Odds and Ends

Now that this tumultuous year is drawing to a close it's time to lie back, relax and decompress from the political shenanigans that have been so momentous and so fabulously entertaining. The satisfying outcome of the Presidential marathon does not totally erase the shock of seeing everyone's financial value decrease by 30%. But that's "on paper" unless you've panicked, so the future still holds some hope.

But enough of the trivial stuff. I'm talking about the major news stories that will be with us forever. For instance, how about that baby born with a foot in its brain? Yes indeed. Neonatal x-rays revealed a mass in the tiny cerebrum, so after its birth surgeons plowed right in and withdrew a fully formed foot, and a few other well-developed appendages. I repeat. This kid had a foot in his brain. Doctors suggested that it could be the remains of an unformed fetus that somehow disintegrated in the womb during gestation, but the doctor on call speculated that such remains rarely lodged in the brain of the twin. Really? Then what else would you call this? Granted, in mythology, the Goddess of Wisdom wise Minerva supposedly grew out of Zeus's head. And I guess this is the Season of Miracles.

I wouldn't be making light of this if the poor baby was not on the road to a full recovery. But the image (and AOL actually produced the photos) is very hard for me to get my head around. And speaking of heads, AOL also reportd this week about a boy whose head was nearly decapitated (sorry for the redundancy), in a car accident, but was successfully reattached. Elvis may be dead, but Frankenstein apparently lives on.

This is not to mention AOL's picture of the year, of the weird turtle-like creature that emerged and died on a Long Island beach, whose genus has yet to be identified. However, the character of AOL seems to be redefining as the Cyber National Enquirer. It almost embarrasses me to still subscribe to it, albeit only for the e-mail advantages. Otherwise it's the meeting place of American morons, as evidenced by the fact that John McCain would always savage Barack Obama in its presidential polling.

And then there's the baseball season, which I've barely mentioned this year despite my usual fanatical involvement. Weirdness abounded in the ballparks. Let's not forget that Tampa Bay won the pennant, and that the last game of the World Series took three days to complete and barely registered a blip on the national consciousness during our hectic pre-election build-up. And how terrible have the World Series become this decade? There hasn't beena good one since 2002 or a competitive one since 2003. They've become the snooze-a-thons that the Super Bowls used to be, though the latter have actually produced some very exciting contests, including the lovely helmet-catch win of the Giants this last February.

The tedium have something to do with the Yankees, love 'em or hate 'em, falling out of the play-off mix this year, so there was no one interesting for whom to root. Of course now the Yankees have gone bananas trying to correct that condition, with their ginormous contracts to Sabathia, Burnett and Texeira. Amazingly, their payroll next year will be less than in 2008. And they still won't win in the end. Not until Arod leaves the team, around 2016.

Oddest post-election factoid I just discovered: Gayle Quinnell, the Crazy Minnesota Lady who called Obama an "Arab," now supports the guy. This after Joe the Plumber started to diss his sponsor, John McCain. Wonder if McCain still reveres Joe as his role model?

I should put in a word here for what I thought was the coolest innovation of the year--the hologram that invaded CNN studios on Election Night. It gave me the chills of observing something truly of the futuristic variety; my younger self would have been blown away to think that I'd see what Luke did in "A New Hope" when Princess Leia popped out of R2D2's brain. It was cooler even than a foot.