My Sick Mind

I was watching the Mets vs. Nationals game on Fox this afternoon, and noticed how distracted television is sometimes. The game was on the screen, but also on the screen was a yellow box running an ad for the upcoming All-Star game (on Fox) that we were required to read, I assume. While all this is going on, the play-by-play announcer was entertaining us with a random baseball story that had nothing to do with either what was happening on my TV screen or on the playing field. I think that the only way Fox could have created a more mentally distracting sight would have been to run loud music over the entire thing. That, or they could have tilted the screen a little so that I would have to move my head. Now they have another new idea. And then, there was an ad for a Dodge truck whose big selling point was that it had a cargo bay "capable of holding 5.5 pounds of chili." Really, that's what he said. It's gotten to the point that chili storage is a positive trait in a v...

When I was married, my wife would often complain about my penchant for watching television. While she viewed it as a boring past time, I saw it as a learning experience. I told her I don't watch television the way most people do. Every so often I get the chance to explain that concept: I was watching a My Name is Earl episode called "Cost Dad an Election" on CW Philly tonight and noticed something strange. During the episode, there is a wide shot that shows the sky. In the background was a Wawa billboard, which I found odd. Wawa is too regional a brand to show up in a Hollywood-produced show, so what's with the billboard? Since I have the DVD, I popped it in and voilà , no billboard. CW Philly had it added in. The photo shows the DVD version, with the blank sky. I wish I had the presence of mind to rewind the show while I had it on, but take my word for it, there was a Wawa sign back there. And then I heard that the episode was sponsored by Wawa, so the shameless t...

From Blogs and Stories by Randall Lane : In an era of epically wrong financial predictions, boisterous Jim Cramer's declaration that "Bear Stearns is not in trouble!" a week before its March 2008 collapse, rated among the most moronic, or at least the most infamous. But it turns out that Cramer made one call far worse: He decided to make a stock-picking star out of a mumbling former Major League Baseball All-Star named Lenny Dykstra, giving him a high-profile column and ultimately an expensive "premium" newsletter on Cramer's site TheStreet.com. How did Dykstra return the favor? As I reveal in my book, The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane , Dykstra took money—$250,000 worth of secretly issued stock—in exchange for recommending that stock to TheStreet.com subscribers. He also promised access to Cramer in exchange for the stock, which he apparently hid under his brother-in-law's name. We love the experts. We love to hear t...