My Sick Mind

"Well, to be honest, it just didn't make it for me. It's just so much fluff." Marlene to Jerry in "The Ex-Girlfriend" It is fluff. Anyone with a widescreen TV or widescreen computer monitor [raising hand] is getting "so much fluff" when they look at an image on the screen. That's the thought that occurred to me as I was watching the MLB Network yesterday. My mind wanders at times. The image at the top is the widescreen version of The MLB Network. The one directly below it is the "regular def" version, formatted for square CRTs. Since most of the TV watching population still has the square TV screen, it wouldn't make sense for producers to format their shot for the widescreen TV. In this case, the young lady on the left and the man on the right would be either cut in half or eliminated altogether. The same is true of the network shows you watch, like The Office or CSI Miami that are filmed in widescreen Hi-Def. Sure, it'...

On a related note to yesterday's small rant over baseball's drug problem: Major League baseball has a list of banned performance-enhancing drugs that, if a player uses, will get him kicked out of the league. So, why would anyone take a supplement that isn't on the list? MLB is telling the players that the stuff they can take doesn't enhance their performance, so why would they waste their money? What's not on the banned list - vitamin B complex and bioflavinoids? Take the steroids because that's obviously what works. Meanwhile, when it comes to our mounting personal debt, it seems the blame is with us. Go figure: Every penny of Americans' nearly $1 trillion in revolving debt started with someone - some individual person - whipping out a piece of plastic and making a decision to use it. We could consider that free will and just call it a day, but there's plenty of reason to believe the story isn't so simple. There are piles of evidence that p...

Remember that crazy, hairbrained scheme that the idiot son of our 41st President cooked up a couple of years ago to privatize the Social Security system and allow us to invest in the stock market to "bolster our savings?" How would that have worked-out for us, do ya think? With Manny Ramirez being the latest superstar baseball player to fail a drug test, that puts about 10 of the most prominent big-leaguers of the past 10 years on the list of players that have either failed or are suspected to have taken drugs. The list includes Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmiero, Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds. Popular opinion says that they shouldn't be inducted into the Hall of Fame because they "cheated." Well, if so many great players have cheated, and we aren't supposed to let them in, who does that leave the writers to vote for? I'm guessing that, in five years the Hall will be filled with players like Melvin Mora and Jamie Moyer. Who? Exactly. Supermarkets across A...

I don't know who reads this stuff. I have an idea, but as for actual humans, I'm dumbfounded. Four comments in a week makes me think that more often than not, I'm talking to myself, which isn't all that odd a feeling. So, in the interim, here's another new study from the center of new studies... In the past few years, researchers have challenged the effectiveness of Prozac and other SSRIs in several studies. For instance, a review published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in February attributed 68% of the benefit from antidepressants to the placebo effect. Likewise, a paper published in PLoS Medicine a year earlier suggested that widely used SSRIs, including Prozac, Effexor and Paxil, offer no clinically significant benefit over placebos for patients with moderate or severe depression. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies maintain that their research shows that SSRIs are powerful weapons against depression. Go figure. Pills don't work. Maybe ... just ...