This pitcher, Lincecum, he looks familiar. I want to say he sat next to me at the Rush concert I went to in 1982 at Radio City, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't born yet. The other guy warming up in the bullpen has a Billy Mays beard. Pitch-man, indeed.

I'm also starting to think Berea-Rose is in some sort of electromagnetic vortex, as I can watch a game for about an hour with decent reception and then, blink-blink, it's all stutters and pixelation. Same thing happens with AM radio -- morning and evening the reception gets crappy.

Uh oh, stoner boy let two runners reach base. Time to break out the Oxi-Clean.

It was pretty damned cold this morning, so I decided to drive Da Chimpz to school. I was the humanitarian thing to do, considering that Cookie was in his gym shorts -- having forgotten all his sweat pants in his locker last week).

Anyway, we got out to the car and I realized just how cold it was: the windshield was iced. Didn't require scraping, but soon enough it will. I hate the cold, but summer is clearly over.

Oh, and another recent hint of things to come: last week I was in the kitchen hustling the boys into getting their breakfast and getting them off to school. Before I could ask Cookie which cereal he wanted he reached up to the top of the refrigerator to take down the box of Frankenberry. Scary. Not just the unnatural pink glow of that particular cereal. Moreso how big Cookie is getting.

Yeah, it's election season and the lawn signs are up. Lots of local issues being advertised. My favorite is the lawn sign urging approval of a local initiative to spend a boatload of money to build a few new schools to replace a few old schools. The signs read "save money, vote yes." Get it? They want people to vote yes, so they avoid saying "spend a boatload of money"; instead they make signs that scream "save money." That's marketing.

Which the local pols do a lot. One local ad campaign promotes the airport. It's an ad I've heard often on Cleveland radio; they even give the airport a catchy little tag-line "going places." That's great. My question is this: who the hell are they advertising to? I mean, if you live in the area you are probably aware that there's an airport here. And even if you aren't, you can call a taxi and say "take me to the airport" and find yourself at Hopkins quite readily -- because there's no other major airport near here until you get to Akron (and that place is tiny).

Not that all airport ads mystify me. I hear an ad for Newark Airport on the New York radio stations and that commercial plays up the retail shops and restaurants, urging travelers to arrive early so they can spend their money. So the ad campaign's objective is fairly clear. With Cleveland, it's just another waste of public money.

And it's not like we can't use that money elsewhere. I won't get started on maybe letting taxpayers keep their money. And I've already made clear that I don't favor spending a boatload of money to replace school buildings. So if the money must be spent on making Hopkins Airport more popular among the locals then I will make a bold suggestion: clean up Terminal C so it doesn't stink of urine.

Seriously, it has been months: every time I walk through Terminal C there's an under-the-boardwalk reek that simply doesn't go away. I even asked Alane's friend to verify this on Friday as she went to catch her flight. Her verdict: piss galore. Hasn't any advertising rep noticed this while jetting into town to pick up his payment? Or is that where they got the idea for "going places"?