Okay – I just have two quick questions. Well, they may not be all that quick, but I’ll try to stay brief.

Question # 1)

You know those Goth / Punker types with tons of tattoos, blue hair, piercings everywhere, spiked collars, ripped tank tops to reveal as much of this as possible, and beards waxed to a sharp point? And that’s just the girls – the guys are even worse!

Okay – I’m all for freedom of expression, so no problem there. But why is it that when you pass one of them on the street and stare at them, they glare back and scream at you, “Hey – what the hell are you looking at?”

What do you think I’m looking at? If you don’t want people to stare at you, don’t walk around looking like a sideshow!!

Just what exactly is up with this? Okay – that is question number one.

Question # 2)

I went to a baseball game in Baltimore a few nights ago, and as expected, many people in the crowd were wearing Orioles jerseys with names on the back. (And yes – The Orioles still suck.) Same thing at The Ravens games – most of the crowd is dressed in Ravens jerseys, or at least the team colors.

Do these people in the jerseys think that it’s possible there will be a last minute injury and they’ll be called in to play? I’ve never really seen this happen. Even stranger (or perhaps not) - fans at a tennis match often wear tennis clothes or warm-up outfits. I mean really – what are you trying to do here? They are NOT going to invite you to play against Andy Roddick at the last minute, and if they did, he would kick your ass. You wouldn’t even see the serve let alone return it. So leave the tennis clothes at home.

How much further will this trend go? Should I start bringing my guitar to a concert in case one of the guys in the band slams his hand in a car trunk and can’t play anymore?

How would you feel if you walked into a dental office and everyone in the waiting room was wearing a smock, mask, gloves and had little replicas of dental tools? This is just weird. Fortunately you don’t see customers of McDonalds dressing like Mayor McCheese and The Hamburglar, but if the trend continues, it could happen.

Okay – just wondering aloud. Please let me know if you have the answers to these two very important questions. But for now, I gotta go. I have an appointment to take my car to the mechanic and seemed to have misplaced my coveralls with the name “Mack” on the front.

See you soon-
Rich

Okay – so I was watching TV in bed late at night (too tired to read, too wound up to sleep) and noticed that practically every commercial was for some kind of pharmaceutical product. This recent phenomenon of drug ads is really cool – now we can finally be treated for things we never even knew we had. Allergies? Bladder control problems? Strange taste in clothes? Yeah - we got a cure for that. All you need to do is make an appointment with your doctor – you know – the one who just had a gourmet lunch brought in by a hot babe pharmaceutical rep – and we’ll get you hooked up.

Hey dude - surely you must have insomnia since it is 1:00 AM and you are watching a rerun of The Jeffersons, so call your physician immediately and load up on some Ambien. You’ll be asleep for the next month. Of course, you will not be able to operate heavy machinery, but were you really going to do that anyway? Personally, I was only planning on operating light machinery, so things should be okay.

And then, just like the small print in the car commercials, they start going over the side effects. It seems like whatever you are having cured will surely be counterbalanced by some horrible things that you never would have had if you hadn’t popped the pill in the first place. But fear not – if the side effects are really bad, there is a pill for that also. I think that one day there will be a pill that doesn’t actually treat anything at all but is loaded with those crazy side effects that we all crave. It will have a cool fake word for a name like Effexor – oh wait a minute. I think that one is already in use.

What was really scary is that one of the side effects of this sleeping pill was diarrhea. Now I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Isn’t one of the rules of life “Never take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night?” Now you don’t have to worry about needing two pills to ruin your mattress – one pop does it all.

Then of course the next pharma commercial was the famous Cialis ad – the one where the older couple is on top of the huge hill, both recumbent in separate bathtubs. How did they get there? I’m thinking if that guy can lug two tubs to the top of a hill he probably doesn’t need any medical help to put some lead in the pencil. Or maybe that got him so tired out that he needs all the help he can get. In either case, the whole situation seems a bit strange.

And then, just as things are getting really romantic, the big announcer voice comes in and proclaims:

“If you experience an erection that lasts more than four hours, call your doctor immediately!”

Call my doctor? The hell with that! I’m calling everyone I know! It will be like a bakery line! Next – number 27! If I call my doctor it will be thank him! I don’t even want to know what the side effect of this one could be, but I’m thinking that guy better clean the water in the tub.

Alright – it’s getting late here. My sniffles (from chronic allergies) have gone away, and the chamomile tea is kicking in, so hopefully there will be no nocturnal bladder control problem like the last ad warned me about. Time to turn off George and Weezie and dream about what the side effects of watching bad TV commercials late at night could possibly be.