Not that I whore things a lot (sounds of disbelief followed by naysaying …) but I need everyone’s help. My buddy Otis Harper needs every vote he can get to win his own sports talk show.  Go to www.wfan.com and scroll down about halfway – the voting column is on the right.  Vote Otis, vote often – I think you can go there tomorrow, and even Monday morning.  Please – this guy deserves this.

I’m off tonight, so commenter mellbell is taking charge:

I certainly can’t compete with our resident chefs blogenfreude and promnight when it comes to savories [eds. – oh please], but give me some flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, and I’ll whip up something sweet. And when The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports rolls around (or even when it’s, say, eight months away), that something sweet is Derby Pie.

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Seeing as I have never, in my life, watched Glenn Beck do ANYTHING (except of course in little snippets on the Daily Show and such), I guess I might be a totally neutral, unbiased observer of today’s doings. Just like Albert Pujols and Tony LaRussa of the St. Louis Cardinals, who are going to observe themselves before tonight’s game against the Nats. The announcement of their appearance yesterday caused quite the stir over that Yahoo’s horsehide blog, Big League Stew, as evidenced by this sage comment:

This is non-political in the same way that MLK’s speech was non-political. All Americans with strong morals will find nothing to disagree with. The only people who will be upset are the America-haters and non-Americans. Beck is a modern day Martin Luther King. In the future, we will remember Beck as the great patriot who stood for American values in the face of tyranny. LaRussa and Pujols will go down as brave warriors who withstood the persecution of the liberal media to stand on the side of liberty.

Boy.  This will be ten different kinds of stupid.  Play-by-play, post-jump. Read more »

“Something miraculous is going to happen on Saturday.” —Glenn Beck

• Rain.
• Lincoln rises from his pedestal, kicks ass, takes names.
• Freak cosmic vortex swaps in crowd from 1963.

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I worked at a DC soup kitchen during law school – gotta love this guy.

Today’s Sacramento Bee has a very interesting article about a sharp rise in calls to the State Department of Personnel Management asking for grief counseling assistance for state employees dealing with suicides of co-workers.

The Bee writes:

California government departments  in 2009 made 33 requests for “critical incident stress debriefings,” in which counselors meet with employees traumatized by the suicide of a colleague.

In 2008, the state made 14 such calls. In 2007, when the Department of Personnel Administration began tracking the incidents, government departments made 18 requests for such grief counseling.

The data are drawn from such a relatively small population and over such a brief period that it’s impossible to determine any trends, said mental health experts interviewed by The Bee. Identifying a single cause for the kind of hopelessness that leads to suicide can be next to impossible.

But it’s clear, they said, that the state’s unprecedented labor unrest – on-again, off-again furloughs that cut state worker pay nearly 15 percent, fractured labor relations with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, rising public disdain for civil servants – has increased tension for a group of people who tend to value security and predictability in their work.

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“British Airways apologized to passengers after an emergency message warning they were about to crash into the sea was played by mistake… A spokesman for British Airways said an investigation was under way to discover whether it was human error or a computer glitch.” [AFP/Raw Story]