My Sick Mind

Tonight saw me at another Wilmington Blue Rocks baseball game. One of the charms of minor league baseball is the proximity to the playing field. A treat for a baseball geek like me is to go down toward the bullpen and watch the starting pitcher warm up before the game. From there, you can see his grip on the ball and watch it head toward the plate. That's Blue Rocks pitcher Chris Dwyer on the right. He pitched 5 innings and gave up 2 runs. The best thing about being at a baseball game is that it makes me forget about what else is going on in the world. NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – Tropical Storm Alex veered away from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Saturday but experts warned that strong waves and winds could still upset efforts to halt the environmental disaster. With oil continually gushing into the fragile waters after 68 days, President Barack Obama's pointman on the disaster cautioned that volatile weather conditions could set back oil recovery operations for up to two...

Every once in a while, I like to impart some wisdom on the masses. Something that maybe you didn't know, but would find useful in your everyday life. Such is the case today. I got a new ATM card from my bank yesterday. You have all gotten new credit cards in the mail, and with them, you have received a sticker on the card that includes a phone number that you are told to call to "activate your new card." My sick mind has always wondered if the activation process was worthwhile. When I received the new ATM card, I wondered (quietly to myself) if the phone number to activate the card was legitimate, as I do when I receive a new card from any of my creditors. But, like the zombie that I am, I call the number and allow " Suresh " to activate my card, even though I have the feeling that he is typing imaginary numbers on an air-keyboard in India that allegedly activates my card, while attempting to sell me expensive balance insurance or other such credit-induced fee...

Americans are fascinated by the Drive Thru. Drive Thru - anything . (And not through , mind you. Thru.) I heard a radio ad for a drive-thru pizza place. Drive thru pizza. Or self-delivery, take your pick. I guess the idea goes back to those old car-hop restaurants, where you eat the food in your car off a tray that sits on your window. I don't get that either. There's nothing like the smell of gasoline and leaking coolant to spice up a night out for the family. I think the parents were using the gas fumes to get the kids to go to bed earlier. But then, somebody figured that we'd rather sit at home in front of the TV and eat not-quite-as-hot-as-it-would-be-in-the-restaurant food instead of sitting around outside. Genius marketing. Then, they figured that if we like grabbing food out of a window we would enjoy making other transactions through windows, sometimes with the aid of a pneumatic tube, to make it more fun. If you have coins, take them inside. Since we're kind...

This is about as bad as it gets. Those are recent images from the Gulf of Mexico where a breached oil well has been spewing oil into the Gulf for two months non-stop. Non-stop. It is estimated that 125,000,000 gallons have flowed into the water so far, with no end in sight, Kevin Costner notwithstanding. Imagine being a turtle or a sea bird and waking up in the morning (or whenever turtles and sea birds wake up) and finding your home awash with a substance that is the direct opposite of the water that gives you life. You look around and it is everywhere. The more you swim, the worse it gets, and you find that as you struggle your work is harder and it appears that the very work you do to extricate yourself worsens your dilemma. As an inhabitant, you are rightfully confused. What you call home is now a poison to you and it is killing you. To accurately place yourself in their position, imagine that from above, millions of gallons of oil were poured into your house while you were...

It occurred to me that if Nick Drake was half as popular during his life as he is now, some 36 years after his death, he'd still be alive. It started in 1999 with that Volkswagen Cabriolet ad that used "Pink Moon" as the soundtrack and mushroomed from there. It seemed a strange way to sell a car, but I don't get paid to construct an advertising campaign. Recently, Nick's "From the Morning" was used in an AT&T spot to promote their wireless network. I see the tie-in - don't you? There are two possibilities for Nick's recent popularity: 1 - Ad agencies and the general public have come to realize how simple and poetic his music is, and have wised up and are using it to advertise things. 2 - The rights are cheap and it fits their purpose. I'm guessing it's number two. If you don't know who Nick Drake is, there is a nice write-up on his Wikipedia page that will get you started. It's a sad story and it's made sadder by ...

Where have I been? The world spins, the oil still leaks, the Phillies play (just don't ask me the scores) and my postman continues to bring bills. Every so often I lose track of things. This week was LPGA tournament week around here. The girls were playing the Shop Rite tournament in Galloway, and I was there for a couple of days walking with Paula Creamer. Sadly, I could not go back today. Partly because of time commitments and partly because it was in the mid-90s with high humidity. I reach my warmth levels quickly. Fortunately though, I do own a television. The men are playing the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach (a far sight better than South Jersey) and once the LPGA tournament ended I switched over to the men. When you see two tournaments side-by-side like that, the differences in the two games hit you pretty quickly. The girls dress in bright colors with various accoutrement and colorful shoes and things like pink golf balls. The men - not so much. It's still the standard sl...

A field of flowers south of Salem, NJ today. (photo by me) NEW ORLEANS – BP began burning oil siphoned from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday as part of its plans to more than triple the amount of crude it can stop from reaching the sea, the company said. BP said oil and gas siphoned from the well first reached a semi-submersible drilling rig on the surface of the Gulf around 1 a.m. Once that gas reaches the rig, it will be mixed with compressed air, shot down a specialized boom made by Schlumberger Ltd . and ignited at sea. It's the first time this particular burner has been deployed in the Gulf of Mexico. BP officials previously said they believed the burner system could incinerate anywhere from 210,000 gallons of oil to 420,000 gallons of oil daily once it's fully operational. Work to optimize the new system was still ongoing, and the company did not say how much oil it has burned so far . Is burning the oil a great idea, or just the last-ditch effort ...

The news coming out of big colleges lately is that many of them are jumping from one athletic conference to another for ... anyone ... money. That's right. Texas is staying put, however, Of course, it's not love of conference or tradition or anything as sappy as that. The good folks at Fox TV are paying the Longhorns somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million per year while still allowing Texas to form its own, all-Longhorn network, an option it probably wouldn't have in the Pac-10... Sweet deal. I find it odd that the same NCAA that puts schools on probation because they may have paid a student-athlete's rent or bought him a nice dinner could sanction the school making a financial deal with a TV network. It's OK for the school to make the money but not OK for the students. Not all of the players are going to sign big NFL contracts. Some are actually attending school for an education, and it might be nice to have a decent meal once in a while that you don'...

There is a new VISA commercial with a huge tie-in to Disney's "Toy Story" movie, complete with requisite Disney VISA card. In the ad, a group of the Toy Story gang are running around a store. Buzz Lightyear's action figure is selected by a kid and the happy character watches the kid embrace the toy Lightyear. Throughout the ad, it's tough to tell whether it's an ad for Disney or VISA. I suppose that's the point of cross-marketing. The thing that struck me as I watched the ad was, why do we get so upset when advertising targets kids the way they do with other products; but we don't say anything when kids are used to sell a product. A happy kid with a toy is a happy kid, even though it winds up costing the parent a hefty 22% service charge. Just don't target fatty foods to kids by marketing Happy Meals . We have determined that to be bad. I'm seeing more ads than usual for Father's Day this year. Maybe I missed something, but suddenly, the...

I'm never sure what is supposed to go in this space. Sometimes I have a coherent thought that spews out onto the page rather easily. Sometimes the page is left open for hours until I can string together 500 words that make both grammatical and logical sense. It ain't always easy, gang. Today, I think I'll just spew at random, if you please. The oil is still gushing out of that pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. You've seen it, right? The incredible thing to me is that the oil has enough built-up pressure to continue to leak out of the pipe without being pumped. That's amazing to me. It would have been great if they could just turn off a pump, but the earth is spitting it out at a pretty nice pace. I'd think that the earth would be interested in keeping it in, since it's a form of slow suicide. It is barely being collected faster than it is coming out, and it will be until Tuesday before another effort is made to stop it. The mind boggles at what effect over 100 mi...

Ashley-Madison founder Noel Biderman sent a letter to the CEO at New Meadowlands -- obtained by TMZ -- declaring, "At this stage, we are prepared to make a preliminary offer ... of $25,000,000 for the Naming Rights for a five-year term." He adds, if the stadium gets better offers, "We would be pleased to match any such superior offer." The offer (which works out to $5 million a year) is pretty big, but it's still below the average for other stadium sponsorships -- Bank of America pays $7 million a year to sponsor the Carolina Panthers stadium and FedEx drops $7.6 a year on the Redskins stadium in D.C. So, let's see if the gang at New Meadowlands is willing to sell naming rights to a web site that promotes infidelity. That's the real test, isn't it? To see if a professional sports franchise is honest enough to take money from a company that may not align itself with conventional thinking. Would they sell the naming rights to a company for less if ...

Geez. First of all, thank you to the thirty of you who have taken the time to follow me on this little Internet voyage. If you feel like the rantings get tired, there are 4 years of stuff to search. Start going back over the things you missed since you joined me and you might think I was either (a) funnier or (b) the same as now, only older and more tired. Either way, It's been an interesting time, and I wonder where my pent-up rants would have wound up if it weren't for the Internet. I haven't written much about the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Partly because I figure that you're already aware of it and partly because I'm at a loss to describe how I feel about it. I think I said that it would make the Exxon-Valdez look like "a Bounty commercial," but it goes beyond that now. The thing I can't figure out is how BP didn't have a plan for a pipeline break. As a driller and a major player in the oil industry, you'd think that they would ...

Site of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, seen from just in front of the monument off Hurd Road in Bethel, NY. (Photo by me) I was almost 12 years old in August of 1969. My recollection of the Woodstock music festival is enhanced by television and movies, and I'm not sure how much I remember and how much I learned over the years. I had a nice record collection as a kid, but almost none of the artists who appeared at Woodstock. The music of my childhood was limited to what was played on Top 40 radio, and almost none of the music of Woodstock was Top 40 stuff. I was in Saratoga Springs, New York for a Dave Matthews concert over the weekend. The return included a side trip to Bethel, the site of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. The town of Woodstock is about an hour away, but it's too boring to tell you why it was called Woodstock . Just go with it. The photo above shows the site of the concert. The stage was where the gravel area is to the left, and the hoards of people st...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Cadmium has been discovered in the painted design on "Shrek"-themed drinking glasses being sold nationwide at McDonald's, forcing the burger giant to recall 12 million of the cheap U.S.-made collectibles while dramatically expanding contamination concerns about the toxic metal beyond imported children's jewelry. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission , which announced the voluntary recall early Friday, warned consumers to immediately stop using the glasses; McDonald's said it would post instructions on its website next week regarding refunds. Ironically, the cadmium-infested glasses are the third-most nutritious McDonald's menu item. Tobacco smoking is the most important single source of cadmium exposure in the general population. It has been estimated that about 10% of the cadmium content of a cigarette is inhaled through smoking. The absorption of cadmium from the lungs is much more effective than that from the gut, and as much as ...

Screws fall out all the time. The world's an imperfect place. - John Bender, "The Breakfast Club" Screws fall out, things break, people fail and umpires make bad calls. In case you dropped out of an airplane today and missed the big news, an umpire blew a call and a kid in Detroit lost a perfect game because of it. Now, people who otherwise wouldn't know who Armando Galarraga is are trying to get him something that he lost, after first base umpire Jim Joyce missed a call with two out that wound up costing the kid his perfect game. It's a shame it had to happen to him, but baseball, by its design is human-element prone. Players make errors, batters strike out and umpires make mistakes. None of them happen at the best of times. Sometimes, they happen when the situation is the most crucial. However, we can't make exceptions when the bad call or error costs the team some place in history. A win is a win, and a "perfect game" means more than just the ...

I like Twitter better than Facebook, because I'd rather have followers than friends. I'm not sure what the attraction is with either of these "social networking" sites, but I cling to them like lint to my fine fabrics, which isn't always a good thing. The thing about Twitter, I find, is that there is a social hierarchy to it. In other words, the higher up the social (or political or entertainment) ladder one is, the more followers one has, and the less one has to devote time to the followers. As a leader, you post your thoughts and the others read them and listen. There are probably @ replies , but the leader isn't necessarily obligated to reply because, after all, he is the leader and you are the follower. You are put in your place. That's the part of Twitter that bothers me, since I find social hierarchy disturbing. By default, what a celebrity (or leader) Tweets is more interesting than what I do, and that isn't always the case, especially the w...

It's the unofficial start of summer, a big day for barbecuing, a great day to find a cheap piece of furniture or grab a big sale somewhere and a day off from work for most of us. However, the disgusting abundance of retail businesses that are open today is a concept I don't quite grasp. While I realize that there is more money to be made by being open on a holiday than not, I would think that a sense of history and respect would prevent it. Maybe it is because so many businesses are owned by non-native Americans that keeps them open, I don't know. I could assume it is simple greed, and I would at least be partly correct. In the United States, today is Memorial Day, which we have been celebrating in one form or another since 1866. It used to be called Decoration Day, but was officially declared Memorial Day in 1967. Until 1968 it was celebrated on May 30, but the U.S. Government passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, and it was moved to the last Monday in May. And therein lies...

President Obama: "Hey, come here and smell my finger!" OK, so it isn't very funny, but then again, neither is thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. You know you're in trouble when three people in business-casual clothing are walking the beach with police tape in the background. That's the shitty part about being president, or the CEO of British Petroleum for that matter. Somebody makes a big mistake and you're left walking the beach picking up clumps of washed-up oil trying to think of something to say to the American public that won't make it sound like the Gulf coast is about to become the world's biggest waterproof beach. Such is the peril of delegated authority.

That's the view from behind the Mars rover called Opportunity. Tracks laid across the Martian landscape will be there for centuries. Things like that make me think. You're not surprised. Centuries ago, Galileo peered at Mars through his telescope and declared that there were canals on the planet. He surmised that they were once waterways that had since dried up, and since, scientists have wondered if there was ever water on Mars. Reasonable men may differ. So now, we have sent a robot to the planet to roam around and explore, leaving tire trails in its wake. Centuries from now, will astronomers be peering at Mars through their telescopes and wonder if ancient civilizations existed on Mars? Suppose records of life on Earth are destroyed by an asteroid or comet, like in the movies, and there is no record of us sending a probe to explore the planet. Wouldn't that make Galileo look even smarter? Perhaps we're all just as intelligent as the time allows? Isn't that wh...

"To you I say, it is only with adversity that we even have a chance at greatness. Adversity is your opportunity." - Ann Curry One of the downsides of expansion - be it sports or media - is the dilution of talent. More teams or more networks translates into more opportunities to hire nitwits and incompetents. Now that there are a thousand news outlets and only so many eligible talking heads, one wonders what the talent level has become for big media. Ask no longer: After taking the stage to launch into the school's 175th commencement address, "Today" show co-host Ann Curry sought to drive home the inspirational content of her speech by ticking off the names of a few of the school's more illustrious alums. Among the entries on the Curry honor roll : " 60 Minutes " correspondent Lesley Stahl , evangelist Billy Graham, slasher-film director Wes Craven, and United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer . There was just one problem: Apart from St...