Tucson Station Broadcasts Porn During Super Bowl

From here:

A short clip of a pornographic movie cut into a Comcast broadcast of the Super Bowl in homes in and around Tucson.

Officials at Comcast confirmed that its signal was interrupted during the Super Bowl, but the company is still working to figure out how porn broke into its cable feed.

Engineers at Comcast will be working throughout the night to determine what happened, said Kelle Maslyn, a Comcast spokeswoman.

The Star newsroom erupted with calls from irate viewers shortly after 7:30 p.m. who said that the porn cut into the broadcast just after Cardinals player Larry Fitzgerald scored a touchdown on a pass from Kurt Warner to give the Cardinals the lead with less than two minutes in the game.

Callers said that the clip showed a woman unzipping a man's pants and included full frontal male nudity.

So, I'll admit, I find this a little funny. However, it's certainly not appropriate for any young schoolchildren watching, and given that the Super Bowl started at 3 or 4 PM Arizona time (they're one of them weird states that doesn't do DST), there would have been plenty of children watching.

Still, it's more amusing than any of the commercials, which, on the whole, were pretty lame.

People That Play Baseball In New York Should Stay Off Airplaines

There are unsubstantiated rumors that NY Mets 3B David Wright was on the plane which made an emergency landing in the Hudson River earlier today.


At least we know that everyone survived the crash, and when you're thanking the heavens for small mercies, I guess this is a fairly large one.

Anyway, not sure why Wright would fly commercial for security reasons given how recognizable he is in New York, but it'd be a pretty cool thing if he did.

[Edit]: According to the Mets, Wright wasn't on the plane. Hat tip to Mike A of River Ave Blues .

ADHD and baseball

I posted about this topic once before, but it bears looking at again.

****

In this article from ESPN.com, there is an alarming statistic presented right at the beginning of the article:

Eight percent of Major League Baseball players last year qualified for ADHD exemptions to take stimulants that would otherwise be banned by the MLB.

Now, let's ignore my own personal history, which renders me intimately familiar with ADHD, and look at this from an objective point of view:

ADHD is a neurological disorder, one of the most common in children, that results in inattentive, impulsive and sometimes hyperactive behavior. It affects 3-5% of all chilren, meaning that in a class of 25, there will probably be at least one child that has it.*

Let's dissect that.

First, ADHD is one of the most common neurological disorders in children. While it's true some professional baseball players are still adolescents, most are adults, in both the physical and legal sense.

Secondly, ADHD affects 3-5% of all children. It would be understandable if the rate in baseball mirrored the actual average, even if many adults are able to develop coping mechanisms and thus not exhibit the signs or symptoms of ADHD. However, the eight percent rate given by ESPN has to turn a few heads.

While it's true that some disorders can find a higher prevalence do to environmental factors--like a higher incidence of depression in extreme northern areas like northern Canada and Scandinavia due to the long, dark winters--it makes no sense that baseball would draw those that have ADHD.

Baseball is a sport that demands a lot of focus for long periods of time. This, of course, would explain why a drug like Ritalin or Adderall would be so attractive to a baseball player, but, at the same time, it makes it hard to imagine that someone previously diagnoses with ADHD would choose this particular sport. One or two cases? Sure...but nearly a tenth of all baseball players?

Unless psychologists and psychiatrists are peddling baseball as the new ADHD cure-all, that just doesn't fly.

Consider also the following, from the article cited above:

The diagnostic guidelines also contain specific requirements for determining when the symptoms indicate ADHD. The behaviors must appear early in life, before age 7, and continue for at least 6 months. Above all, the behaviors must create a real handicap in at least two areas of a person’s life such as in the schoolroom, on the playground, at home, in the community, or in social settings. So someone who shows some symptoms but whose schoolwork or friendships are not impaired by these behaviors would not be diagnosed with ADHD. Nor would a child who seems overly active on the playground but functions well elsewhere receive an ADHD diagnosis.

If ADHD was that prevalent in baseball, you would think that ESPN and Baseball Tonight would be airing a few more 'fluff' pieces about playing the game with the neurological disorder...

The point here, and it's a point that needs to be made to the general public, as well, is that ADHD isn't just having a hard time paying attention.

ADHD is being inattentive to the point that it seriously impacts multiple, if not all, facets of your life. It's not just being unable to sit still in class; it's being unable to do what the coach asks in basketball practice, stay tuned to the same episode of Lost for more than ten minutes, maintain silence when a friend is speaking...all of these things.

Perhaps the most damning, is, again taken from the above cited, this paragraph about adult ADHD:

To be diagnosed with ADHD, an adult must have childhood-onset, persistent, and current symptoms.18 The accuracy of the diagnosis of adult ADHD is of utmost importance and should be made by a clinician with expertise in the area of attention dysfunction. For an accurate diagnosis, a history of the patient’s childhood behavior, together with an interview with his life partner, a parent, close friend, or other close associate, will be needed. A physical examination and psychological tests should also be given. Comorbidity with other conditions may exist such as specific learning disabilities, anxiety, or affective disorders.

(bold my emphasis)

For ADHD to be properly diagnosed in adults, there must be evidence of childhood symptoms.

This is a tricky thing--children are, by nature, hyperactive and lack long attention spans. When diagnosing a child, one has immediate access to a child's school environment and can tell fairly easily if a child is that much more inattentive than the rest of the children around him or her.

As an adult, however, one only has access to memory, and, if they're lucky, former school records, not to mention that as time progresses, different standards are expected from children. There's simply no surefire way of knowing if behavior as a child was along the lines of ADHD or simply a child misbehaving.

Is it possible that there are one or two baseball players that have ADHD and meet all of the diagnostic criteria? Of course.

The idea, however, that nearly a tenth of them are reported to have the condition, brings it to almost epidemic proportions--and is worthy of further examination.



*National Institute of Mental Health.

Pay Attention!

Most of you have probably become acquainted with the knowledge now that use of ADHD drugs Ritalin and Adderall has soared in the MLB since 2006. One of the possible and often cited reasonings for this is that it is a legal way to get around the ban on amphetamines. It's pretty simple, too: go to a psychiatrist, get an ADHD diagnosis, get a prescription, ask for an exemption.

It should, of course, be harder than that, but that's not the point here.

This one strikes home for me.

You see, for much of my childhood, let's say ages eight to sixteen, I was on said medication. The memories that I associate with this are not happy memories.

Mostly they are memories of being told by various adults that I could not function properly without said medication, that I had to take it on the spot or I'd be a wild, uncontrollable, disobedient child...but there are other memories, as well.

There is the memory of the one time I took it before school, on an empty stomach, and got rather sick from it.

There is the memory of never being able to properly fall asleep.

There is, of course, the memory of knowing how I was never really allowed to feel quite like myself.

About the time I was just about to turn seventeen, I decided that I'd had enough. My parents were never up with me when I was eating breakfast, so it was incredibly easy to just not take the pill. So I didn't.

While I cannot 100% prove that the medication destroyed my digestive system, it does seem like the most likely culprit. My sleeping habits are still a mess, though the university life may be to blame there.

Anyway.

This is a rather bare account, I admit, but it gives you an idea. After all, most people on Ritalin or Adderall are not professional baseball players or grown ups, but school-age children who have (usually) no say in their own mental health. There are certainly some cases in which the drugs are needed, but for what it's worth, as I'm no doctor, often the issue is simply an overly imaginative child being forced to sit still for long periods of time.


The idea of baseball players using these drugs, glorifying them in a respect, is disgusting. For every baseball player trying to use it as a legal way to get around the ban on amphetamines, there is a heaping of children being told by their parents, their teachers and their doctors that they can't function without the drug, that having an imagination is a bad thing because it will make them misbehave.


I am passionate about this--but we tend to be passionate most about the things that affect us directly and I have been on Ritalin and I have been on Adderall. If you really need to concentrate, that much, have a cup of coffee, or better, tea, before the game.

Random Baseball Trivia and Yankees' Classic Moments

Random Trivia, courtesy of Uncle John's 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader:

A Regulation baseball has exactly 108 stitches.


On a more serious note, I'm sitting here, trying to come up with a classic Yankees' moment, and all I can think about is Joe Kennedy and Sean Taylor, and how they were taken from life way too soon (Taylor was only 24. That's three years older than me. Scary thought).

Life is precious. There is tragedy when anyone is taken from us too soon, but there is more tragedy when someone is taken without warning and often without reason.

I have to say, though, while we might mourn the loss, it is far more important to celebrate the life.

For anyone such as Kennedy or Taylor or Lou Gehrig or Thurman Munson or any other athlete taken from us too soon, it is far more important to remember what they gave us than how they were taken from us.




Yes, I know it's far from my most cheerful entry, but it is on my mind, especially as I've just found out Indians' pitcher Lara is also in critical condition after a car accident...