Congratulations are due to Greg Maddox. He's currently the most famous person to make it into this blog in the tool of interest. I don't know if you heard, but apparently he has a disgusting, perverted method of hazing rookies. Apparently, he sidles up to rookies and urinates on their leg in the showers. I did a bit of searching on google, but I couldn't come up with a link to back this story, but I saw it on PTI and I'm not a paid investigative journalist so I can roll with it.

I have a number of problems with this. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think a 300 game winner ought to have just a little more dignity than that. For instance, I cannot imagine Roger Clemens sidling up to a teammate in a shower for any reason. It seems strange, too, that Maddox should be implicated like this. It might be his look, with the Poindexter glasses. But he never struck me as the type of guy who would do something like that.

It's also disturbing on a psychological level. I might not have taken a psych class, but it doesn't take a bald bully who makes obese redneck women cry like Dr. Phil to see that there is something just beneath the surface of a guy who cozies up to another man in the shower room for the purpose of micturating upon him (or any purpose, for that matter).

I often mock my friends who while away the hours pursuing training in the martial arts that there is an element of erotic sadism in that pastime. I think that there is a little of that going on here. Why piss on a guy in the shower unless you're trying to establish some pseudo-alpha male social order on him? I say pseudo-alpha male since the human race is so civilized that the Darwinian pressures that create the wolf pack alpha male mentality no longer exist. The fact that you've pitched for all these years and won 300 games is enough to command respect. Pissing on a guy in the showers under human circumstances in America in the 21st century is more homoerotic than anything else, with the possible exception of parading in front of the picture windows at you college library in a banana hammock and ski mask with another dude as accomplice.

Leaving aside Greg Maddox for a moment, I'd also like to talk about a story I saw in TMZ today. As pathetic as the Rosie vs. Elizabeth feud is, the real story I want to talk about is the small snippet about Tom Cruise looking at purchasing a unit in the Dakota in Manhattan. I hate to say this, because it makes me sound evil, but when I read this, the first thing I did was call a good friend of mine who happens to be a Beatles fan and ask him if we could get Mark David Chapman a furlough and another copy of A Catcher in the Rye.

For those of you who don't get it right away, Mark David Chapman was the guy who shot John Lennon. I am not suggesting that someone should shoot Tom Cruise as much as I'm saying I wouldn't care if they did. I am not a fan of his acting. Unlike the vast majority of children of the 1980s, I don't regard Top Gun as this generation's Citizen Kane. Risky Business was amusing, Rain Man was a great film, but was it because of Cruise or a strong supporting cast? Days of Thunder sucked like very little has sucked before or since, even though Robert Duvall is an amazingly talented performer.

I guess I've come a long way to say that Tom Cruise hasn't made a decent movie in about 10 years, Katie Holmes has never made a decent movie, unless you count Wonder Boys (which I enjoyed quite a bit, but her role was very, very, very small and very much peripheral to the action of the movie). If they weren't involved with a fringe religious group that creeps out mainstream America, would they still command the media attention that they get? I think it's time we buried TomKat and tried to focus on the wreckage that is our own personal lives.