Substance Abuse?

After a roller-coaster week in the political arena, I tried to watch last night's VP debate with an open mind. Neither candidate made the expected gaffes that some pundits called (hoped) for. In fact, both carried themselves in pretty much their natural fashion, which ultimately means if you liked or disliked them before, you came away with the same sense. Senator Biden seemed to have a much wider plan of specifics, citing detailed facts, dates, and differences between the Dems and the Reps. Governor Palin had far less substance and detail in virtually all of her responses, but chose more to tell how her family sees it around the table at dinner time, cashing in on the charm and likability factor. I must say, there were times I felt like I was watching the movie "Fargo", or maybe more accurately an early Shirley Temple film "The Little Princess", with a lot of gosh darns and golly gee whillikers thrown in there. By coincidence, there is a line in that film that somehow seems appropriate:

"Why are they sending so many soldiers daddy, if it is only going to be a little war?"

No matter who said what last night, neither person won or lost it for the top of the ticket. The next two debates between the #1's will absolutely tell the tale.

There was some cruise news this week. A while back, NCL sold its Norwegian Dream to Louis Cruises, for future operations in the Mediterranean. However, at the 11th hour Louis appears to have broken the contract and backed out of the deal. As of this writing there is no resolution, but I think it could get a bit ugly. NCL has no future cruises sold on the Dream, but suddenly they have a vessel and maybe more importantly the lives and livelihood of 500+ crewmembers to contend with. This is sure to get ugly, and I'll try to update you as more comes to light.

How would you like to be a Cubs fan? After literally 100 years of not winning a World Series, they had a spectacular regular season and strode confidently into the playoffs. They made it past the Bartman incident of a few years ago, re-worked their lineup and Lou Piniella has done a masterful job all season. Until Wednesday. Here are the Cubbies, playing in front of the home crowd and expected to steamroll the Dodgers, and they found themselves whipped up one side and down the other. Their starting pitcher had been a model of consistency all year, with excellent control. He hit a little bit of a snag Wednesday. If I told you he had walked 3 hitters, that would be a lot for him. Well no, in fact he walked SEVEN to go along with plenty of hits. But that's ok -- it's just 1 game! We've got Zambrano going Thursday and he'll show these LA guys a thing or two. He did. He showed them how to hit singles, how to hit doubles, and watched in disbelief as the fielders behind him created 4 errors on the way to a 10-3 loss. That is some smelly cheese on the North Side of Chi-town, and now they've got to get on a plane to try to win two straight in California. The curse lives.

Some strange news has cropped up in America's Heartland. This year lawmakers in Nebraska set out to make a difference, by adopting a new variation of the "Safe Haven" law. If you're unfamiliar with Safe Haven, it's a law made to protect infants' safety. In a nutshell, it says you can drop off a newborn or young infant at a Hospital anonymously, which was meant to discourage abortions or abuse from families who couldn't cope. Great law. But that's not what was strange -- Nebraska decided to expand beyond the word "infant", thinking they could also improve the lives of 1-2 year olds, so they changed the description to "minor". Everything was fine until late September, when some parents showed up at a Lincoln Hospital with an 11 and 15 year old, basically saying "Here you go." The State Senate has begun re-thinking the wording, and a new amendment should be forthcoming soon......