A dangerous product NOT from China, shooting fish in the law enforcement barrel and the Chicago Cubs unload a massive dose of crazy to Seattle

- Any time there is a dangerous product on the market and it’s not from China, I feel compelled to share. In one sense, it’s a shout out to my Chinese homeys, letting them know that I’m not just out here looking to whack them for making products that could potentially sicken or kill consumers while ignoring people of other ethnicities who are doing the exact same thing. This time, it’s a good ol’ American company on the receiving end of my wrath, that company being Vicks, maker of Dayquil, Nyquil and other like products for people suffering from colds, flus, etc. About 700,000 units of Vicks Dayquil cold medicine were recalled Friday after a finding that the packaging was not child-proof, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. This particular recall only affects Vicks Dayquil Cold & Flu 24-Count Bonus Pack Liquicaps with the UPC no. 3 23900 01087 1 (I’m sure everyone out there knows the exact serial number of their cold medicine, because who doesn’t check that sort of information immediately upon purchase?). The time frame for this recall is actually quite large, with the offending bottles sold between September 2008 and December 2009. Actually, the problem is not what’s inside the bottle, not even what’s on the outside. The issue is what’s missing from the outside, namely a lack of child-resistant safety measures and the statement, "This package for households without young children." Now why a person couldn’t just put their own notation on a bottle or – and I know this is a reach – keep the damn thing out of the reach of their kids on their own, I don’t know. But according to the CPSC, if a child swallows several of the pills, the child could suffer "serious health problems or death.” So far, no injuries have been reported in relation to the recall and I’m fairly confident that no injuries would ever have occurred even without the recall. However, consumers who bought the product can request a refund or coupon from manufacturer Proctor and Gamble Co. by calling them at 800-251-3374. And no need to thank me for this little announcement, China, I know you appreciate it………

- Gosh, who saw this coming? Rapper Lil Wayne was detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas on Friday after authorities found marijuana on two of his tour buses and personally, I am floored. After all, it’s not like news just surfaced this week that Lil Wayne is having trouble selling his Miami apartment because the smell of the hippie lettuce is so ingrained in every inch of the place that you can get a contact high just by driving past…….oh wait, that’s exactly what happened. Apparently Lil Wayne (whose real name is DeWayne Michael Carter, Jr.) was rolling through the border crossing, headed to Laredo, Texas, from a concert stop in Hidalgo. He was among a dozen being detained from his group after a drug dog sniffed out the scent of the chronic on the buses and immediately proceeded to go eat five bags of Cheetos and lay on the couch for the next 36 hours. All of the detainees were later released, said Agent Joe Trevino, and the case has been referred to the Brooks County Sheriff's Office. Expect this brush with the law, combined with Lil Wayne’s impending prison sentence, set to begin in February and stemming from gun charges in New York, to only help his sales and street cred. As a quick aside, I feel compelled to have a quick chat with all law enforcement officials out there in the United States. Look, I realize that you could basically follow around the tour buses of a few select musicians – Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson, any reggae musician of any talent level – and bust them for possession of tree at any point. You could do this, technically you would be enforcing the law and you’d get some nice pub for your local police department and citizens would pat you on the back. However, this is like shooting freaking fish in a barrel and eventually, it would get tiresome. You would bust these guys over and over again, they would wriggle out of their legal predicament and the cycle would continue while more serious, dangerous criminal offenses went unchecked because your attention was focused on the pot-smoking musician sect of society. My advice to you is to back off, reassess your priorities and see if your community would not be better served by focusing elsewhere………

- As of now, it is officially a successful offseason for the Chicago Cubs. When you can ship an industrial-sized supply of crazy out of town and receiving anything other than an STD or Clay Aiken album in return, it’s a win-win-win situation. And if I’m using the term “industrial-sized supply of crazy” in conjunction with the Chicago Cubs, you know exactly who I’m talking about: Milton Freaking Bradley. The Cubs signed Bradley prior to the 2009 season in the hopes that he would provide some left-handed power to their lineup and help fortify their outfield with his ability to play all three positions there. They brought him in knowing that he’s ceritifably insane and hoped they could keep him in check. Keep in mind, this is a guy who once stopped his car on the expressway, jumped out and began berating a police officer writing out a citation – to another motorist, one with no connection to Bradley whatsoever. He’s the same guy who once grabbed a plastic bottle thrown onto the field by a fan, ran over to the stands and slammed the bottle down at the feet of the wrong fan. He chucked an entire bag of batting practice balls onto the field to protest a bad call, injured his knee arguing another call with an umpire and attempted to go from the dugout to the press box to a game to confront an announcer who was critical of his play. In short, Milton Bradley has anger issues and mental stability issues. With that in mind, I was stunned to hear that the Cubs initially balked at a trade offer from the Seattle Mariners to swap so-so starting pitcher Carlos Silva for Bradley before finally agreeing to it over the weekend. Sure, Silva inked a four-year, $48 million deal with the Mariners after the 2008 season and has been a disappointment in Seattle, going 5-18 the past two seasons. Yes, he appeared in only in eight games last season, going 1-3 with an 8.60 ERA. But based simply on the fact that he is not Milton Bradley, he is a huge improvement over Milton Bradley. That would be true if Bradley had bothered to show up last season and had posted a season of 25 homers and 110 runs batted in. His actual totals were a .257 batting average with 12 home runs and 40 runs batted in. There are plenty of reasons why the Mariners will be his eighth team in 10 seasons, but at present none of those reasons matter to the Cubs. Making matters better, the Mariners will send a total of $9 million to the Cubs in the deal, including $3 million to even out the difference between Silva's salary in 2010 and Bradley's salary. Most of the Cubs players won't notice that Bradley is gone because he wasn’t around for the end of the regular season anyhow after being suspended for repeatedly making inflammatory statements and having run-ins with reporters. The team was then sold to the Ricketts family after the season and the new ownership made it clear from the start that it had no interest in keeping my man Milton around. As a lifelong Cubs fan, I could not be happier to see this trade go down and the 2010 Chicago Cubs will be better for it……….

- For the second time this year, the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign marking the outskirts of Sin City has been vandalized. However, this act of vandalism is a sad story whose protagonist is worthy of your pity, not your contempt. At approximately 7:30 a.m. Friday, Joseph Peter Pepitone, 69, of Las Vegas, approached the sign barefoot, wearing a barrel with homemade signs on it and a Santa's hat. He threw red paint on the front of the” sign and black paint on the back of it, with the paint launched from glass balls. Pepitone tripped and laid on the ground crying after defacing the sign, and he complained of ear ringing, so he was transported by ambulance to a local hospital for treatment. A local Fox affiliate was nearby filming when the incident took place and caught it all on film. After being treated at the hospital, Pepitone was charged with injuring – damaging the property of another, a gross misdemeanor and He was booked into the Clark County Detention Center. Damage on the sign was estimated to be between $250 and $5,000 (way to narrow it down) and Pepitone could face jail time if cleaning up the damage costs more than $250. Yet Mayor Oscar Goodman wasn’t upset when he saw the footage and he clearly recognized that Pepitone was not mentally well. "This fellow is a little imbalanced, it would appear. I mean look at the outfit he has. You almost have to feel sorry for the fact he's trying to get this kind of attention by defacing something that's very important to this community," Goodman said. I would agree with Mayor Goodman and anyone who sees the video would have to feel some degree of sympathy for Pepitone, who admitted that said he had lost his job and vandalized the sign to protest the recent actions by the city government and its treatment of the elderly. . "I took it out on the sign because this is the only way, maybe the government would say, 'You know, this guy is maybe part of what is going on,'" Pepitone said. Police say that prior to his arrest, Pepitone had no criminal record. He does have an interesting history in Las Vegas, having made headlines in the late '90s after he said he lost a half-million dollars in a slot machine jackpot, which the Gaming Control Board decided was a machine malfunction He was also one of the protesters in front of the Clark County courtroom during the O.J. Simpson kidnapping and burglary trial. Prior to his arrest, the Las Vegas sign was tagged with red initials by an unknown vandal on July 13. After that incident, Goodman had called for the vandal's head to be put in a stockade in downtown Las Vegas. It is good to see the mayor evaluate this situation independently and realize that Pepitone is not a guy who needs our wrath and condemnation. This is a guy whose life is clearly in a bad place and he needs some serious help. Here’s hoping someone out there will give it to him…………

- NASA is just finding water all over outer space these days. The agency’s scientists revealed Friday a first-of-its-kind image from space showing reflecting sunlight from a lake on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The photo comes from the spacecraft Cassini, which has been searching for this kind of reflection since it began circling Saturn in 2004. As you’d expect, the scientists working on this project are pumped. This is the first visual "smoking gun" evidence of liquid on the northern hemisphere of the moon and the first-ever photo from another world showing a "specular reflection." Not that I need to explain this to any of you, but a specular reflection is space talk for reflection of light from an extremely smooth surface and in this case, a liquid one. "This is the first time outside Earth we've seen specular reflection from another liquid from another body," said Ralf Jaumann, a scientist analyzing data from the Cassini unmanned space probe. "It was great because if you look at photos of planets, you mostly see nothing is happening. But in two hours we saw a glint of light getting brighter." Jaumann admitted he was surprised when he first saw the photos transmitting from Cassini, orbiting Saturn about a billion miles from Earth. Titan has been a focal point for NASA scientists for years because of its striking similarities to Earth. Other than Earth, Titan is the only body in the solar system that is believed to have liquid on its surface. Also, it’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, just like Earth. Of course, the presence of water or a similar liquid is key because most experts believe that its presence means that there is an elevated chance that some kind of life could develop there. This discovery comes after scientists with the University of Arizona were able to use previous data from Cassini to learn details about the reflection's location on Titan. Based on that data, they pinpointed the glint to an area near the southern edge of a lake called Kraken Mare -- a massive body of methane that covers about 150,000 square miles. The search for the mythical reflection took five years, but NASA has finally found it. So what’s the next step? "Next, we want to find out more about Titan's liquid," said Jaumann. "Do we have some kind of weather there? Do we have changes with seasons? Does it rain? How does the liquid methane run across the surface?" And does this mean that we’re going to find life there because there is liquid? Not likely unless some super-powered Eskimo types reside there. "The temperature on Titan's surface is something like minus-180 degrees Celsius," Jaumann said. "That means it's very cold.” Does it now, Captain Obvious? A temperature of 180 degrees below zero Celsius is cold? Glad we have such brilliant minds hard at work for NASA………..