ARod: Don't Tell Me It Was Mistake

An arbiter basically sided with Major League Baseball and reduced Alex Rodriguez's drug suspension from 211 to a one full season of 162 games.

So far A-Rod's team still seems in denial, with vows to challenge the ruling. But, someday, it will happen. Just like other baseball cheats like Ryan Braun, maybe on Oprah's couch, Rodriguez will admit to "mistakes" and apologize.

Is he really sorry? Are any of them? You know the apology I'd like to hear? The honest one:

"I'm sorry I got caught, but that's it. Why did I take performance-enhancing drugs? Because they helped me become far better than I could ever have gotten otherwise, and because they helped me sign TWO contracts  worth more than $200 million. Yeah, my stats are tainted, but the numbers that matter are the dollars. They're still real, and I can still spend them. So, excuse me. I have to fly my private jet back to my South Beach mansion, where I will have to decide which of my 27 exotic cars I want to drive today, and which of the 26 exotic dancers I want to ride in it with me."

I don't think this will give me a big head

Someone called the station today to ask if this was the weekend we were supposed to turn back our clocks to end Daylight Saving Time. After getting his answer ("no"), the caller changed the subject and told our newscast producer that I was too good for this market and should move on to someplace bigger.

When the producer passed the message on to me, I of course felt flattered. But I could not resist pointing out that the glowing assessment of my talent came from someone who had called a television station because he apparently could not read a calendar.

You can assess my talent yourself, if you wish. Here's an excerpt of one of tonight's newscasts.

Overheard Inside My Head

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five or six times and I will start to catch on.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

Overheard Inside My Head

If you followed me on Twitter, you'd get stuff like this in smaller doses.

Time goes faster yet the weeks still grow longer.

If you're going to be stereotyped because of looks, better it be because you're beautiful rather than because you're ugly.

Friend: "If I were on Twitter I would have tweeted that."

Whew. House guest gone. It's safe to drink straight from the milk carton.

Most things aren't meant to be, they're made to be.

Cautious optimism: Buying condoms, but keeping the receipt.

Another, er, benefit of cat ownership: You learn how to clean carpets of all varieties of messes.

Stick out your chin. It will look like you have fewer of them.

Every few months I eat a cheeseburger and fries just to remind myself why it's a bad idea.

Wow. It must be a special occasion. I washed my feet. But not too much. I didn't want to look like I was trying.

I am trying to decide which is worse: That people write "OMG!" to express surprise. Or that now they actually say "O-M-G!" out loud.

That's true. You don't know me well. And as long as it stays that way, you might still like me.

There is no way to explain the purpose of push-ups to a cat.

If no reply is written, that is an answer by itself.

Reading

I just finished reading the novel "Hit List" by Lawrence Block. I haven't been reading enough lately, content instead to fill my time passively sitting in front of the TV watching a show or a movie.

Instead of a reality someone created with sets, actors, lights and cameras in productions that can cost millions of dollars that conveniently lays everything out for you, reading delves you into a world created entirely by a single person, sitting somewhere, typing.

But there's a catch. The author encodes his imaginings into "idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phoenetic symbols, ten numbers and about eight punctuation marks," as Kurt Vonnegut described written English in his book "Timequake."

Reading the book is the process of decoding those symbols, numbers and punctuation marks arranged idiosyncratically in horizontal lines back into imagery. My brain has to picture what each character and setting looks like. It must imagine the voices and the sounds.

It's amazing when you consider it. The way one of my brothers explains it, it's the same process now used to carry telephone calls over the Internet. One person talks into a gadget. It doesn't send the sound waves to to the other person, it turns them into packets of data and carries them to a gizmo at the other person's end (as opposed to the person's other end, which would be how digestion works not Internet telephony), which turns them back into sounds.

And, yes, I too enjoyed seeing gadgets and gizmos working harmoniously.