THE MORNING ACCORDING TO US

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"To learn how to use your head you have to go out of your mind."

Timothy Leary, the psychologist and writer who turned a generation of people onto the wonders/evils of psychedelic drugs, was born today back in 1920. It seems only natural that the Tampa Bay Rays are providing baseball today with one of the strangest trips the game has been on for years. And oh, the parallels.

Leary seemed to have done it all, none of it conventionally. According to his obituary following his death in 1996, Leary was an accomplished clincical psychologist at Harvard (he was kicked out, though the kids loved him!), a dabbler in Eastern Mysticism, a fugitive and convict, a stand-up comedian and actor, a writer and a software designer and exponent of cybernetics. Naturally.

The Rays are a bit the same … in a baseball sense. Any team that crashes the gate so oddly has to be. Like Leary, they've also conquered a Boston institution, nabbed some Eastern influence in Akinori Iwamura, grabbed old baseball fugitive and wanderer Tim Percival, have their own stand-up comic in head man Joe Maddon (No? Guy is over 50 and has a mohawk), and also have the young, stat-driven baseball minds in the front office to draft and make it work. The team, literally, is a trip. Cybernetics are next, surely. The roster in its entirety costs the same as the left side of the Yankees infield. The pitching staff is still young enough across the board to, as Leary famously said, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

But we don't think they will.

They've made it this far, and it's no time for a bad trip, aside from a flight to Game 3 in Philly over the weekend. Leary's parting wish for the team? Naturally, it's the same one he delivered on his deathbed, surrounded by friends and family:

"Why not? Why not? Why not?"

Elsewhere…

Okay, so maybe the whole adominable snowman debate is back on. Climbers think they've found his prints. We thought he was busy doing beef jerkey commercials.

Yao might retire from international play? Hard to carry a whole country on your back when you have wobbly feet. Hard to blame the big man.

Break up the Rays? Well, even as the second cheapest team in baseball in terms of payroll, the local economy is suffering, and the Series could be a swan song. Really.

Brits are sailing to Australia in a homemade boat. It's not exactly a dingy.

Controvery surrounding a female kicker once again. It's never like the nice high school movies, is it?

Did the San Francisco Marathon sort of screw over the real winner? Seems they may have. Unlucky!

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