If I seem a little more unpleasant than usual tonight, you'll have to bear with me. Believe it or not, I'm not too bothered by the tremendous performance by Kaison Gabbard tonight. So what if he allowed 3 hits and threw the team's second complete game of the season. It was the Royals, who aren't exactly the 1927 Yankees.

It's just that I had a rough day. I woke up with a massive hangover, a sunburn and a head cold. All of which serve me right for drinking in the sun when I had a cold, but I don't have to be happy about it. It's always good to be the only guy with a cold when it's 90 degrees and sunny. People look at me as though I had tuberculosis or something, as though I were Doc Holiday. Bad times.

I do have a tool of note segment for you. I don't know if you've heard about this chump, but an English tool (seems a bit redundant, no?) swam a kilometer at the North Pole in a speedo. Of course he made a spectacle of himself for completely altruistic reasons. He wanted to alert world leaders to the harsh realities of climate change. The fact that a bald 37 year old English explorer could only get on worldwide TV for some idiotic stunt like this or having several freezers full of human remains probably had nothing to do with it.

This guy seems like he's bucking for archtool status. In no particular order, here are some of his major malfunctions: he has a mind coach, his nickname is the Polar Bear, he's an explorer and he's a grandstanding jackass. If there were any justice in this world a real polar bear would have shown up and mauled him for calling himself (or allowing himself to be called, which is just as bad) the Polar Bear. Unless you're a gargantuan physical specimen like Paul Bunyan you have no business with a nickname like that. So what if he swims in polar climes. Call him the Penguin or the Seal if Batman fans object.

I still can't get over the fact that he has the minerals to call himself an explorer in the 21st century. What is he exploring? It's all been explored. I thumbed through the atlas I have at the house. I didn't see a lot of blank spaces on any of the maps. No terra incognita or hic sunt dracones areas. I have to say, if you're the 23,457th person to find the headwaters of the Nile, you're not an explorer, you're a tourist.

Global climate change is a serious problem, I don't want to give the impression that I don't believe in global warming. But for all the good that one loser in a speedo swimming a kilometer at the geographic North Pole is going to do, he might as well have started a tire fire. After all, I might have missed the story, but I don't think President Bush and the 2/3 majority of the US Senate came storming in to work this morning to get the Kyoto Protocol back on the table and ratify the hell out of it. Somehow, I don't think Dick Cheney's staff had to wrestle the VP to the ground to stop him from divesting his shares in Haliburton and other energy conglomerates.

Maybe it's just me, and I'm cynical and mean and wrong on this thing, but what was the eco-footprint of this tool's mission to swim in the North Pole? Did he and his posse travel up there in a tall ship, sailing as though it were the 1840s? Or did they sail up there in a big, smelly, messy diesel powered behemoth belching carbons into the atmosphere to prove a point about global warming? If that is the case, this guy is definitely an archtool. Other, lesser tools should have to kiss this guy's ring when they meet him.

In other unrelated matters, the guy I go to for my Red Sox info tells me that I can't even begin to mount a candidacy for President of Red Sox Nation unless I see at least one game at Fenway this season. I am always willing to go some place where I can sit outside and drink beer and eat unhealthy food. Even if that means sitting amongst 36,000 people who would be very unhappy with me if they knew that I am the author of Sedition in Red Sox Nation. Can you imagine how many pieces of pizza would be hurled in my direction each time I turned my back?

But my source offered me a ticket for a game in the not too distant future and I can't use it. I can't use it because another friend called me late Thursday night while I was in Connecticut and drinking Bud Lights to invite me to a backyard party well north of the Charles River. And me being the nice guy that I am, I turned the ticket down. I wish I weren't such a good person.

And in even more unrelated matters, I was shocked recently to see that Lindsey Lohan is going around recommending The Prince by Machiavelli. It's even more surprising now that the news is coming out that she is having all kind and manner of trouble over some nude pictures that were apparently stolen from some ex-boyfriend's computer. Not being a big fan of the Italian Renaissance, I don't keep a copy of The Prince on my bedside table, but I imagine that Machiavelli would not be blackmailed by some tools running a celebrity gossip website. I think old Niccolo would be down there kicking some ass and clunking heads together as though he were Moe from the Three Stooges. Or at the very least hatching underhanded schemes to ruin people's lives.