The Frost Heaves new mascot.......

Here we go, the Vermont Frost Heaves new mascot..........

Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day, I would like to say thank you to the men and women of the armed forces who have sacrificed their lives for this country. Those who have fallen paid the ultimate price for their country and should never be forgotten. Rest in peace......

To my Uncle Dick(Who is a trained killer, but is a teddy bear at heart), Uncle Bob, and my late Uncle Bud, thank you as well.

Mayor Kiss and guns

This is a bit delayed, but it has been a busy week. Mayor Kiss held a press conference on Friday which was meant to discuss the upcoming budget cuts, and progress on the budget. What it turned into was the opposite of what he wanted.

Yes, Kiss did discuss the budget, and how there will be some cuts, but where this is all speculative, and hasn't been voted on, nothing is set in stone. What it looks like is the city will be facing about a three percent tax hike due to shortfalls in property tax revenue. The interesting thing was how the topic of gun control was brought up.

The conference started with the announcement of a shooting in the Old North End, and since this was the second such incident in the last couple of weeks, the obvious questions over public safety came up. After a couple of minutes of not much of anything on the subject, talk about the budget came up, but safety and guns was brought up at the end of the session. Kiss said(while trying to dodge the question) that he would like to see a dialog started about guns in Burlington, and when pressed further, said he would like to see Burlington become a gun free zone.

Ummmmmmmmm, Mayor? I hate guns as much as anyone, if not more so, but what you are proposing would violate yet another federal law. Believe it or not, it is in fact legal to possess guns in the US. You cannot possibly want to propose that the gun toting Vermonters would actually let you go through with this!!!

The new mayor seems to have a problem in the fact he is not thinking things through before he speaks. Dare we forget his comments about making Burlington a safe haven for illegal immigrants? (Again, telling the police to violate the laws of this country.) Man alive, Peter and Bernie didn't even say things like that. Kiss is an idealist, which I respect, but I also believe in following the laws of this country of ours. The mayor is starting to establish himself as having the reputation of being a renegade, a reputation I don't think he wants so early in his tenure as mayor. If he keeps these kinds of statements rolling out of his mouth, he will be a one term mayor, and only one term.

Contraction in baseball

There are a couple of franchises Major League Baseball has been talking about moving; the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Florida Marlins. Here is my take on that…..Just disband the teams, blow them up, and hold a dispersal draft. I don’t have anything against the teams, other than the fact they are terrible, it is just that first of all, they aren’t drawing fans. The other day in Florida for the Marlins game, what did they draw, 6,000? The Marlins are a team who has been good in the past, winning a couple of World Series titles, but every two years they hold a fire sale and get rid of their talent, then start rebuilding yet again. How in the world is a team supposed to keep its fans if they don’t know who will be on the field from one second to the next, much less from year to year? This is a team you would think would draw decent crowds with the Cuban population in Miami. They are baseball addicts in Cuba, but even the Cuban fans don’t come to the games. Why? Because it is a terrible team with terrible ownership.

Here is another thing about the Florida teams. Has anyone noticed the quality of pitching has gone down the tubes since the latest round of expansion? Now, I am just too lazy to look up the figures, but the league ERA has to have gone up over the years. Look at this year and the number of 10-9 or 13-10 games we are seeing. Those aren’t baseball scores, they are football scores. Now I could be a total cynic and say that ERA’s are going up because of steroid juiced ballplayers like Barry Bonds, but for once I won’t go there. Pitching in the majors is just terrible!!! Do you know why? There are too many of them out there, so the quality has gone down the toilet. If Selig goes with his original plan from a few years ago and contracts a couple of teams, the quality of play goes up, and with the higher quality of play, revenue will go up as well. No longer will Major League Baseball have these pathetic crowds of 6,000 for a game, because fans will actually care again since the games will be better. I know the player’s union won’t buy into this because it will mean the loss of a few hundred jobs per team, and the cities where minor league teams reside will suffer as well, but I really feel that for the sake of the game, this just has to be done.

Briefly........

Before I do the dishes, and head to the field to coach a baseball game.......

Is this weather ever going to change?? Good Lord, coming back from Middlebury last week, I thought I would need an ark to get home. The weather gods are screwing with me.....

The Da Vinci Code presents interesting theories, and I wish the religious zealots would stop their whining. It is fiction, but the real fear has to be that there may actually be some truth to what Dan Brown has to say. The Catholic bashing is one thing, but what if Jesus was actually married and had a child? Why is that such a problem? Is it because it goes against what everyone was taught as a kid? How dare there be another theory out there!!!

Barry Bonds is still an @sshole, case closed. By the way, I hope the kid who caught the ball gets a small fortune for the thing. I give credit to the kid for saying he hates Bonds. Good, add another to the long list of people who can't stand the jerk.