My Sick Mind

There is a new infestation. A race of mutants that must be stopped. At first glance, they appear to have tremendous power. In reality, they are weak and easily defeated. Their weakness is exposed as they roam our streets. They are not born, they are made. Because they have been created, they can be destroyed. It will take many years and perhaps we will have to endure loss of lives, but the loss will be worth the gain to society. I'm talking about the Walk and Text crowd. Hoards of people roaming around with their heads down, texting on their so-called Smartphones. Their self-indulgence leads them into awkward situations with the humans walking toward them. Those who are walking with their heads up can see the approaching WAT (Walk and Texter) and dutifully avoid them as the WAT's gaze continues downward. Sometimes they do not know that they have come within inches of a collision, as they never alter their downward gaze. Our duty as upright walkers is not to...

This is two days in a row I've written about baseball. Not on purpose, just because it's the game I know the most about and it's the game that has some of the most ridiculous behavior in sports. It's also a game where unwritten rules are just as important as the ones that are in the rule book. Players all know them and when one of their brethren break them, there is Hell to pay - or at least a hefty fine. One of the unwritten rules is that you're not supposed to steal a base when your team is leading by a substantial margin. What the margin is and when it is determined to be insurmountable, only the people who write the unwritten rule book know. It's a sliding scale. By following that logic, when your team has a big lead, batters should go up and just strike out, since they don't need any more runs. OK. When the Phillies' Jimmy Rollins stole second base on the San Francisco Giants while the Phils were leading by 6 is a flagrant violatio...

You can't use sports as a metaphor for life. I'm not sure if anyone has tried, but it seems to me like someone has. Sports is so far separated from life, that to compare anything you do to something a professional athlete does is just plain silly. Take, for example, the recent allegations that Yankees' third baseman Alex Rodriguez was caught in a high-stakes poker game with some rather distasteful people. Major League Baseball said something about it, to the point that a real investigation was performed. What MLB fails to realize is that these guys have two vital ingredients that work toward odd behavior: Money and time. You pay these guys ridiculous sums of money - even the Major League minimum salary is close to a half million a year - and expect them to, what ... save it? They can't be on one side by paying the salaries that they pay and be on the other side by protesting what the guy does with the money. If you want people to behave, starve them financially...