Not Random Thoughts

--Opening Day 2010: The baseball season breathes life into the year. And once again, My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates go out to try--try--to win 82 games in a season. Doing that would break their record 17-year consecutive streak of losing seasons, a record so putrid I hesitate to write these lines anywhere near a food preparation area. I find it hard to believe that a record that bad could actually earn voting rights if kept alive one more year.

--The investigations stemming from the easy rollup of Jorge "Il Castrao" Castro, former senator, former bribe-taker and soon to be formerly-free weasel, have extended themselves to start reeling in former and current senators and aides. The Big Cheese(head) is current secretary of state(of dissolution and disillusion) Kenneth "What? Me? Worry?" McClintock, he of the wooden brain and sawdust platform. The investigations' (plural, folks) pace may be glacier-like, but remember that glaciers buried everything they rolled over under ice. For decades.

--Did anybody pick up on how Puerto Rico's Competitiveness Ranking dropped Us down to the 40th in the world? First, We were surprised if not delighted to be included at all, especially when We ranked in the mid-20s. (I said it was too high, got slammed for it by a numbskull; you know who you are...), then dropped--with little comment--to the mid-30s and now that We're at the Big 4-Oh, Oh We don't care. We should. If We had a gram of business sense in the government--IF--We would slash the excessive regulations and laws that hamper business growth and reverse the trend from sliding into the 40s to climbing (legitimately) back up into the 20s. But no, We won't talk about how Our "competitiveness" is floating like a lead balloon...until and unless it goes up from 40 to, say, 38 and then We party like it's 2007.

--If We had some sort of survey on the state of Our press, the power of Our journalism industry as such, We'd rank somewhere between retarded and dumbass. We "have" four dailies, but the two largest are owned by the same cartel (El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora), one is so weakened by internal strife and union-busting (El Vocero) that it is being printed at and on the crappy paper sold to it by--get this--the El Nuevo Día press and the fourth, the only English-language daily (Puerto Rico Daily Sun) is stuck in the 1960s in vision and revenue. Mash up all Our journalists and squeeze them and you might get about 0.6 ounces of true journalism from the crappy lot. As Bill Moyers said: "The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined." Ours both suck like ball vacuums. There's so much room for improvement here...

The Jenius Has Spoken.