Nature in darkness groans
And men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night:
Restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain
Feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words
Of stern philosophy & knead the bread of knowledge with tears & groans.
- William Blake

That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia
That's the night that they hung an innocent man
-Vicki Lawrence

Indeed. Did you ever notice that a Joe Morgan chat session was like a power outage. No, I don't mean because Joe's porch light is out. I mean, because Joe's chat can be zooming along answering questions in a reasonable manner without a care in the world and then suddenly, wham! It's like night descending at the flick of a switch .And as the intellectual power outage begins thoughts like pitchers should be evaluated by wins alone, on-base percentage is a lot of hooey, an Albert Pujols is more deserving of the MVP award than Barry Bonds, all start to make sense.

The gestalt is something like the Canadian Pepsi Syndrome that occurred the other day knocking out power from Nova Scotia to Michagana, MI. Maybe more to the point, is the analogy of a black hole, a vortex sucking all intellectual light into some netherworld where Dave Concepcion is a Hall of Famer and from which the light can never escape, along with Maximilian Schell and those silly, R2D2-inspired, cuddly robots. Oh, wait a minute, that just the crappy Disney version of a black hole-my mistake.

Maybe Joel McCrea said it best in Foreign Correspondent:

Don't tune me out, hang on a while -- this is a big story, and you're part of it. It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come... as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning... Hello, America, hang on to your lights: they're the only lights left in the world!

So without further ado: Chat on! Chat off! Chat on, Chat off; Joe's Chat Day...

The Good

Lost it in the lights just like Jay Gibbons.

The Bad

To be continued...