Look, why all the Schilling hate around here.

It's interesting that you chose Schilling and ARod as your two subjects for today, because I see some of the same traits in each of them, and it bugs me that one gets called out all the time while the other almost never does.

Each of them strikes me as a prima donna, obsessed with the status of his personal legacy, and given to self-conscious "hey, look at me" gestures that I find irritating when people in my own life engage in them. I believe they're both narcissists who suck all the air out of a room, albeit using different methods.

Look, it's cool to write letters to your teammates. It's silly to then go around saying you've done it without anyone asking, and that's Schilling all over. I understand it in a way -- he's a history buff and would surely like to be remembered fondly, specifically via induction to the Hall of Fame. But he has a problem -- he's only been a HOF-worthy pitcher for the second half of his career. The only way he can get over the top is through the intangibility of folklore.

And so he finds ways to milk the spotlight when it's his business, and to interject himself when it isn't -- he's every bit the politician that ARod is, but ten times as savvy. If ARod is Kerry, Schilling is Reagan.

Fuck you, too. Everyone I know here in Atlanta is taking individual measures to lessen their personal water use -- everyone. I don't know anyone -- not one person -- who doesn't want there to be enough water to go around. Yes, everything might have been sunshine and puppy dogs had there been adequate regional planning 30 years ago, but it didn't happen. Now we've got a crisis on our hands, and the question is what to do about it. This is hardly the first time in human history that a crisis has illuminated a problem. So how about a little support and an idea or two, if you've got one besides "Fuck 'em"?

Yes, the south is crawling with Republicans, but this is Atlanta we're talking about. Here's a snippet from a recent profile of Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, from US News & World Report:

"For two years after she was elected mayor of Atlanta in 2001, Shirley Franklin talked sewers every chance she got. Few were convinced that the city's pipes were crumbling or that the city was bleeding $20,000 a day in fines. And few wanted to raise rates on water to fix the problem. At high school graduations, Franklin talked about clean water. At the supermarket, she talked about pipes to whoever was next to her in line.

"I was a one-person chant, a drumbeat for infrastructure," says Franklin, 60, who dubbed herself the "Sewer Mayor." Her persistence paid off when voters passed a $3.2 billion overhaul of the aging water and sewerage system.

Franklin, a Democrat, knows sewers aren't sexy, but that's exactly the kind of policy problem she likes to focus on. Scan her first-term record, and it might look different from a typical politician's: She has raised the sales tax by 1 percentage point, eliminated more than 1,000 city jobs, and spent her time talking potholes and sewers."

That's right, the citizens of Atlanta voted themselves a $3.2 billion tax increase to pay for sewer infrastructure improvements, due in large part to the efforts of Mayor Franklin. Your pithy comments notwithstanding.

While the city of Atlanta is largely liberal, the rest of the Greater Atlanta Area is largely Republican. Just this week the city commission of Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, voted to allow watering of new "professionally installed landscapes," changing one of the new water restrictions. So while you can plant a new yard, you can't water it unless you paid to have it installed by professionals. So is Atlanta making sacrifices? Hardly

There is a complete ban on "maintenance" watering. That's not a sacrifice? And the Alpharetta ordinance was newsworthy in that it is bucking the trend for the Atlanta area (of which Alpharetta makes up a tiny, and yes, irritating, percentage) as a whole. Entire counties are banning installation watering as well, meaning that professional landscaping -- which employs over 80,000 people (legally) in the area -- is in fact the only industry so far that has been ordered out of business.

In much of the Atlanta area, only car washes that recycle their water are allowed to remain open.

Yes, and once this fact was revealed to the public in an AJC article, the outcry from all corners was such that they scrapped the plan within 12 hours. You'd like to cast the story as waste that nearly occurred -- the real story is that it didn't happen.

Funny you put it like that, because I was just thinking that I don't know what feminism looks like any more than I know what the war on terror looks like. As such, I have no idea what victory would look like, so I wouldn't know when to declare it.

You'd think a woman president would look like victory for feminism, in the sense that a woman would now be allowed to either lead or screw up in the largest way possible.

And wealth has been a key factor in the rise of the conservation movement. It was wealthy Americans who founded the New York Zoological Society to save the bison. It was wealthy Americans who founded the Audubon Society to save birds. I think that poor people tend to eat the organisms around them. It takes pretty wealthy people to decide that they can afford national parks.

It gets to the point where I don't even want to waste the energy to form a rebuttal. The pursuit of wealth benefits the environment. Poor people who eat food destroy it. Fine, Newt, fine. Go away, would you please?