Nikki Sixx

I have been neglectful.

I could have been writing about how I found the coverage of Elizabeth Edwards' death a bit excessive. Aside from being the wife of a failed presidential candidate, what did she do with her life? Oh right -- she's the scorned wife of the failed presidential candidate who had cancer, and now finds that her death has a certain ironic-pity quality to it that the media eats for lunch.

I could have been writing about yet another hike in DRPA bridge tolls, but that's beating the proverbial dead horse, and is of limited interest to the hundreds of people who access this page from Korea and Japan.

I could have been writing about the Phillies' coup of signing scorned lefthander Cliff Lee to reprise his role of 2009. Fans are lauding the guy because he took less money to come to Philadelphia than stay in Texas or move to New York. As if people don't realize why you would take less money to live and play in Philadelphia instead of those two Hell holes.

I could have been writing about how my office space is being remodeled and I went to the Internet to find a Phillies mouse pad, flush with the glee of Lee. I found one on mlb.com for $19.99. Decent enough, I thought, what with logo rights and such. Later, I found the exact same one on Amazon for $13.99 from an independent seller. That's right. My question: How could an independent seller sell the same mouse pad for six bucks less than the people who own the property? Answer: Because Major League baseball are a bunch of greedy crooks who buy the same mouse pad from a manufacturer for ... oh, maybe 3 dollars ... and mark it up another six bucks higher than a guy selling them as a merchant.

I could have written about the Blu-ray player I won in a raffle at work. It's nice, I guess, but I can't help but feel as though the quality of my life would not have changed if I had not won it, and that's a sad thing to say about a prize. There is a perceived difference in the quality of Blu-ray discs and regular DVDs. The sound is better, too, but I kept asking myself if I would have bought one of these things of my own volition. I didn't think I would. For the convenience of the picture quality, I am asked to contribute an extra $2 to my Netflix subscription every month if I want them to send me Blu-ray discs instead of DVDs. I do not. Moreover, the Blu-ray discs are more expensive than DVDs (if I decided to buy a movie) and there is a lot of extra junk that goes with it (like alleged Internet access) that serve to complicate the movie-viewing experience. Perhaps I've reached the tipping point in my tolerance of technology and its associated costs. Sometimes it seems that new technology is meant more for marketing than function. That sounds American to me.

But those things are all kind of boring, so I decided to skip it for a while. Together, they seem to have more substance than on their own - like most people - or that Jets strength and conditioning coach that tripped a player on the sidelines. What is he even doing on the sidelines to begin with, and why wasn't he fired on the spot? But I digress.

All too boring, so I named the post after today's Yahoo's top "Trending Now" web search topic. Maybe I'll pick up a few accidental readers? Now that would be exciting.