My Sick Mind

I don't know about your part of the world, but around here, after the events of Monday , Tasered is now an adjective that is part of our everyday speech. Sadly, it isn't yet part of Blogger's spell check dictionary. Yesterday, the stock market was Tasered a little before 3:00pm when it fell a whopping 600 points only to recover to a loss of around 350. Earlier, sources told Reuters that the plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial average may have been caused by an erroneous trade entered by a person at a big Wall Street bank. Market sources said the erroneous trade may have involved E-Mini contracts -- stock market index futures contracts that trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's Globex trading platform. The composition of the E-Mini is similar to the stocks in the S&P 500 . So there you go. Your financial future hinges on something that sounds like a convenience store chain - the E-Mini. I'd like to have something a little more stable to put my savings i...

It's lawn mowing season, which means that the air is full of dust and pollen and the noise from mowers, string trimmers, edgers and leaf blowers wakes those of us who like to sleep late on weekends. Sadly, it seems that rakes have been outlawed and the only way we can move grass clippings is by blowing them around until they disappear into some vague space that exists in a Ray Bradbury novel. I wonder why some big grass seed company like Scott's hasn't come up with a hybrid strain of grass that grows two inches and stops. I think it's like the electric car. The big mower companies and the powerful lawn care lobby in Washington (there is one, you know) have killed it in an effort to boost the sales of equipment. It's a good thing (for my neighbors) that I live in a condominium, because my front lawn would look like my house was abandoned. I couldn't be bothered mowing a lawn, edging or doing any of those other things that occupy their time. I suppose I could ...

One of the topics of conversation around here has been the Tasering of an unruly fan at Monday night's Phillies game at Citizen's Bank Ballpark. Oddly, the topic wasn't the unruly fan as much as it was the Tasering. It seemed to be a bit extreme to some folks to use a weapon on a kid running around the field. Tackling him and rubbing his face in the grass is apparently the accepted form of apprehension. As for me, I'm all for the Tasering. It's a nice electric shock that causes neuromuscular incapacitation, which to me, seems to be the point. They probably could have tackled him, but this did the job in half the time and didn't endanger any law enforcement personnel. The ballpark has become something of a social gathering point as much as it is a ballpark. The Phillies have had 51-straight regular season sell-outs. Even the blessed Yankees don't routinely sell out their palace in the Bronx. Some of the fans however, don't come strictly for baseball r...

"You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, 'Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?'" California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at a news conference near Sacramento. No, the "enormous disaster" he was talking about wasn't his administration, it's the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it wasn't a risk in 2008 when the governor signed a $100 million deal between some environmental groups and Plains Exploration & Production Co., known as PXP, that was estimated to bring the state some $100 million a year. Interesting. A hundred million made it a good idea - then. Imagine how he'd feel if he had never turned on the TV. But like a lot of things, risky endeavors were good ideas when the state needed money. Now that there has been an accident - and it's been on the TV - drilling for oil under the water is suddenly a bad idea, which it probably was all along. Now that we have seen (on TV)...

It has to be a real pisser to be sitting around your office, doing whatever , when the phone rings and you're told that millions of gallons of oil are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. The plan: to lower 74-ton, concrete-and-metal boxes into the gulf to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface. Whether that will work for a leak 5,000 feet below the surface is anyone's guess; the method has previously worked only in shallower waters. If it doesn't, and efforts to activate a shutoff mechanism called a blowout preventer continue to prove fruitless, the oil probably will keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to cut off the first. Oil giant BP PLC's latest plan will take six to eight days because welders have to assemble the boxes. I realize that the world runs on oil, but I wonder if the risk of drilling for it so close to land is worth what we get out. Even President Obama has given his official "okey-do...