Another Birthday

-57 years ago yesterday...yours truly drew his first breath at St. Elizabeth's hospital in Belleville. My mom tells me the weather was much the same as it was Thursday...grey, cold, snowy. I'm blessed to have so many friends and family that went out of their way to wish me a happy birthday. To all of you, I wish I was half as thoughtful as you...and I'll make every effort in the new year around the corner to be that. I love you all. And I thought you'd enjoy my newborn photo at right.

-When I was small, I thought it was pretty cool to have a birthday that happened to fall on St. Nicholas Day...the traditional German beginning to the Christmas season. Even though only half of my heritage is German...we always had our stockings hung on the mantle and made a huge deal out of the candy, peanuts, and usually some trinkets too, that St. Nick would put in our stockings. You don't hear much at all about St. Nicholas Day any more...but it is the source of some teriffic childhood memories.

-Wow...where do the Cardinals go with the Scott Rolen situation now that Tony LaRussa has publicly trashed the guy? It seems like TLR and Mo must have decided, when they couldn't get anything for Rolen at the Winter meetings, that they would call him out as a whiner and rejector of anyone who represents authority. It seems to me that Rolen now must either attempt to re-establish himself as a commodity under the LaRussa leadership, or sulk, and have a pitty-party for himself, whereby noone else would want him anyway. He's got enough marketability problems without that.

-I saw Doug Weight, among others, at the Blues holiday skating party the other night. What a great guy he is...and what a teriffic teammate he must be. But he has to be concerned about his career with the lack of production he's been skating through this season. I hope he gets squared away soon.

-I hope you will take a moment soon to listen to TEAM1380. The AM, all-local sports talk station has hired this guy to do their voice imaging. An honor for me to be associated with the outstanding management and talent there. I look forward to a long relationship.

-Also thanks to Rich Gould and the folks at CW11 who invited me to come by and play "Blues Announcer Guy" on The Fan Show Sunday evening. It was an awful lot of fun. And I got to chat with the great Ozzie Smith again. I got to know The Wizard when he was a fairly regular "stopper by" when I worked at KTRS a few years back. He looks great...and seems like he's enjoying life.

-Barry Bonds pleads not-guilty.....Yawn. Career over...rest-of-life...trending down.

-Who would you vote for if the election were held today? I'm thinking about adding a polling feature to the blog so you could actually answer that question. Stay tuned.