My Sick Mind

OK, so it's 1:53am and I'm hopped up on Starbucks' Vanilla Latte (milk and coffee) and I'm finding it almost impossible to consider going to bed. I don't know what that means for the rest of Saturday, but it can't be good. PATNA, India – Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday. Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows. "They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains," Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar's remote Banke Bazaar town. "This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue ...

It was hot today. " Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of heat ." What made matters worse was that I had to spend the bulk of it in the sun watching the Phillies cough-up a 10-game winning streak to the Cubs in a 10-5 defeat. A day off from work, but even a bad day at the ballpark beats a good day at work. Sadly, by the time the clouds rolled in and the sun rolled out, the game was almost over, and the only thing left to do was to venture out and play in traffic. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe a moment of clarity, but as I sat there witnessing the carnage, I realized that most of the things I enjoy in life are on the fringe of what most people would call popular . Minor league baseball, the LPGA, professional cycling and most of the music I like get reactions like a dog hearing a high-pitched sound when I start talking about them to the humans. I think it was the heat. For instance, last Saturday I had a ticket for the Blue Rocks game against the Frederick Ke...

I bought a 4-pack Mike's Harder Lemonade tonight. The side of the box says, " WARNING Contains 8% alcohol." Warning? Why would they warn me that it contained 8% alcohol? The warning would be, "WARNING: Contains 3% alcohol." Then, you'd know you were paying 7 bucks for lite beer. Otherwise, it should say, " HEY! Contains 8% alcohol - Cool." Marketing. They think they should warn us for something that we want. I love the people who stand on line at the market for ten minutes, throw all thier junk on the conveyor, watch the cashier ring it up, bag the junk and then fish around for two minutes for the money to pay for it. Did they think that, at the end of the line, the cashier would say, "Hey, it's free!" Get your money out, dumbass. Now I'm reading stuff on the Internet that Barack Obama is apologizing for his "mom jeans" that he wore when he threw out the first pitch at the All-Star game on Tuesday. Jeez. In an int...

For those of us of a certain age (old) we remember where we were on July 20, 1969. If you have to ask what that date means, you're either too young to have any idea or just not paying attention. For children of the space age like me, the program was standard viewing, and in spite of all the hype surrounding the passing of Walter Cronkite, I was an ABC News kid. Either I liked Jules Bergman or we got better reception on channel 6 than we did channel 10. I think it was the latter. I was an 11-year old, perched in front of the TV until I got tired enough to give into sleep. I remember my mother yelling down from her bedroom for me to "turn the TV off and go to bed." She failed to grasp the gravity (pun) of the situation. To a kid, it was better than cartoons. Since we like even numbers, we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of men walking on the moon. We didn't celebrate 39 and probably won't celebrate 41. That would be senseless, right? It's nice, but i...

Tom Watson is a couple of months away from being 60 years old (his 61st birthday, but let's not quibble about semantics) and today he had a chance to, as the media folk say, make history. He was the third round leader of The [British] Open at Turnberry. If he won, he'd get that Claret Jug and the undying gratitude of AARP members who own a set of golf clubs. They'd be out at the local club on Monday thinking that they had a chance. Pity. He lost, of course. He had to. Stuff like that doesn't happen in reality. It happens on television, and the network built the thing up to the point of nausea - thanks Mike Tirico - to where anybody who beat him would be viewed as Lex Luthor. Well, Stewart Cink is Lex Luthor. Check Tirico's seat for a yellow stain. Television created a monster - as it often does. Since Tiger missed the cut, they fell into a pile of gold with this Tom Watson deal, and they played it for all it was worth. Right up until the end, when ESPNs Rick Reil...