My Sick Mind

Hey, remember that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? I do . Suddenly, we don't hear anything about it. Since Chevron put the cement cap in the well the news from the area has slowed to a ... drip. As is the usual, our federal government may have withheld some information from us when the well initially started leaking, as a panel reported today : WASHINGTON - The Obama administration blocked efforts by government scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could become and committed other missteps that raised questions about its competence and candor during the crisis, according to a commission appointed by the president to investigate the disaster. In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff describes "not an incidental public relations problem" by the White House after the April 20 accident. Among other things, the report says, the administration made erroneous early estimates of the spill's size, a...

If you can't go to the DMV to people-watch, the second best place is your local doctor's office. Mom was having laser eye surgery today and yours truly was in charge of transportation. In the office, there was a sign posted that read: TURN YOUR CELL PHONES OFF UPON ENTERING THE OFFICE. IF YOU NEED TO MAKE A CALL, PLEASE USE THE HALLWAY. It might have said "Thank You" after that, but I don't remember. Either way, you'd figure that middle-America would get the point. But we haven't progressed far enough as a society that we know how to deal with the cellular telephone - hence the laws prohibiting texting while driving (duh) and the several verbal warnings about its use in public. A few minutes after I sat down, an elderly woman with a phone sat down two chairs away and picked her phone out of her handbag. Dialing, she said to her counterpart, "Talk to me," as though the other person was expecting her call and those of us in the audience couldn...

I haven't posted any photos in a while. Mostly, it's because I haven't taken any photos lately. That's pretty easy to explain. These, of course, were taken in Baltimore. I was there over the weekend to see the Orioles and a street fair called the Fells Point Festival . The population of Baltimore is around 700,000. I have no idea where everybody was on Sunday. The top photo is the famous Inner Harbor , with the USS Constellation and a building they call the World Trade Center at the left. It was early on Sunday morning, so the hordes of tourists hadn't yet descended on the place. There is a 4-story shopping mall called The Gallery across the street from Harborplace, and I thought the insides were photogenic. The stores weren't open yet, so once again, it looked a little like a ghost town. The Orioles were playing the Tigers at Camden Yards, and the players might have outnumbered the fans. The biggest cheers of the day came when the Ravens final score was ...