up to the experts. Mostly they're wrong, but we don't seem to mind since most of us don't know anything either. Take yesterday's Kentucky Derby , for instance. Mine That Bird , a 50 to 1 (50.6 to 1 officially) underdog (horse) won the race and not one expert picked the horse to finish in the top 3, let alone win the damned thing. To my way of thinking, if you're really an expert on horse racing and you saw a long shot like this that actually had a chance to win the race (since he did win, I figure he had a chance) you'd have to say to yourself (and us), "Hey, wait a minute - th...