People say, “I’m not an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings.” Using that same thought process, I’m not a brilliant bank robber. Brilliant bank robbers go to prison. Also, they rob banks. Brilliantly.

Watching “Toddlers and Tiaras” is quite possibly the worst thing anyone can do with their time. It’s terrible.

Watching women’s softball on ESPN2 is the second worst thing anyone can do. It’s all strikeouts and running bunts, and when you factor in the annoying girls yelling from the dugout the entire time and the high percentage of unattractive lesbians on the field, well, it’s virtually unwatchable.

I’m looking forward to Toy Story 3. I just hope they don’t do with Ken what they did with Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2. You know, get you all excited to see the movie by showing him in the previews and then only having him on screen for like 5 minutes of the actual movie. Because I don’t know if I could handle more disappointment.

Before winning 7-1 today, the Reds had been outscored 36-21 in their previous 5 games. And the one game they won, they won 11-5. So they lost four games by an average score of 6-2 since I wrote that one post. And they weren’t that close. This is why I don’t write about Ohio State football.

My new car – a 2008 Infiniti G35x a.k.a. i-Z (pronounced “Izzy”) the Silver Bullet – is the best car I’ve ever owned. By far. You should get one. Especially if the alternative is a 2005 Honda Pilot.

So the Pac-10 wanted Texas, Oklahoma, OK State, Texas Tech, and Colorado and ended up with Colorado and Utah? Tom Arnold is probably the only person alive who understands how they feel.

Meanwhile the Big Ten added Nebraska, one of the five winning-est football programs in history. And Notre Dame gets to continue on their road to irrelevance? Someone pinch me, I must be dreaming.

It’s nice to see USC finally get what’s coming to them, but I’m a little disappointed that Pete Carroll still made $18000 today. On the bright side, he’s coaching the Seahawks, so maybe that was his punishment.

“Yeah, uh, Pete – you screwed up so badly that we’re going to take you out of a place where you’re considered a god and you get to see the Song Girls every Saturday and instead you’ll have to coach in a league where you’ve already failed miserably once  in a place full of weird hippies and whose most famous resident is famous for – among other things – blowing his brains out with a shotgun. Bad Pete. Bad!”

I’m not saying Obama has no leadership skills, but I’d rather work for my most recent boss whose incompetence caused me to quit my job in the middle of a recession with 10+% unemployment than work for Bambi.

But that’s because I’m a racist. That’s right, I hate Hawaiians.

Reds current record: 35-26, 1st place in NL Central

Reds end-of-season record, projected (if they somehow continue winning at their current rate) 93-69

Reds end-of-season record, my prediction: 88-74

Don’t look so crazy NOW, do I? Especially considering that Aaron Harang has, until recently, pitched like the fat kid who got picked last for his Little League team and that the bullpen has been disastrous outside of Arthur Rhodes.

Editor’s note – Yes, I know. Now that I’ve mentioned the Reds’ success, they’ll promptly go on a 20-game losing streak and finish the season 30 games out of first place. But still, we’re more than a quarter through the season and they are doing well. I have to acknowledge it at some point, right?

UPDATE – Sure enough, after I write this post the Reds lose 2 of 3 to the freaking ROYALS, and look terrible doing so. Well done, guys. Well done.

Why is Special Agent Oso a panda bear? Shouldn’t he be Special Agent Whatever-The-Chinese-Word-For-Bear-Is?

For a Special Agent, Oso kind of sucks.

I also question his priorities. He has all this technology that he could use to help end world poverty and instead he teaches kids to ride a swing set and crap.

It amazes me that a department can lose 1/4 of their people in six months after only having lost a handful in the preceding four years and STILL not do anything to make their work environment better.

It’s like that old saying – if you’ve been divorced six times, maybe it’s you.

I’m good enough to be accepted into the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. I wonder if that’s like being good enough to play semi-pro football in Shreveport.

The Reds lost a game yesterday when they were leading 9-3 going into the bottom of the 9th inning.

The reason I didn’t expand on the previous item: what do you say about a choke job like that?

The only person to choke worse than Jay Bruce on Wednesday (0-5, 3 strikeouts, 77 people left on base) was Vince Carter on Tuesday against the Celtics. I don’t follow basketball closely, but it seems to me that someone making $15 million a year (and not named Shaquille O’Neal) should be able to make a couple free throws.

I could miss two free throws at a critical moment in a playoff game, and I’d do it for way less than $15 million a year. I’d do it for $5 million without hesitation.

At what point do increased unemployment claims stop being “unexpected?” My guess is either when no one else in the country has a job or when a Republican becomes president again.

Those two things might happen around the same time, a couple years from now. We’ll see.

I’m convinced that kids’ TV shows are written and starred in by people who are coked out of their gourds 24 hours a day.

Along those lines, is it just me or is Handy Manny the most racist show ever? I mean other than Hannity, of course.

My daughter saw Jack Bauer during 24 the other night and said “ninja!” She has no idea.

Speaking of 24, the people who do security clearances at CTU must be the same people handing PR at my former department. I refuse to believe that there are two separate groups of people who are that incompetent.

It has been nice to see Jack open up a little bit this season and start eviscerating people more. If there was one thing 24 was missing, it was evisceration.

Please excuse the rough nature of this post – I wrote it quickly and it contains a lot of disjointed thought. Hopefully some of it makes sense. – ed.

The four of you who regularly read this site may be disappointed to see that I’m taking a bit of a turn for the serious this morning. But a thought has popped into my head this morning and if I don’t write something down I may never get back to sleep.

I’m not generally one of these “everything is horrible” types when it comes to relations between the sexes. (And yes, I used “sex” in this post rather than “gender,” because “gender” is a linguistic term, not a biological one. Or at least, it used to be. Call me a throwback or a Neanderthal if you like, but it’s my belief that words mean things.) That’s not to say that things are one hundred percent equal, but it’s my – possibly naive – belief that a lot of these inequities are subconscious, don’t stem from malice, and in most cases exist for a good reason. Don’t worry, if that’s too much gobbledygook for 5:30 in the morning I’ll clarify this a little later on.

Over the last year or so, my job has gotten progressively worse due to a multitude of factors that I have no desire to get into in any detail here – I’m saving that for my MBA thesis. But to put it briefly, there has been a feeling of uncertainty hovering over everything there, especially when it comes to job security. Consider this – I haven’t gone more than a few weeks knowing whether or not I have a job by the first of the next month since sometime in mid-2009. Add to that the fact that people higher in the food chain than myself have basically been giving me and everyone else I work with the finger for the past six months. Then imagine what influence that kind of work environment might have when it comes to the way I deal with my family when I come home from it every day.

On the other hand, my wife has a good job. She made more money than I did last year and she will make considerably more than I this year. She will make enough, in fact, that every penny I earn from now to December will probably go towards paying income taxes on what she makes, since those taxes aren’t directly taken out of her paychecks. Furthermore, her work is fulfilling to her and she’s doing what she’s always wanted to do – a pretty neat thing for someone who is still several years shy of 30. She’s been recognized on a couple occasions as one of the stars at her place of employment. and while there have been the occasional frustrations for her, I’d say she’s very happy with her job nonetheless.

To make a long story short (too late) after several long discussions with my wife about these things I put in notice at my job last week. It didn’t make any sense for me to continue working at a place where I didn’t really have a future and wasn’t wanted. Let’s not forget that everything I earned would be going to Uncle Barry and I think that it’s pretty clear that the decision wasn’t completely insane. Yet from some of the responses to this event you would think that I walked out on the best job ever and left my family in jeopardy of living in a refrigerator box for the next few years. A lot of people have been very sympathetic – as though my leaving was a bad thing and not my choice – or they’ve been very curious, asking my wife or me whether we would be all right in the coming months and so on.

I wonder if it would be the same were the circumstances reversed. If my wife had been treated like crap for the last year and quit her job while I made more than enough money to cover all our expenses, would people be so curious about whether we could afford to only have one of us working. If she’d been in a place where she didn’t feel valued or wanted and came home on a daily basis cranky and grouchy and finally decided she’d had enough of it, would anyone question whether or not quitting her job – even in this economy – was the right thing to do?

I seriously doubt it.

Now comes the part you don’t normally read in these types of posts: it’s not really that big a deal that people look at our situations differently. I know that the people asking me whether or not we’re okay are asking out of love. They’re not being jerks. I struggled with the fact that I’d be giving up the responsibility for financially providing for my family. And when I say I struggled with it, consider the fact that if not for that I probably would have quit my job sometime between last September and January. If I went back and forth with this for that long, I can’t blame anyone else – who just found out about most of this – for wondering whether or not I have lost my mind. The fact is that men are expected to be the breadwinners for their family and women aren’t held to that same standard.

The nice thing is that it’s mainly just an annoyance. No one’s going to cast me out of their social circle for being voluntarily unemployed – not that I’m in too many social circles anyway, the rampant swearing, drinking, and sarcasm will do that I think. Family will pry and occasionally inadvertently say things that on first impression seem pretty insulting. Friends will ask questions they wouldn’t ask my wife. Strangers will look at me funny when I’m grocery shopping with the kids at 1 in the afternoon on a weekday. But the people who know me and know us will eventually see that we did, in fact, know what we were doing when we came to this decision, and life will go on.

A few months ago the Steelers had an internal meeting to decide who would stay on the team and who would go. Bungles quarterback Carson Palmer and coach Marvin Lewis were around to witness it, and this is roughly how it went.

• Qualifications?
• Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
• You said rape twice.
• I like rape.
• Charming. Sign right here. Next!
• Arson, armed robbery. Mayhem.
• Wait a minute. What’ve you got in your mouth?
• Nuttin’
• Nuttin’ eh? Smoking weed on line? I hope you brought enough for everybody!
• Me too!
• I didn’t know there was gonna be so many!
• I’m trading you to the Jets.
• Boy is he strict.

Pat in Colorado writes: “If you were in Denver, why in hell would you want to go to Pittsburgh?”

My initial response off the top of my head was that you might want to go if you were the fattest, stupidest person in Denver, because if you went to Pittsburgh you’d be the smartest and best looking person there. However, the question made me think, which happens rarely enough that it merits its own post.

REASONS SOMEONE IN DENVER MIGHT WANT TO GO TO PITTSBURGH

• They think Broncos fans aren’t obnoxious enough.
• They would like to see a river they can’t jump across.
• Rather than watching a young, talented baseball team in a nice ballpark day in and day out, they would prefer to watch a young, untalented team in a nice ballpark day in and day out.
• They’d like to go to a place where more restaurants threaten to give you a coronary before you get to dessert.
• They’re tired of watching a college football team underachieve with a coach who was overrated in his prior posts in college. They’d rather see a college football team underachieve with a coach who was overrated in his prior posts in the NFL.
• They think sunlight and low humidity are terrible things.
• In the same vein, they’re vampires. Fat ones.

And the biggest reason someone from Denver might want to go to Pittsburgh:

• They like quarterbacks who rape people, and they highly doubt Tebow’s going to pull that one off.

A penguin walks into a bar. “You got any fish?” he asks. The bartender says no and the penguin leaves.

The next day, the penguin comes back. “You got any fish?” he asks. The bartender says no and the penguin leaves.

This goes on for a few weeks, with the penguin asking if they have any fish and the bartender saying no. Finally the bartender has enough of it and when the penguin shows up to ask if he has any fish, he shouts, “No! And if you come back tomorrow asking me if we have any fish I’m gonna nail your feet to the floor and set you on fire!” The penguin says nothing and leaves. The next day, the penguin comes back.

“You got any nails?” he asks. The bartender, surprised, says, “No.”

“You got any fish?”

Dusty Baker is a plant (plant? I thought men like you were usually called a fruit) sent by the Cubs to decimate the young arms of the Reds’ pitching staff in an attempt by the Cubs to hurt their competition in a futile effort to win a World Series for the first time in 102 years.

Fortunately Lou Piniella is a plant sent by the Reds to get Cubs fans’ hopes up every year only to dash them in heartbreaking fashion. Not for any benefit to the Reds, mind you. Just because a lot of Cubs fans are morons and deserve it.

A priest calls in the head nun – along with all the other nuns – into his office and tells them that a new bishop is going to be visiting the church, so they need to get some fish and prepare a good meal for him. On the day the bishop arrives in town, one of the townsfolk sees a nun pulling a big fish out of the river.

“That’s a nice goddam fish,” the guy says. The nun takes a step back in surprise and then the man, seeing her reaction tells her, “no, that’s what kind of fish it is. It’s a goddam fish.”

The nun, understanding now, takes the fish back to the church and hands it over to the head nun. “Look at this wonderful goddam fish I caught!” she says. The head nun recoils in surprise until the other nun says, “no, that’s just the kind of fish it is. It’s a goddam fish.” No longer shocked, the head nun takes the fish and brings it to the kitchen where she begins cleaning it. The priest walks in and comments on the impressive size of the fish and compliments the head nun on catching it.

“Sister Mary caught this goddam fish. I’m just cleaning it,” the head nun says. When the priest backs off in surprise, the head nun clarifies for him. Now knowing the kind of fish it is, the priest takes it and cooks it.

That night as they sit around the dinner table with the new bishop, who comments on how wonderful the meal is.

“I caught the goddam fish,” Sister Mary says.
“I cleaned the goddam fish,” the head nun says.
“And I cooked the goddam fish,” the priest says.

The bishop looks at them for a second, leans back in his chair, and says, “I like this fucking place already!”