Good news from a bad decade

It was earlier this summer when I was delivering some papers to the registrar at the Pittsburgh school where I do some occasional teaching. It had been a hectic day of heavy traffic and fruitless productivity.

The secretary informed me I had the wrong paper, the designated envelope was missing and I’d need to try it all over again during a second trip into town early the next day.

Out of harried frustration, I remember blurting out, “Geez, this just hasn’t been my decade.”

Has it been yours? Chances are, no, it hasn’t either.

I don’t by a longshot remember a less joyful decade during the more than 40 years since I was thoughtful enough to climb up off my Big Wheel and take an observant look around.

There’s been 9/11, the catastrophic break-up of the Space Shuttle Columbia, Abu Ghraib, Baghdad suicide bombers, Guantanamo, a train wreck economy and now Mumbai. It’s getting so that reading the newspapers, a once daily joy, has become something to be dreaded for those of us steadfast enough to still read the -- and here’s another bummer -- the rapidly disappearing daily newspaper.

But I’m not going to give into pessimistic impulses. No, I’m feeling strangely optimistic that we’ve hit bottom and me and you are going to begin embarking on an exciting rebound. So in advance of all those grim 2008 year-in-review stories with which we’re all about to be inundated, here’s some of the really great things that sparkle among the news rubble from the past eight years.


• Y2K turned out to be a really swell party. It’s easy to forget the chaos and hysteria many experts predicted for that pivotal day. Planes were going to fall from the sky. Banks were going to misplace our savings. Missiles would inadvertently launch. I didn’t buy it then and Val and I, childless at the time, enjoyed a wonderful citywide party in downtown Pittsburgh and got to laugh at all the doomsayers buried in their bunkers.

• Cool numeric dates are happening with a fun frequency. I just spent an afternoon with an old friend and his wife who eloped on 01-02-03 so they’d never forget their anniversary. Neither will I. I don’t think we’ve ever reached any consensus on whether we’re going to call this decade “The Aughts,” “The Zero’s,” or “The Ohs,” (may I suggest “The Oh S---ts!”), but I enjoy these quirky dates. Next up, 07-08-09.

• The Quecreek Mine Rescue answered many prayers. That happened about an hour from my home and I was summoned to do some reporting on it. I’ll never forget the surprise I felt when I noticed tears running down my cheeks when Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker announced all nine miners were alive. I interviewed one of the survivors and asked the routine question of what he thought about during the long hopeless hours. He said, “I thought if I ever get out of here alive I’m going to spend the next six months getting stoned immaculate.” Two weeks after being rescued, he was well on his way.

• The iPod came out in 2001. I love the fact that I can carry the entirety of my 7,500-song music library in my pocket. I plug it into my car or my home or office stereo (I don’t use earbuds, preferring to remain engaged to the world around me) and just thrill to its flexibility. Now I wish Apple would move on to more substantial innovations. Like Thomas Friedman says, “I want my iCar.”

• Warren Buffett announced he’s giving away his entire $40 billion fortune to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other charitable endeavors. Sure, it’s doubtful I’ll see even a measly dime of it, but it’s a great gesture, one that I hope more and more well-off philanthropically follow. I’ve read that our goal in life should be to die the instant our last check bounces. It’s maybe the one thing Buffett and I now have in common.

• The New England Patriots won big games and Super Bowls when their team and their fans were fresh and deserving and are losing them now that they’ve become either obnoxious, cheaters or both.

• My weasley U.S. Senator Rick Santorum lost and Barack Obama didn’t. I don’t think it’s possible to underestimate the historical significance of the first black man being elected president. I only hope it portends good things for all of us.

• O.J. Simpson got convicted of doing something substantial and the authorities still don’t have a clue on the whereabouts of D.B. Cooper.

• Environmental awareness became a major topic at both kitchen tables and boardrooms around America. It doesn’t matter if it causes global warming or not. We can all do better.

• Tiger Woods continues to amaze, winning with grace and style.

• A list of petty lowbrow things that have improved: baseball parks, waterparks, satellite radio, free WiFi, rollercoasters, HDTV, and many quality TV shows (24, Lost, The Sopranos and, yes, Survivor) I still find entertaining.

• None of the reliable music giants have stumbled in the past eight years. There’s been some great music and performances from The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen. And underappreciated geniuses like Van Morrison and Mark Knopfler just keep getting better and better. Honorable mention to Steve Earle, The Dixie Chicks, Todd Snider and Quinn Fallon.

• Amtrak is thriving. I’m a train nut and take it to New York City from Latrobe at least once a year. The country is better off if more people try the trains because there’s no such thing as train rage. I remember in the really dark days when my train was about six hours late. I boarded expecting anarchy. Instead, all was festive. I asked my seatmate why no one was angry. He said, “Well, everyone’s upset when they get on, but then they find out they’re giving away free chicken up front. Free chicken!” I jumped up and got some. It was pretty tasty.

• No new U.S. terror attacks since 9/11. I remember waking up on 9/12 and wondering if the Empire State Building would still be standing. Was it the war in Iraq? The Patriot Act? Torture at Guantanamo? I’m loath to credit any of those overreactions and I don’t think there’s any simple explanation. But it’s been unabashedly good news that we’re all still too nervous to acknowledge.

• I can’t remember the specifics, but I seem to recall a beached whale or two being saved.

Finding good news isn’t easy. I wish my list had more euphoric events like the Quecreek Mine Rescue, but I blame the times more than my desultory research.

But I’ll welcome any additions to the good news from the bad decade.

And let’s hope for one and all the good news isn’t quite so scarce in the next decade.

Excessive traffic lights drive man to drink

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is making a sassy liar out of me. I’ve spent the past 15 years or so bragging that I live in Youngstown, Pa., a town with “one stop light, five liquor licenses.”

I love just how much information those six words convey about Youngstown, pop. 937. It says we’re small town America. Just one stop light. No traffic. No congestion. Just folks.

But there’s much more to that part of it. This is the birthplace and residence of Arnold Palmer. He could live anyplace on the planet, but he still chooses to live in tiny Youngstown for about seven months of the year (he flees for Florida in the winter and we don’t hold that climatic wisdom against him).

And it was here that Fred Rogers was born and kept a home until his 2003 death. He modeled his endearing and enduring children’s show after nearby Latrobe where he attended school.

Small towns all over America are the birthplaces of other cultural and historical giants, leading to the popular local jibe, “A lot of smart young men and women have come from here and the smarter they were, the younger they were when they left.”

But we’re not leaving Youngstown, and that’s where the part about the five liquor licenses comes in.

Crowded around our charming little stop light is an authentic and satisfying Mexican restaurant (BYOB), and two fine taverns, Falbo’s Rainbow Inn and the Tin Lizzy, which features not one but three distinct bars. The main floor has a great townie bar on one side and Chef Dato’s upscale restaurant on the other. Upstairs is a posh martini bar with an outdoor deck, and rathskeller has fireplaces, exposed stone walls, a long oak trunk bar top, and a pool table that still provokes the occasional brawl among those disposed to such feistiness. Yep, the Tin Lizzy has it all.

In addition, there’s a great volunteer fireman’s social club and the historic Latrobe Country Club’s just 1/2 mile up Arnold Palmer Drive.

So I’m taking some liberties with the five liquor licenses part, but you get the point. We’re a convivial people. There’s also has a quaint little market and a tiny art gallery. It’s a great spot to call home.

Now PennDOT, in defiance of all logic and fiscal sanity, is going to force me to declare Youngstown a place with “eight stop lights and five liquor licenses,” a ratio that could describe any number of Utah towns filled with equal portions of backsliding Mormons and their teatotaling brethren, for heaven’s sake.

During a still ongoing construction project, workers are installing two confounding stop lights, a total of eight, for each avenue of on-coming traffic in a place where one really proud stop sign would suffice. Understand, there are no turning lanes of funky turns. It’s just cars heading to the four points on the compass.

That means a total of eight stop lights atop four stout poles when one four-sided stop light has been doing the job.

Can anyone calculate the expense? Let’s say each light costs $200 and each pole $1,000. That’s a $5,600 total that is, I’ll wager, on the conservative side of cost.

Maybe a four-sided sign strung between already existing utility poles would cost about $500.

And it’s the felonious assault on common sense that really gets to me.

Who needs to stare at two stop lights to get the message? Maybe if drivers had eyes on the sides of their heads like cattle, I could understand. But there’s no real point in cluttering up the intersection with two lights per lane. Plus the four poles add new sidewalk hazards whenever one our town drunks wobbles off on foot.

Is this sort of unnecessary duplication is being done all over Pennsylvania? All over America? Just how much money is being wasted?

Everyone says we’re about to enter an era where logic will be restored and excess is banished. I hope that’s the case.

And it just galls me that if the gods had to monkey around with Youngstown’s delightful little ratio, they couldn’t have seen fit to enhance the liquor license side of the equation.

You see, reflexively disdaining all forms of abundance would be unnecessarily excessive.

National No-Pray Week

Is it time to give God a break? I thought so in about 2004 when I was convinced the world was going to hell. I wrote this story about my proposed National No-Pray Week and submitted it with high hopes to various publications of prestige and infamy.

None bit.

So I dumped it for a while in my on-line orphanage for unloved and unwanted stories on www.chrisrodell.com. The Ophanage still exists because I’m still writing many stories that have yet to find a good home.

I’d submit this again and again over the years around Thanksgiving to no avail. Still, I think it’s a provocative point so I’m foisting it on what is for me the ultimate orphanage, this godforsaken blog.

Check it out:


One of the banes of returning from vacation is the e-valanche of electronic messages in our in-boxes. We are besieged with pleas, queries and so many pornographic advertisements that many truly worthwhile e-mails get deleted without even a cursory glance.

Think you have it bad? Imagine how God must feel. Heaven knows, we are a prayerful society. Americans of many faiths pack the places of worship at least once a week and pray to God that He will heal us, enrich us, and ease the myriad suffering in our world of woe. And many of us issue fervent prayers at meals and bedtime asking for the same things.

That’s not all. Startled students mutter silent prayers for divine recollection during pop quizzes, patients pray the golf-mad doctor’s not too distracted by his afternoon tee time to perform lifesaving surgery, and drunks in bars pray He will help steer the car to safety and surreptitiously past the DUI road blocks.

And, yes, like beauty contestants, we all pray for world peace. This holiday season weekend will again be one of God’s busiest and I can imagine Him with the sullen scowl of the poor overworked souls down at the post office the week before Christmas.
Where has it gotten us? It seems, once again, to the brink of destruction. People all over the world are being slaughtered, usually in God’s name. In nearly every major conflict, God is the mutual justification for a holy hell that’s erupting around the world.

Clearly, God has turned a deaf ear to our massive and constant prayers for world peace. In fact, it seems God’s gaming interests take priority over matters of hateful life and violent death. Many lottery winners thank God, believing He was behind the lucky jackpot sequence and that powers from above divinely selected them to -- hallelujah -- win the Powerball. Same goes for championship athletes who assure us God answered their prayers for righteous victory on the gridiron or ballfield.

“Go Angels!”

I go to worship God at a small church in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The late Fred Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, grew up near my Latrobe, Pennsylvania, home. My church is the same one attended by the young Arnold Palmer. As one could surmise by the nature of these two beloved icons, it is a humble and unpretentious place.

Our pastor doesn’t have a powerful television pulpit. He’s never led us in hateful prayers or asked God to tinker with the tickers of any ailing U.S. Supreme Court Justices whose constitutional philosophies differ from his. And I adore him. His every deed exudes a joyful foundation of love that makes me happy knowing Pastor Dave von Schlichten’s life is dedicated to saving my miserable soul.

I asked Pastor Dave if he thought maybe God could use a break.

“No, I don’t think God needs any kind of break,” he said. “His strength is infinite and He truly wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. Rest assured, we’re not bothering Him.”

One friend told me that prayer is actually holding the world together, that if we suddenly stopped praying, everything would get worse.

Could it?

If we stopped praying and the earth began to rupture and the oceans commenced to boiling, then believers would certainly burst into simultaneous, heartfelt prayer along the lines of: “Father, forgive us; for we know not what we’re doing.”

That, at least, ought to sound familiar to Him. It was among the last words Jesus Christ uttered before ascending to glory.

Given that result, it’s certainly worth a try.

For God’s sake, it’s high time we try something new. I’m proposing a “National No-Pray Week” where we close the churches and cease any and all prayers to God Almighty. And, no, that doesn’t mean you can substitute any pagan idols. Don’t stop believing in God. Just quit bugging Him.

Who knows? He might enjoy the leisure. He might reward us by eliminating world hunger or at least giving us a carefree week without extreme weather conditions. We just don’t know. But we have to try. No one can argue that 2,000 years of steadfast prayers have made the world a better, more peaceful place.

On the contrary, even with all that prayer, it still seems now more than ever that the whole wicked world is -- God help us -- going straight to hell.

If we don’t try something new, I fear none of us has a prayer.

Give me a break? Still not my turn

I try and think of this guy whenever I think I could really use a break -- and I think about that all the time.

Really, I thought this would all be a lot easier by now. I thought my novel would be published. I thought it would be a success and I thought I’d have to work and fret a lot less than I do.

Yet, fret and toil I do. To be more accurate, I fret that I’m not toiling enough. I don’t mind work. I love to do what I call “work,” which is talking to people and typing about what they have to say, and talking and typing isn’t real work. No one’s shouting at me. No one’s firing cannon balls in my direction. I’m not far removed from my dear loved ones or under constant threat of capricious violence.

That means my “work” is vastly different from the most unlucky able bodied blokes in perhaps the history of the sad, beleaguered working class. Those would be the press ganged sailors forced to serve in His Majesty’s Royal Navy during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The term press gang stems from roving bands of officers who’d prowl the English ports and pubs in search of men it could “impress” into endless or terminal service on behalf of the King. They did this by often brutal means. If the ship was departing by daybreak and they didn’t have sufficient crew, they were permitted to in effect kidnap any otherwise free man who looked like he could bail water, pull a rope or do menial chores on board a ship that could be sailing clear around the world.

I’ve always been fascinated by this aspect of maritime history. It amazes me that at one time men just like me could be sitting in a comfortable pub after a hard day’s work -- and I’m talking about them, not me -- never expecting their lives could be so cruelly and indelibly altered. Without even a moment to say goodbye to loved ones, they could one day be working as fishmongers or liverymen and the next morning find themselves bound for distant lands they never knew existed.

It would be like a gang of bluebloods storming into my favorite tavern, yanking me from off my bar stool and sending me against my will on a trip to someplace like Pluto. And, knowing my luck, it would happen just as I was reaching for a fresh beer (and, guaranteed, that unsipped beer would likely haunt me to madness as I lay marooned and dying on some deserted asteroid).

Nothing like that’s ever happened to me yet and I don’t expect it ever will. Still, I’m forever complaining about my sad lot in life. Work is often scarce, pay is low and widespread collegial regard seems to forever elude.

I always say I know I’m not working hard enough unless I get at least a rejection letter a day. And I’ve been on track for that since about, oh, 1992. So I don’t think it’s a case of not working hard enough.

The leaves an even worse option, that my stuff just sucks. And those are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.

I used to pray I’d be successful, now I just pray God will slay all my ambitions.

And that’s a pitiful mindset. I know many aspiring writers who think I’ve got it made. And to many I do.

Still, I wonder if I was blind to any of the doors opening before me, if I was arrogant to sage advice and why I can’t seem to get a break.

That’s when I try and gain perspective by thinking of that poor bastard who was in 1707 press ganged to serve under Admiral Cloudesley Shovell on some of the most expensive and powerful war vessels of the early 18th century.

The histories I’ve read said the common sailor became alarmed that in heavy fog and respectfully warned that the ships were in danger of striking a shoal of deadly rocks.

Admiral Shovell was outraged as his impudence. How dare he, an unskilled and unschooled sailor, think he knew more about navigation than many of the King’s most agile seafaring minds?

In one of history’s greatest and most forgotten I-told-you-so’s, the very next day four of the mighty ships struck the same rocks about which the unknown sailor had forewarned. The ships promptly sunk and more than 2,000 men, including the imperious Admiral Shovell, perished beneath the waves.

But the sailor was never given his due. No one begged his forgiveness for not having heeded his dire warnings. Shovell had him immediately hanged without trial for his mutinous speculations.

Give me a break?

I think if I ever do get a real break, I think I’ll try and time travel back to 1707 and give it to that guy.

Fatherly fibber stirs skepticism

It began to dawn on my daughter sometime earlier this year that I haven’t been getting into telephonic shouting matches with President George W. Bush every month or so.

That’s what I’d pretend I was doing every time the Caller ID indicated some pesky telemarketer was calling to go through his or her monotonous spiel.

“Well, if it isn’t President Ding Dong again!” I’d say (I call him Ding Dong because, like a bell, his apparently empty head is still capable of producing loud, jarring noises that reverberate around the globe).

“Seriously, George, I don’t know why you keep calling here when you never take my advice. Now for the last time, if you don’t do something to shore up the housing market, it could trigger financial collapses in the banking and credit industries. Then we’re all in for a hell of a mess while you skip down to Crawford to clear brush and sip nonalcoholic beer. Please, for the good of the country, act now. And stop bothering us during the dinner hour!”

Then I’d slam the phone down and resume eating like nothing unusual had happened.

Really, it might seem to even casual observers that President Bush has been for the past eight years soliciting advice from spastic and underemployed jokers like me, but I’ll wager my shouted suggestions to the confused telemarketers are better advice than anything Bush has ever heard from Dick Cheney.

For a while at least, the 8-year-old thought her Daddy was a pretty important fellow, someone sought by famous and important leaders and celebrities around the globe.

She’s heard me have similar strategic conversations with Steeler coaches, Catholic popes and the dreamy young actor who plays Troy in High School Musical (“Kid, I’m telling you the sequel’s gonna be gold. Gold, I tell you! You gotta do it!”)

But now she’s becoming more skeptical of my little games. This pleases me and makes me work even harder to fool her.

I know I shouldn’t do it but I often find it irresistible to tell Josie a really big lie. I try to be forthright with her in nearly every regard, but I think it might be helpful to once in a while tell her whoppers of such audacious blather that she’ll learn to question everything, even the specious wisdoms of fatherly fibber.

Like the time this summer when I told her some scientists believe the entire vast sum of the oceans’ origins stem from dinosaur urine.

We were standing on the sandy shores of the Atlantic at Virginia Beach, the warm foamy waters lapping at our legs.

“I’m not saying I know it’s true, but I have read some respected scientists who say that all this water, for as far as your eyes can see, really comes from vast ancient releases of dinosaur pee.”

And that much was true. I had read it in a prominent national magazine. It was in the late and much-missed Weekly World News (favorite headline: “Baby Born with Wooden Leg!!!”), but it was a national magazine and I had read it.

That points to another supportive lie I still shout in adult arguments: “The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says you can’t print it if it isn’t true!” You’d be surprised by how many arguments that helps me conclusively win, but I digress.

Back at the ocean, Josie’s eyes scanned the horizon and I was happy to see she was engaged in critical thought. She turned to question me, but I was already dashing into the water to dive in head first. I came up with a big mouthful of salt water and fountained it up over my head as she raced to her mother to have her confirm her suspicions that Daddy’s an idiot, a confirmation Mommy’s always ready to invoke.

I think part of it, too, might be so much of what our ancestors held as sacred wisdom has been revealed to be folly.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about: The world is flat. The earth is the center of the universe. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

I think a healthy skepticism is important for a curious child, and I lament so little of it in the adults they look up to for guidance. So much of what passes for conventional wisdom these days is worth little more than a great big steaming bucket of dinosaur pee.

And that’s the truth.

Buried by magazine subscription cards

I have a simmering gripe against the magazine industry that has nothing to do with their cruel rejections, their capricious edits and the dodgy pay systems that have me fantasizing about making nuisance raids on all their posh New York offices to steal things like staplers and coffee machines.

That’d fix ‘em!

Of course, that all goes with the territory for anyone who, as I do, freelances for a living. That is the price we pay for living in what one employed friend of mine derides as “the fool’s paradise.”

But that is not the thrust of today’s complaints. No, my gripe is once again on the selfless behalf of all humanity.

What’s bugging me is the ticker tape parade of biggie-sized confetti that flies out of the new magazines whenever I flip through the pages. It’s those stupid mail subscription cards.

Understand, I have a deeply vested interest in magazines succeeding. I need them to thrive so that they’ll be prosperous enough to hire guys like me to write panic deadline stories then wait up to six months to see the paycheck for a diminished amount that wasn’t on the contract.

So I’m in favor of any steps magazines do to increase readership and revenue.

But it’s a confounding silliness to believe that stuffing your product with these deforesting little annoyances results in any appreciable increase in readers. If they did, then each month, each magazine ought to be increasing its circulation roughly six fold until every person in the world was subscribing multiple times to every magazine.

Let’s start with Wired magazine, the techie magazine devoted to the digital age. In the entirety of the magazine’s 235-page December issue, I found just a handful of stories that didn’t involve something that needed to be plugged in to function. It’s a magazine that clearly seems eager to work itself out of business, or at least the print version of itself.

Yet that same issue included six nearly identical subscription cards for, I guess, their Amish readers who are culturally disinclined to go online to read or subscribe to a magazine that calls itself Wired.

Wouldn’t one strategically placed house ad/subscription card suffice? Of course it would.

But it’s the same with the golf, news, travel, regional, men’s, writer’s and New York magazines to which I subscribe. Note, I’m already a subscriber. They’re preaching to the choir. Maybe each think I have six reading friends for whom I’m going to shell out $20 for three years -- “A 3 Year Savings of $159.64! -- but that’s not going to happen. I don't have that many friends, the ones I have don't read much and, geez, who's got $20 to spare?

Of all the major magazines, the only one I know that’s renounced this wasteful practice is men's adventure magazine Outside's Go, a publication run by visionary and sensible editors who not only understand the cosmic import of this issue but also have had the wisdom to have twice employed me this year. So they’re all earth-loving geniuses. And I’ll bet they all smell nice, too.

I used to collect all the mailers from magazines that owed me money and drop the dictionary-thick sized stack of them in the mail every month or so. This meant they’d have to pay pennies of postage for each one returned blank. I was hoping the practice would bring these publishing titans to their senses.

It never did and I began to take pity on Mother Nature and our humble postal employees for the unwelcome burdens I was spitefully imposing to their already overtaxed systems.

As you can surmise, I’ve always been one of those nasty tack-on-the-chair sort of revenge seekers. I’m not proud of it, but I’m working on it -- and you’d better just stay on my good side.

So now I just toss them in with the recycled newspapers. Once read, the magazines I take to the local hospital for dispersal in all their godforsaken waiting rooms. Here’s another childish habit: if I have a story in one of the magazines I anonymously write “How insightful!” or “Witty observations throughout!” in the margins.

And I usually bookmark the page with a single subscription mailing card.

I’m just trying to be helpful.

So feel free to share your ideas on how we, together, can end this wasteful practice. Both constructive and malicious ideas are welcome so don’t be shy if something involves things like tacks on chairs or stink bombs.

It’s all for the greater good.

Ahoy! At least some Pirates are winning

I nearly leapt out of my seat when I heard a news report about the Pirates beating the Indians. As a long-suffering fan, I’m always shocked whenever I hear the once-great and now-lowly Pittsburgh Pirates are beating anybody.

Their bullpen stinks, they can’t hit and they’re always getting picked off trying to steal second.

But I’d misheard. It’s not an interleague baseball between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cleveland Indians. It’s sailors with the navy of India patrolling for a kind of pirate that is showing much more potency and pop than the major league baseball franchise that is likely to again stink up Pittsburgh next summer.

Everything about the hijacking of the Saudi-owned supertanker Sirius Star fascinates me and, really, I’m having trouble deciding for whom I should be rooting in this episodic lawlessness on the high seas.

How can I root for human rights violating Saudi Arabia? How can I root for the oil industry that’s spent so much of the past year gleefully screwing us?

As I noted in a previous post (see October’s “A Flatulent Discussion on Unfair Gas Prices”) when oil was trading at $140 a barrel, our local gas was going for $4.00 a gallon. But when it was $70 per barrel, gas was $2.69 a gallon. Simple math says gas should have been $2 a gallon about a month ago. But now it’s at $60 a barrel, we’re still paying $2.19.

(Please accept my apologies for exposing you to all that loathsome math. It was punishing for me, too.)

Of course, as a big fan of the show “Dallas,” I should have seen it coming. In fact, during the four-minute discussion on journalism ethics in the classes I teach, I always cite that great philosopher J.R. Ewing who opines, “Once you get past ethics, the rest is easy.”

So do I root for the pirates? That, too, presents me with issues. I try and play by the rules and be a nice guy -- and don’t ever let anyone tell you nice guys don’t finish last. If I’m not last, I can at least wave to the poor bastard clear at the back of the line.

It would be helpful if someone handed me a program detailing the statistics and motives about this particular team of pirates. I admire their audacity and will firmly commit to their fan base if they turn Robin Hood and start disbursing the $100 million cargo away to a needy constituency that includes struggling freelance writers who write whiny killjoy blogs about tedious things like gas prices that are actually going down.

My great fear is this game will end, much like the infamous 2002 MLB All-Star game, without any winners.

It’s likely the pirates will swap the ship for a nifty ransom that will allow them to go back to some divey port to buy even bigger guns, even faster boats and, avast ye maties, splurge on a three-month binge that’ll have guys like me putting “Become a Somalian Pirate” on our 2009 to-do lists.

The ship is said to contain more than two million barrels of oil. And someone please assure me that “barrel of oil” is simply a quaint and anachronistic description and not the true method of shipment. Because if it is, then crude oil and monkeys the only things still being inefficiently toted about the globe in full barrels.

Most amazing of all is that this enormous responsibility was being handled by just 25 men.

Think about it: the Sirius Star is roughly the same size as the 93,000-ton U.S.S. Enterprise, a 1,223-foot air craft carrier with a crew of 3,000 fighting men and women, and maybe a really tough cook or two.

But just 25 swabbies run the Sirius Star and its precious and potentially hazardous cargo. You’d think the ship owners would invest maybe $50,000 for a team of badass hombres to secure the ship. The whole absurdity of the situation is another strong argument to go solar, at least until crafty pirates figure out a way to hijack the sun.

Either way, I hope the hapless owners of my Pittsburgh Pirates are dispatching a squad of scouts to say ahoy to some of the Somalian Pirates.

I don’t know if their bullpen will be able to hold this lead but, guaranteed, some of these guys are bound to be good at stealing bases.