Merry, Merry Month of May

Hello World, Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Actually, on Friday we find ourselves halfway between May Day on Wednesday and the Battle of the Puebla on Sunday. and if that's not enough reason to get out there and celebrate with dancing and tequila, well, then I just don't know what it would take, and don't spare the burritos, my good man. I feel it is only right that I should also warn people that Mother's Day is next Sunday, so anyone who isn't prepared for that yet, should certainly shake a leg - and here I'm not talking about the Mexican Hat Dance, that's for sure. Anyone in the local area can also tell you that this is "the time of the green fuzz," where suddenly whatever is beneath the emerging maple trees, is covered in a blanket of bright limey green that sticks to anything in spite of wind or rain. At home, I've finally learned to park my car farther away from the culprit in our parking, and one of the great advantages of the big employee parking lot at work is that it has no trees to make a mess all over everything, unlike the stupid little lot whose narrow confines made it impossible to escape from the fallout. Also speaking of new growth, our yard is awash with enchanting English wood hyacinths, in a rainbow of colors that the finest artist's palette could never do justice. In fact, I was out taking pictures of them when I inadvertently waded into a sea of rampant alien mutant poison ivy, which is already 18 inches tall, and you certainly can't miss it, because it is the brightest shiny bronze all over, like the Poison Ivy Beautification Committee had been around to polish it or something. I would have to grudgingly admit that they did a heck of a job, but if they come around asking for donations, frankly, I may not be responsible for my actions. Also on the topic of doing a good job, there's the surprising Mets phenom, young pitcher Matt Harvey, who the sportswriters always refer to as a "fireballer" - which term is a quaint throwback to a bygone era from the likes of Sandy Koufax or Bob Feller, quite unlike the usual soft tossers that proliferate nowadays. To the delight of their perennially disappointed fans, Harvey leapt out to 4-0 start, despite his team playing .500 ball or worse out of the gate. In the great white north, former Mets darling R.A. Dickey has been unable to right the ship of the woeful Toronto Blue Jays, whose 11-21 record so far is an unfortunate reflection of his own 2-5 mark, with an ERA in the 5.5 range, for which the technical term (not to get too pedantic about this) is "stinky." I dare say this is surely not what the Toronto management was expecting when they made the deal for 2012's Cy Young award winner, which they rushed into with such blazing speed that he was basically still holding the trophy when the contracts were signed. It can't help but remind the dinosaurs and me of the famous sports axiom that "Sometimes the best trades are the ones you don't make." In other baseball news, it seems that the Houston Astros have been moved to AL this year after 50 years as a National League mainstay all along. Apparently the addle-pated trolls in the Commissioner's office (who obviously have not only too much time on their hands, but way too much time in the "Hospitality Tent," if you know what I mean) decided that instead of having 14 teams in one league and 16 teams in the other, that they would shift one franchise over, so there would be 15 teams in each. Somehow they managed to get the owners and players association to go along with this malarkey, which really has to make you wonder who knows what skeletons are in whose closet, and where all the bodies are buried, in order to get that unprecedented level of consensus - when normally, these people are at each others' throats, so that if the owners had proposed the Law of Gravity in the Middle Ages, the players would have come out full force against it. Then rather than moving Milwaukee back to the AL where they started, for some reason they picked on the poor Astros instead, tossing them willy-nilly into the wild and woolly AL West, along with the Texas Rangers, Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Angels and Seattle Mariners. The problem this creates for the schedule is that in order to have enough time for the teams to play a full 162-game season in 6 months, starting now there has to be a continuous rotation of inter-league play at all times - otherwise, one team in each league would always be idle for 3 days in a row, and run out of days before they ran out of games. Previously, inter-league play was a novelty that happened only sporadically, and gave the fans in two-team cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles something else to tussle over in the taverns of their choice. As a result of this bird-brained move (with apologies to birds everywhere) now it's just going to be another hum-drum aspect of the game, like stirrup socks, spitting and steroids. (Oh, hit that easy target.) That sound you hear is the unquiet soul of poor Judge Mountain Landis, the no-nonsense Commissioner who ruled over the rambunctious early days with an iron fist and brought the free-wheeling palookas under his unyielding control for the good of the game. You can bet the shrewd Judge would have none of this tomfoolery, and in fact, he would have long since torn down the Hospitality Tent before anyone had a chance to come up with a cockamamie scheme like this in the first place, and that's not just the Cracker Jacks talking, believe me. On other sports fronts, the playoffs continue apace in the NBA and NHL, with the plucky Rangers losing the opening game of their series to the dratted Capitals, which although not unexpected, was still disappointing to their long-suffering loyal fans - and everyone knows that in this house, we bleed Rangers blue. Playing in the same building, but with different results, the new and improved Knicks won their first 3 games against the Celtics in handy fashion, and then proceeded to drop the next two, thanks not. It occurs to me that this might be a good time to move the Celtics out of the Eastern Conference altogether, and get them out of the Knicks' hair once and for all. I hear that Houston is very nice this time of year. Meanwhile at work, alert readers may recall our irrepressible former bookkeeper, and pride of Ireland's bonnie shores, Jean McPaddy O'Shamrock, who had the uncommon good sense to take advantage of that pension plan peculiarity for staff in a particular category, and left on December 31st with the other old-timers. She popped in for a visit last week, looking like a million bucks, which is what always happens when people leave the Employer of Last Resort, so that when they come back, you just about want to haul off and smack them. In any case, I bumped into her in the hallway when she was telling a story about her neighbor taking his grandson to McDonald's for lunch, and in spite of the fact that he ordered a Happy Meal for his young charge, the toddler did nothing but cry the whole time they were there. He said he wanted to go back to the counter and ask for his money back, since the inaptly-named Happy Meal utterly failed to provide the happiness that he was expecting. For her part, Jean said she could totally relate to that, because when her husband had a company car, she never found it to be very good company at all. Well, everyone knows how I worry when things like this start to make perfect sense to me, and next thing you know, I'll be out there with the Poison Ivy Beautification Committee, digging up Judge Mountain Landis to knock some sense into the baseball idiocracy, before any more teams go the way of Houston. Or in the immortal words of the legendary General Sam Houston, "Remember the Astrodome!" Elle