-- Plenty of empty seats in Yankee Stadium belonging to greedy Wall Street bigshots ashamed to show their faces to a national audience. Why not give them all cute animal costumes--we suggest weasels. Memorabilia from opening day in the new stadium has gone to the Hall of Fame, including the first home run bat and an artist rendering of the first subway mugging outside the park ... Madonna still wants to adopt a 4-year-old girl from Malawi--guess she misses A-Rod more than we thought! ... Mets also have many empty seats but at least they sold Bernie Madoff's seats. Investors should have been tipped by the name--"Bernie madoff" with their money ... Regarding Braves' Chipper Jones--is it cool for a 36-year-old sourpuss to go by the name Chipper? ... Heroic pilot Sully Sullenberger threw out the first pitch at the Giants opener. Reportedly, the ball skipped a couple of times and landed perfectly in McCovey Cove ... It was 29 years ago former Rochester Red Wings pitcher Mike Parrott won Opening Day for Seattle and finished the season 1-16.
-- According to Kevin Massey, Maude Tull of California got her first driver's license at age 91.
-- During the Heat's Game 2 in Atlanta, the Hawks' mascot, a small hawk named Spirit, got loose in the arena. Glad the Heat weren't playing the Bulls ... Heat had a promotion last month offering free playoff tickets to people willing to remain in one spot without moving for 48 consecutive hours outside the arena. It's in such a bad area, bet many of the inadvertent winners were passed-out vagrants.
-- Did you know legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes did interviews in the buff following losses, hoping it would cut interviews short ... It has come to this--Maryland head football coach Ralph Friedgen gets a $50,000 bonus if there are no arrests, indictments or convictions of his players.
-- We knew acquitted Indy Car driver Helio Castroneves could race and dance, now we know he's very good at skating, also.
-- Swimmer Michael Phelps has redesigned his freestyle stroke. Bet he'll come out smoking. For the past three months, he has been learning to bake brownies.
-- In closing, Chuck Hinkel isn't saying his golf game has gone bad but if he grew tomatoes, they'd come back sliced.
(Some of the information in this column was obtained from other news organizations)
