Miscellaneous Ramblings Today

I'm just tickled that someone thought Patrick Swayze should weigh in on the Mel Gibson saga.

And I’m not real crazy about the word glitch. It’s a non help-desk way of telling someone far less tech savvy that “Your Commodore 64 is fucked up.” Can’t we use more specific terminology? I enjoyed it when the gal at Burger King some weeks ago told me, “Our computers is down. There had been a glitch, but it’s coming up in a minute.” Now, I don’t expect the home of the Whopper to also be the home of the technically brilliant, but sometimes not saying anything at all would make the consumer feel more comfortable.

Fortunately for the producers of “Geraldo At Large,” there is a break in a high-profile murder investigation or some otherwise gruesome crime or story at least five times a week. Wanna know how I know that? Because there’s a tease each weekday morning telling viewers what’s on the upcoming show, and things seemingly always work out in a way that Geraldo, the self-proclaimed lightning-rod, is able to show us each day new video that in his opinion is “shocking.” As long as he says it’s shocking, folks will watch. Whether it actually is shocking is another story, but since misleading is far more important and acceptable than accuracy is practiced, we let him get away with it.

I’m usually among the first to jump on the bandwagon when athletes do wrong, but I’m not so convinced of Floyd Landis’ guilt just yet. I don’t know a whole lot about steroids, but my cousin and his wife, both health writers and avid cyclists, gave me some things to think about that make me wonder if the French press or anybody else, really, might have horsed around with Landis’ urine sample. Landis submitted a handful of urine samples both before and after the day that he submitted two tests that later were deemed positive. None of the others was positive, yet the one in the middle, which was submitted after the decisive stage in which Landis demolished the field and shaved nearly eight minutes off of his deficit, yielded the troubling result. Problem is, that’s not how steroids work. They don’t give you a same-day or next-day jolt, like, say, a Red Bull might, on a much smaller scale, obviously. There are other things that convinced me, but this was the one I heard before the Sapporos on Saturday, so I’m most clear on this particular piece of reason.