Vegetarian Friendly Ballparks

I meant to write about this earlier. At least I got to it just in time for my Cubs to get swept for the second year in a row. I can always try the list next year. This write-up is better late than never, so here goes.

PETA came out with their 2008 list of the most Vegetarian Friendly Ballparks. The champion for the second straight year is Citizens Bank Park in historic Philadelphia. The home of the Liberty Bell is as friendly to vegans as Philly sports fans are unfriendly to Santa Claus. The array of choices includes meatless cheesesteaks, faux crab cakes, vegan burgers, vegan dogs, and grilled eggplant sandwiches. The concessions manager expanded the menu as a way of drawing a new batch of fans. According to the Daily News, they use the quality vegetarian food options as a way to draw non-sports fanatics to games.

Other veggie-friendly parks include San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago (Stupid Sox), St. Louis, Detroit, Atlanta, Colorado, Tampa Bay and Arizona. Only Tampa and Philly are left in the playoffs, so many of these are offline until next season.

The 2008 winners list also includes vegetarian options at non-winning ballparks, as well as a list of the best minor league vegetarian options. I propose that the Columbus Clippers and their Dime-a-Dead-Animal-Dog promotion may have to make way for Rad Dog Veggie Nite in order to build the fan base for future dates.

Mississippi Braves Managerial Tantrum

This one is hilarious. You have to love the spirit. If Lou Pinella's meltdown was a 6, this one by Mississippi Braves manager Phillip Wellman was a 9.5, possibly a 10.

News You Can Peruse

The Cubbies...you can set your watch by their consistent inconsistency. Hopefully the new outfielder's potential doesn't end up being Pie in the sky.

The story of the day continues to be the Virginia Tech shooting. The identity of the shooter was announced (he's also a hell of a playwright), but the media angles for this story are deeper than the kid with a gun stories all over the airwaves. Students were keeping up with the story through Web updates. CNN's on the spot reporter was a Va-Tech graduate student with a cell phone camera. This may be the first tragedy brought to you live in grainy YouTube-quality video linked on Facebook.

Sudan has finally agreed to allow U.N. aid workers into the country in a move that is viewed as a potential precursor to a peacekeeping effort. American efforts would most likely be available if they weren't hopelessly quagmired in the Iraq debacle.

Presidential candidates named John are doing everything they can to separate themselves from the crowd by saying and doing stupid things. John McCain still defends guns, even after a South Korean student killed 32 students before he killed himself in Blacksburg. McCain is definitely a few bullets shy of a full clip on gun control...keep your mouth shut, Big Gun. At least he isn't getting multiple $400 haircuts like John "I Feel Pretty" Edwards. When he doesn't make it in Washington, I'm sure Hollywood holds endless potential.

Ohio State was doing their best Ohio University impression when hackers stole the identities of 14,000 employees and 3,500 students. Most identities can be used for ill-gotten gains, but if they got Maurice Clarett's information, they would most likely would get slightly less than the Broncos got by drafting him.

Mother Jones profiled the environmental harm and engineering flaws inherent in Apple iPods. These problems are in addition to the problems they create making oblivious morons to walk in traffic with impunity.

Interesting media stories include the campaign to reform internet radio. The medium may be dying out as the price for royalty fees shot up drastically last year. Great free sites like Pandora will be gradually phased out and replaced by pay-to-play sites. If somebody goes postal because of this, at least you will be able to get video footage at the newly minted Smoking Gun video vault.

In news of the weird, the most popular prophylactic in New York is the official free NYC condoms produced by Lifestyles. The report states that over 5 million lubricated condoms have been used in the back seat of Derek Jeter's limousine this year alone.

Finally, a German military instructor was dismissed after a video of him instructing recruits that they should pretend they were shooting blacks in the Bronx surfaced. People haven't been this upset with the German military since the last time they invaded Poland.

Love You 42 Times

Monday means it's time to play ball. While it's still in play, I would like to extend my hand to any living relative of Jackie Robinson and offer you the opportunity to bat one through nine in the Cubs lineup this spring. Make sure you bring a glove.

The story du jour is everybody's favorite tabloid topic -- school shootings. The Va Tech shooting left 33 dead in a tragic event that raised the casualty bar from previous shootings in Colorado and Texas. This storyline surfaces once every few years, and people blame gun control, religion, video games and/or any other blame peg to hang their pseudo-psychological arguments on. When the report was Virginia Tech, the only broken figure that would be capable of such a thing that easily came to mind was Marcus Vick based upon his previous record in Blacksburg, but those reports were not the case.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is expected to admit that he screwed up in the firing of U.S. attorneys in front of an attentive Congressional audience. He is also expected to tow the party line and explain that the firings were NOT politically motivated but the orders did come from the White House. It doesn't take a pencil to connect the dots, and even if you connected the dots, the outline would be a giant, steaming pile of horse manure.

Jose Padilla goes on trial this week after five years in solitary confinement without charges being filed. After all of the torture and Constitutional tango described in an L.A. Times article, the former Chicago gang member will face reduced charges. This is the smoke-and-mirrors proof that USAPATRIOT Act is working for...somebody other than Jose, apparently.

The NY Times features a story on illegal immigrants filing tax returns before the impending deadline, which should be helpful information for Roger Federer and Zinedine Zidane if they forgot their green cards. It should be on Bill O'Reilly's talking points like yesterday.

Sports Sunday celebrated Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier with memorials around the country and 14 hours of prerecorded features that covered up for the dearth of footage based on multiple rain outs. Chicago also won the competition to be the American bid for the 2016, proving for the fiftieth time why Chicago is great and Los Angeles is a pit.

In another tragic loss to the creative community, New York free jazz spot Tonic closed its doors for good Friday after a pile of musicians including John Zorn, Marc Ribot, DJ Spinoza and Matthew Shipp were among the many played through the wreckers coming in to tear the club down. Places like this need to exist so that real art can be produced, the kind that isn't designed by boardrooms full of M.B.A.s, lawyers and pimps but rather by dynamic, organically realized music that is new and stretches your imagination to places that it couldn't conceptualize over and over, finding music that speaks to you without words. Great music so rarely happens in Madison Square Garden but is always happening in little out of the way places like the Hideout (great shows this Tuesday, Friday and Saturday)and Elastic (great shows this Tuesday and Thursday), and these shows require support from crowds more so than do the big venues and the A&R man driving the Mercedes S-Class. (I'm jumping down from the soap box now, but please please support independent music. Ornette Coleman just won a Pulitzer for music, so I do have some hope.)

Finally, Hawaiian music legend Don Ho died over the weekend. Put on your favorite loud shirt and sing along to some of the favorites in memoriam.

Imus is a Cowboy

Sometimes a cowboy gets in one too many gun fights his enemies and gets taken down in the crossfire. Don Imus is the cowboy. The response from advertisers, pundits, bloggers and everybody else with an ounce of common sense is the crossfire.

News about Iraq makes the typical top story. Today, it's raining Iraq stories. Soldiers had their tours of duty in Iraq extended by three months. While their duty is extended, however, the troops are slightly rudderless. Three retired four star generals have refused White House requests to become the new czar in charge of the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. I keep forgetting what that quote is about rats and a sinking ship, but I'm sure I'll remember it eventually.

A federal panel reported limited evidence of voter fraud in previous elections and suggested voter identification should be required for elections. Democrats oppose the move, saying they believe this will decrease their voter turnout. After losing the last two elections to Bush II, perhaps they should concentrate their efforts on putting a candidate up that has a chance of winning an election. In the last Presidential election, Bush was so unpopular that Bucky Dent would have carried Massachusetts if he ran as a Democrat.

In other reports of people I wouldn't vote for with a gun to my head, Rudy Giuliani has been dodging controversy all over the place since he announced his plans to run for President. First, his marital issue (divorcing his second cousin) came up. Then he defended screwball radio doofus Don Imus. Now he's dodging questions about his comments regarding the Terri Schiavo controversy. If I have to choose between Rudy and Hillary in the next election, I will move to Switzerland and lodge at Frank Serpico's former digs as soon as the votes are counted.

Medical news is also notable today. Brazilian researchers utilized hematopioetic stem cells from bone marrow to create islet cells, curing type I diabetes in the patients. The study is in early stages. There are dangers to the procedure, which uses cyclophosphamide, a substance that can cause bladder cancer and leukemia, and it currently can only be performed in patients recently diagnosed with diabetes. It also involves severe immunosuppression. As a type I diabetic, all I want to hear is more good news. The Dems are challenging the moral scientist George Bush's threat to veto fetal stem cell legislation in the U.S., so hopefully the utilitarian philosophy will prevail.

Media reports are currently all Imus, all the time. Imus, who might as well have been invisible before last week, had his show canceled at MSNBC after advertisers jumped ship. Finally that nappy-headed hoser will have an easier time returning to anonymity.

Although slightly less newsworthy, Taalam Acey has a new documentary featuring his dynamic poetry performances. Acey delivers at a level that most people can't imagine spoken word achieving. Just go see him.

Sports stories were also plentiful today. Four Italian soccer fans were arrested after violence erupted after a match in Manchester, U.K. Soccer, much like hockey, has trouble keeping relevant without the gratuitous violence. Unlike hockey, most of the violence is in the stands.

The legal circus that was the Duke lacrosse rape case finally came to an end with the prosecutor dropping all charges. This freed Court TV to cover Anna Nicole Smith material all day, everyday one day too late.

Baseball season has gotten off to an interesting start, with snow moving the Cleveland Indians' home opener to Milwaukee. Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey tells everybody that they should suck it up and quit complaining. With global warming where it's at, in a few more years we'll be complaining that it's too hot in Florida and Los Angeles to play baseball in July.

In feel good baseball news, the College Baseball Hall of Fame selected Jim Abbott in the latest class. Abbott, a pitcher born without a right hand, accomplished more with one hand than Mark Prior and Kerry Wood did combined with four hands.

The New York Knicks accused the Chicago Bulls of running the score up against them last night in Chicago's 98-69 victory. The Bulls claimed they were not running the score up. They were trying to score 100 points so the fans would win a Big Mac in a promotion with McDonalds. Former Bull Eddie Curry expressed displeasure with the score. However, since all he accomplished while he was in Chicago was eating Big Macs, he could at least let the fans eat one.

In crazy weird news, the Germs' drummer Don Bolles was arrested in Los Angeles after police tested a bottle of a cleaning agent in his car that allegedly contained the date rape drug GHB. Soap of this kind could be very dangerous if it fell into the hands of a devious rapist with a germ phobia. Stay tuned to this one.

In New Port Richey, Florida, a string of robberies has terrorized local gas stations in and around the town. The robber enters gas stations and threatens clerks with what he claims is a syringe filled with H.I.V. positive blood. In other words, the crazy junkie tells gas station employees to jump, and they answer, "How High?" while handing him all of the money in the register.