Memories of Comiskey Park

I don't know how many of you had the pleasure of watching a game at 'America's Baseball Palace' Comiskey Park, but it was the home of some of my most vivid childhood memories. This slideshow give you a great idea of what it was like.

For a kid, Comiskey was the biggest playground you can find. The concrete concourses seemed to go forever, and unlike today's ballparks, they were mostly empty. People actually watched the game back then. You could take a set of winding metal ramps to the exploding scoreboard and get a mind-blowing panoramic view of the whole ballpark. I was up there once and I looked down to see Nolan Ryan staring up at me. "How'd you get up there?" The roof top of both outfield decks was in play, and I saw the one and only Harold Baines put one over the left field wall in '86.

The Chicago White Sox were not very good in those years, but it goes to show that with baseball wins and losses don't really matter. It's the memories of all those lazy summer afternoons and evenings basking in the warm glow of men playing out a boy's dream.

Castro resigns

Fidel Castro is no longer the President of Cuba. And everyone in America just kind of shrugs their shoulder. The guy who has been blamed for everything from the Kennedy hit to New Coke has stepped down. Ten years ago, this would have been disrupt the Price Is Right kind of news. I heard about it moving my car this morning, and came back in and nothing about it was on the morning 'news' show. Instead GMA was showing a correspondent almost piss himself by jumping off a casino in Atlantic City.

I am excited to see what the reaction of the loony Cuban exiles in Miami will be. Maybe this will finally get them off the national political stage.

Vayas con juevos, Fidel.

Tommy the tutor

I got a bite from my tutoring ad a day after I placed it on craigslist. Some foreign guy who wants help with his English to take professional standardized tests. It would be great if I could tutor a few people a week. Cash money, yos.

In News of the Weird, ex-roommate version, Dan called me last night asking if he and the new roommate could move the bed I am going to sell them before they pay me. After I told them no, he acted like I was inconveniencing him. SOOOO glad I am living with him no longer.

Fraud email of the day

I received this email today after applying for a part-time job I found on craigslist.com.

Dear Candidate, We got your resume and your application for the job on Craigslist. Our Managers have gone through your resume and due to some certain factors you have been picked as one of our possible candidate to be our Account Receivable Manager. The post has been filled, what we need now is a representative and payment process manager for the company on financial issues.So we re sorry for the inconvinency:(MEGAINC) is a well established, leaders in innovative Art Works Technology, providing art materials worldwide. We serve the entire United States and a growing export market. Your primary task for now, as a representative of the company is to coordinate payments from customers and help us with the payment process. You are not involved in any sales. Once orders are received and sorted we deliver the product to a customer. After this has been done the customer has to pay for the products but in most cases we make our clients prepay for orders or items they order for. About 90 percent of our customers prefer to pay through Certified Checks or Money Orders drawn from the United State based on the amount involved. We have decided to open this new contract to hire job position for solving this problem. Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients. 2. Cash Payment at your Bank or Deposit payment and let us know how long its going to clear the Bank3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed 4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you will be contacted to send payment to, You'll have a lot of free time doing another job, because this job is part time, you'll get good income. But this job is very challenging and you should understand it. We are considering your application because you satisfy our requirements and we are sure you will be an earnest assistant till we start running our branch office in your state.For example if you recieve 4000.00 USD and your 10% should be 400.00 USD Plus your basis monthly salary is 1000.00 USD here are the information you are to provide then we will get back to you after we must have gone through it all. Get back to us with information below information, so that we can add your mailing address to our Regional database and forward it to our customers for them to send payments. Requirement:
First and Last name..........Address Not P.O Box..........City.........................State........................Zip/Postal code..............Age..........................Home phone...................Cell phone...................Bank Name.................... Your response to this email is needed, so that we can reconfirm your mailing address details we have in our database.We will be updating you as soon as the payment is being sent to you and you will be directed as to where to have the remaining 90% of the money sent to, after the deduction of your 10% pay on any payments received and processed by you. A swift acknowledgement of the receipt of this email will be appreciated. Thanks For Your Total Understanding(Megainc) Manager Best RegardsR.

I just can't get myself to do money laundering on a Sunday.

Suspicious Minds

Does anybody have a job or anything to do where I can get paid for sitting on my ass? That's pretty much my general question of the day right now.

Oh, and while I sit can I play Texas Hold-Em?

Dr. Beetroot and the Great AIDS Denial

The long-term impact of the epidemic is almost incalculable. The country has 1.2 million Aids orphans. A generation of women is being lost. Teachers are dying at the rate of 14 a week; child mortality rates in some areas have trebled in the past 15 years. And life expectancy, because of Aids, has fallen to around 47 years. "This is medieval," said Dr Alan Whiteside of Kwa-Zulu Natal University in Durban. "Why are we not shouting it from the rooftops?"

South Africa yesterday fired their deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who was the only government official critical of the country's bizarre AIDS policy. See, South African president Thabo Mbeki and health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang don't believe HIV causes AIDS. Yes, you read that correct. Their whole nation is suffering from a plague that makes apartheid look like a Tahitian vacation, and these two see no correlation between the two diseases, twenty years of solid public health history notwithstanding. Meanwhile, 1,400 new people are infected with HIV every day in South Africa.

What do Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang think their countrymen should do? Why, imbibe potions created by local medicine men of course! The New Yorker did a great piece on this story in March if you can find it. Truly, this is one of those profoundly African tragedies which even Shakespeare would find too unbelievable for words. I can understand the reluctance of African leaders to trust Western medicine but, as the New Yorker article points out, they don't take sweet potatoes for heart disease.

The AIDS epidemic in Africa will be a World War II like event for the continent. The death toll will end up in the millions. Denying the science behind disease prevention will only cause history to leave the destruction of this continent onto Africa's own doorstep. They will not be able to blame colonialism or prejudice.

Oil is a curse...

Those are the words of an African expert on the effects oil will have on that continent Right now, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa are growing, which is a good thing. But these economies are all sucking on the teat of Big Oil, whose affinities have proven to be disastrously fickle. We all know of the paradise Big Oil has created in the Middle East. In a grander perspective, the after-effects of oil-based capitalism has accelerated man-made climate change. All of this makes me wonder, is oil some natural plague?

Can anyone think of one good thing oil has brought humanity? Yes, besides endowing the Clampetts' with their fortune. Sitting here I can't think of one. I own a car, bought gas just today. I am certainly as addicted as to oil as the next American. My livelihood depends on it, no matter how much I ride my bike or use public transportation. The guilt I feel about this, though, has began to subside with the dawning realization that oil is some kind of natural curse. Like the Ark was a supernatural forbidden for Dr. Jones, maybe oil is that same thing for humans? Would our lives be so much more awful without it? We all know the unstoppable force that is capitalism. I have no doubt without oil we would have created some other means for our industrial rise.

I feel as if we are on the precipice of disaster. Yesterday's events remind me that maybe you never know what a disaster is until it is really happening to you. In that case, I hope that soon we realize the grave portents from our dependency on oil and stretch our capacity to survive beyond that of our lifetime. Tonight, this is my most heartfelt wish.