July 14 2007

In case you haven't heard, this years benefit will be held on Saturday October 20th at the West Alabama Icehouse.Get the word out so that folks can organize their social calendars.

Now, those of us that root for the Houston Astros are in deep doo doo. No doubt about it.
All things considered, their making the play offs this year would be like catching lightning in a bottle, and it’s starting to have a serious effect on the fans.
Six year old kids are walking around in a daze, with Astro’s caps on their heads and tears in their eyes.
Club members at shooting competitions are so depressed that after drinking the usual eight or nine years to take the shaking out of their shooting hands, find themselves passing out on the way to the firing line.
Guys whose opinions you respect won’t even talk about baseball anymore. They just shake their heads and waggles the palms of their hands at you.
Guys whose opinions you don’t respect, don’t want to talk about anything but baseball. And wouldn’t you know? These are the guys with all the answers.
A particularly significant development that has come to light, is that the Astro’s Crises Hotline has had to hire three more counselors to handle all the extra phone calls.
And that’s not counting having to replace the two that quit because they just couldn’t take it any more.
The one that is now in therapy, got to the point where, although not on the job, if a phone rang, even on a TV show, he would get a panic attack with chills running up and down his spine.
The other counselor that quit said that fans would call up for counseling, and he would wind up crying on their shoulder with them trying to cheer him up. He said that it was embarrassing.
And then there are those, who having contemplated suicide last year, have already asked their wives to hide their firearms. With the ammunition in a separate place.
As mentioned earlier, there have been many suggestions as to how to fix the situation, ranging from Draconian trades to simply bringing up some of the hot kids from the minors.
But the idea that seems to make the most amount of sense is that instead of spending millions of dollars on baseball players, the team management should be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on umpires.
And there’s only four of them in each game.
You see, they’re taking a simple thing, and making it entirely too complicated.

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary