Bits and pieces

So I've caught up on my beauty sleep, and I'm finding in the three days I was on the road and focused on my day job, all sorts of nutty things have happened.

When the cat's away...

I'm not the cat, but you get me.

Anywho:

• My pond - Speaking of being away and mice playing and what not, I have a habit of checking my pond about three times a day - once to feed my koi, and twice to check for tadpoles. I always know when the evil, (literally) poison, Bufo toads, have laid eggs, 'cause they're noisy lovers the night before. Every now and then I get teased for my vigilance. So get this, I leave home on Friday. I'm away Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I come home, and what do you think I find in my pond besides huge fish? About 15,000 toad eggs and tiny tadpoles. The fish are pissed off. I can't blame them. It's like a black cloud swimming in there. This is going to take some work.
• The Vatican's new deadly sins - After 1,500 years the Catholic Church has updated and added to its deadly sin list. The new ones are environmental pollution, genetic engineering, being filthy rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia, and causing social injustice. Based on the pollution sin alone, half my neighborhood is going to Hell, especially those knuckleheads who toss their food wrappers and empty beer cans in the street and let their dogs pollute the swale in front of my house. And the drug dealer one makes a lot of sense to me too. You have got to be a selfish person to push poison on vulnerable people and justify it by arguing they want it and someone has to give it to them so it may as well be you, or arguing that you have to pay your bills and feed your family. Bad excuses. Get two jobs or three if you have to, real jobs, not sidewalk pharmacy. Not sure what I think about the super duper rich sin. I admit I'm scornful of most obscenely rich people, but that's because the hater in me is just a little jealous of the fact that paying bills and living with money stress never a worry for them. But if they earned it honestly, I don't see what the problem is. I don't think I even have to the explain why I'm all for pedophilia being on this list. I'm leaving genetic engineering and abortion alone. But I'd be curious for a little more definition on the social injustice sin.
• Eliot Spitzer - It's funny. A buddy and I were talking yesterday about the things apparently smart people will do to ruin their lives. Hooking up with hos was one of those things. And by the way, guys, if you do business with a prostitute, like Ludacris said - and I'm paraphrasing - you're a ho too. So how could a man who built his career on law and order and strict enforcement, a man who was nicknamed "Eliot Ness" after the prohibition-era G-Man, be so dumb as to purchase a prostitute? And not just get a prostitute but get one from a Web site? It was wrong, no doubt. But even if Spitzer didn't take issue with his "sin," anybody who watches TV knows high end prostitutes keep records of who, what, when, where, how much, etc. A rising career, and more importantly an intact family ruined. I am curious about one thing though: What in the world were guys like Spitzer buying for $1,000 to $5,000 an hour or $10,000 a day? If I paid that kind of money, I wouldn't want sex. I'd want my house painted inside and out, a few new trees planted in my yard, maybe some sod laid down on a few bare spots in the yard, and if there was time left over at the end of the day she could wash my car...and if she wanted to look sexy while doing the chores I suppose that'd be OK.
• Day job stuff - here is an article I had in yesterday's paper. Enjoy, if you have time. It's a profile of an interesting lady.

Odds and Ends

Morning folks. I didn't blog last night 'cause my wireless router fried. And I was too lazy to set aside my notebook and walk the 40 feet to my desktop to go online from there.

Anywho, I'm doing a little homework this morning and have no grand ideas.

But I do have some reading material for you and a few morsels for thought.

• My article in today's paper. Enjoy.
• Is this for real? If so, I can't begrudge anyone happiness, but it's just weird. I know neither of these two is a killer on the record, but it still makes me envision OJ hooking up with Lizzie Borden.
• When I was a kid my dad used to say all the time "I hate quitters." Later he toned it down and said he didn't hate them, 'cause hate wasn't right. Eventually he backed off that notion altogether, because some people quit some things for honorable reasons. Jerry Roberts, former editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press newspaper, quit not so long ago, because he didn't like what management above him was doing to the paper's news content and its staff. He could've bitten his tongue, collected his pay and stayed put. But, right or wrong, he quit on principle. So it was gracious of my dad to eventually clarify, but from when I was a kid I understood that he meant he had disdain for people who quit simply because the going gets tough, which leads me to two of the biggest fighters in media these days: Donald Trump and Rosie. I have respect for both to the extent that Trump has built his business and reinvented it repeatedly over the years to much success, and both of them have ingeniously turned themselves, their personalities, into marketable commodities. I even respect that they don't often seem to back down from what they say they believe, even though I don't like most of the opinions I've heard her express or how he's expressed his opinion. Either way, I've always respected that they took the heat for their words. And now they've both quit. She quit The View after her tussle with co-host Elizabeth Hasslebeck over whether or not Hasselbeck should have defended Rosie's statement about "who" the terrorists are in the war in Iraq. For the record, the terrorists, as far as my tiny brain can comprehend, are the people intentionally killing civilians and blowing up markets and schools, etc. He quit The Apprentice, after NBC announced it wouldn't be on the fall schedule. Lower ratings over the past couple of seasons contributed to NBC's decision. Still, I recall Trump lambasting a cast member/contestant on The Apprentice who decided to quit last season when her team was in a slump. She left because she said the conditions weren't right for her. So, back where we started: Trump and Rosie quit. You don't have to like either of them, but quitting 'cause the kitchen got too hot? Not cool. BTW, in case someone who knows Trump stumbles and falls face first into a computer monitor that has this blog on screen and tells him about it, I am not the dumbest person in newspaper. I have met that person. He doesn't work at the Miami Herald.