I have a bad feeling about this...

THE REDS
Hey -- let's trade our longest tenured player and face of the franchise for next to nothing and then turn around 12 days later and give away our most productive hitter and baseball's current home run leader for damaged goods and a couple of scrubs to be named later. I really thought that after all of the posturing and positioning by the owner and GM that there would still be no way that they'd let Adam Dunn go after the season. They couldn't even wait that long. Two years ago this was a team that was in playoff contention until the last weekend of the season and now they look like the same bunch of idiots in the front office without much of a plan. Here's hoping BP, EE, Votto, and Bruce step up big time soon. Here's hoping the Reds make a play at Texeira. I don't know; kind of tough to follow the team right now when it looks like they still are a few years of everything going right before they contend.

THE DARK KNIGHT CAST
What's next? The movie's still raking and it's still unbelievably awesome, but I'm starting to think there is some sort of pall or curse over it all. Heath Ledger winds up dead in suspicious circumstances, Christian Bale is arrested for who knows what exactly, and now Morgan Freeman gets royally banged up in a car wreck with questions swirling around his "friend." And hey, Ledger's death back in the news with half of the Olsen twins being subpoenaed over it. What new drama/scandal can we expect next? I have legitimate concern for Chris Nolan's safety.

RUSSIA V. GEORGIA FOR ALL THE MEDALS
Seriously, all this nonsense over South Ossetia really bothers me. I think everybody needs to forget all about the Olympics and concentrate on this one. This has way too many possibilities of going really wrong and getting much much worse than it currently is. How far is Russia willing to take it? What response can the West really make and what kind of dangerous dangerous precedents will be set if we do nothing or the wrong resolution is made? As a social scientist and historian this is such an intriguing situation to me, but it could go real bad real fast I feel. Historical eras have ended and powers destroyed over much smaller world events (see World War I). Recently reading Watchmen doesn't help ease any old Cold War fears either.