Category Archives: This Ain’t Fair

On being nibbled to death by ducks

They are going to kill me. Swear.

Boston University and Barnes & Noble (partners in extortion), I must admit, have happened on an idea that is positively, consummately, hilariously brilliant.

Ladies and gentlemen…the “Coursepack.”

What is a Coursepack, you ask? Well let’s see if I can get this right. A Coursepack is a bunch of Xerox-copied pages from various textbooks, compiled into a stack, and offered as reading material for my doctoral classes. Nifty, eh? Not so fast, pard.

Behold Exhibit A:

Right. They have some 18-year-old library droid pull books off the shelves in Boston and stand at a copier for 5 hours, and charge me $106.75 for the privilege (and this is the cheapest one yet – once I paid something like $190). But what do I get for my money?

Exhibit B:

The Coursepack. They did go to the trouble to punch holes in the sides so you can provide your own 3-ring binder. How thoughtful.
Exhibit C: Reduced in size and copied sideways so you have to turn the book to read it. Some pages are right-side-up, some aren’t. Brilliant.
Exhibit D: A substantial amount of information, to be sure.

Is this not the most incredibly profitable idea ever? Pardon me while I go get my credit card.

Sheesh.

PS – I want one of these.

Here we go again

I call it Syringe Wars.

The steroid scandal that slammed full-force into professional sports has once again surfaced in the news.

This time it’s Tammy Thomas, ex-professional cyclist, convicted yesterday of lying to a grand jury about her steroid use.

She denied ever using steroids. Friends, if this is the face of a woman who never shot up male hormones, I am Christ on a pony.

I suppose that people can be born to look this way, but I’d like to see her before she began her cycling career – which, by the way, was stripped from her for life.

And she blamed the jury and the prosecutor for “destroy[ing] people’s lives.”

Nah, I’d say she made that choice all on her own.

See, what gets me is not that people shoot up steroids. Folks can (and do) put whatever they want into their bodies, for myriad reasons. What cheeses me the most is when people screw up, then blame others.

A second cheese-off is the fact that such harsh punishment is doled out to these athletes, with more to come in the future (are you paying attention, Barry and Roger?), while criminals who hurt people other than themselves get slaps on the wrist. Drug dealers go free because prisons are overcrowded. Idiots like Ray Lewis serve 12 months probation for murder. People who beat their wives and children get a finger-wagging from the judge and are told to attend some bogus class.

To me, those are the real perps.

Why aren’t we dragging people to court for smoking cigarettes? I mean, the jig is up on tobacco – it’ll kill you sure as you’re sitting there reading this. But steroids? Oh wait…we’re dealing with professional sports <<insert angel chorus and beam of light from heaven here>> , so by God that’s serious business. We have to stop doping in sports!

No. We have to stop being dopes, paying top-dollar for sporting events and making it so one individual athlete makes more in one year than the entire economies of some third-world countries.

Ok, rant over for now. I’m happy there’s Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in my house. Shame on The Thriller for turning me on to it, ‘cuz it’s like $8 a pound.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Fink out.

Who makes up these rules?

As much as I loathe what he did, I think when compared to the penalties levied against other pro athletes who have run afoul of the law, Michael Vick got the shaft.
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He killed dogs, lied about it, and got 2 years in jail. By many accounts, this was completely justified. Heck, if they’d asked me, I would have said 2 years was a walk in the park for someone who had watched – and taken part in – the hanging, shooting and torturing of innocent animals.

[If PETA had their way, he’d have been lynched in public.]

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Next case. For (always bitter) Browns fans like myself, this is a specifically ouchy memory. Remember Kevin Mack? Sure you do. He was another pro athlete for whom money, talent and fame were not enough. He had to add cocaine to the list, and it landed him a 6-month jail term. Six months? On a first offense with no prior record? Almost anyone in that position back then walked away with probation and community service. I remember the outcry from the Cleveland press and the football world in general, deriding the court system and the NFL for making “an example” out of Mack.

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Next: Marion Jones. Another liar who broke the hearts of all those who supported her, defended her, and most importantly, looked up to her. She cheated in the Olympics, deceived an entire country, made fools of those who trusted her, and betrayed the kids who wanted to be like her.

She got 6 months. And the other liar on her level, Roger Clemens, should get even more, since he’s taking his lies to even loftier heights of insanity. But that’s another post for another day. Let’s get to the point (and I do have one, I promise).

Vick killed some dogs. Jones took steroids, and Mack bought cocaine. Those are all bad things, for which each athlete paid (or is presently paying) in jail time. But then wait….

What about Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens? Charged with murder and aggravated assault in 2000 (do you find it at all strange that they never found his blood-stained white suit?), he never served a day. Instead, he agreed to rat on his homies and walked free.

Leonard Little of the Rams rammed his Lincoln Navigator into the car Cindy Gutweiler was driving, after he ran a red light. He was skunk drunk, with a blood alcohol level of .19. Did Cindy press charges? Nope. She couldn’t, because she died. Little served 90 days and got 4 years probation.

And I won’t even go into the wife beatin’, crack smokin’, rapin’ and pillagin’ delinquents of the NBA. It is amazing how many commit felonies, then walk out of the courtroom, free men.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the biggest thug of them all:

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Still walking free, still making millions – although the piper just might catch up with him in September.

And I know all about aggravating vs. mitigating circumstances. People, there aren’t that many mitigating circumstances on the planet. A woman who shoots up steroids – physically harming no one but herself – and lies about it gets 6 months, and people like Lewis and Little go free? You tell me how that’s fair.

I read on somebody’s op-ed column that we can’t compare cases. The justice system deals with individuals with myriad inconsistencies, and with humans who are imperfect, so we cannot expect perfection from the legal machinery all of the time.

Oh yeah? Just wait until it’s *you* sitting at the defense table, pal.

Is this a test?

It’s going to be the death of me.

And my show.

Lately, every morning at 5 (sometimes earlier), I come downstairs and check the weather. More times than I’d like to think, I’ve seen something like this:

warning.jpg

This is not a winter storm warning. This is a test – from God. Title of test: Mounting a Musical Theater Production with as Little Rehearsal as Possible.

Of course, I don’t have it as bad as my friends in Concord, New Hampshire over the last few weeks, but hey – anything’s possible. And with the way my cast and I have been scoring in the luck department, it’ll probably happen.

Who knows? Maybe there’ll be a cholera epidemic. Or the school will lose power for a week.

Or maybe all our tails’ll fall off…

Signed,

eeyore.jpg
© The Walt Disney Company

You went and got me started.

(Thanks, Mave, for getting me all riled up.)

Some things just ain’t fair. Take, for instance, our government. Constitution? Feh! Check this, homey…

  1. The US government allows the open and unrestricted sale of alcohol (to anybody over the age of 21), despite the fact that in 2007, likkered up drivers caused more fatal accidents in cars than ever before.
  2. The Kennedy-Kyl Bill prohibits internet gambling in one’s own household. Here’s a great essay on it from 1998.
  3. Pornography -proven to have psychological effects that have led men to violent acts against women AND children, not to mention consistently exploiting women for 100 years – is openly displayed in “news stands” all over the country.

How can this happen in America?, you ask. We’re all the Land of the Whatever & Such. Well, friend, that may be the $640,000 question (I know there’s an extra zero – inflation).

I could go on a day-long rant about numbers 1 and 3. There’s all kinds of research on it out there. And although I have no personal issue with booze, alcohol has ruined the lives of many of my family, and consistently makes others act like fools – some of whom need little help doing so as it is.

It’s the Kyl bill that smokes my tobaccy. There are NO laws against drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes in one’s own home – behaviors that have repeatedly proven to cause death – as in, people stop breathing and die and kill other people with their cars – yet, I can’t play internet poker for real money in my own home because it’s against the law and it might harm me. Tell me that makes sense. Triple-dog-dare ya. Well, you can’t, because it don’t. Er, doesn’t.

The real reason, as we all know, is the overarching, suffocating power of the political lobby. In other words: money makes the world go around. In still other words: let people kill themselves by smoking and drinking themselves to death, or by polluting their pathetic psyches with porn, because those are personal choices. But boyo – don’t go touching the banks. People who spend their credit card balances on gambling – now there’s a problem, folks. That’s a choice we are going to control. Because, you know, gambling kills more children than anything else in the world, and we must save the children from their parents.

Puh. Leez.

Either let the gander do what’s good for the goose, or leave everyone alone.

Fink out (because I gotta get ready for school now).