Here's stuff to brighten your day...

In my querulous quest to bring light to the planet's endless darkness, I offer today  some vignettes  that you may have missed  in the numbing front-page  media coverage of LeBron's return:

Dollar Tree has converted its dollars $8.5 billion times for its purchase price for Family Dollar. Don't know where that leaves discounter Dollar General, whose latest flier told us of scads of items well above a buck (The only stuff  that sustained the $1  tag were Animal Crackers and a few other Back to School "Snacks and Treats" .)  As a wag once  said of Starbucks in New York City, they should call it "FiveBucks".

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All writers, including me, should mightily thank  New York Times columnist Gail Collins for liberating us from the cumbersome burden of politically correct references to his/her...When she began a sentence "Look, everybody has their own way of demonstrating..."  it was a wicked dismissal of a singular subject and plural pronoun that has tormented me since I was still  figuring out how to replace a typewriter ribbon. Now,  everybody and their  have been reconciled in the Times by a leading national columnist.   Will she now move on with who and whom?  Gail, I'm waiting.  Desperately.

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After years in my line of work, I learned that you can't  tell  politicians from their covers. No better example of that is Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine, a
Republican,  who seems so meek and mild but is a first-tier religious zealot.  On Tuesday,Team DeWine was in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, again arguing against what he considers sinful, lawbreaking same-sex marriage.   No one has  been keeping score on how much all of this costing Ohioans - a personal crusade that extended  for DeWine in earnest when he ran for the office in 2011 promising to fashion an AG  career on family values and opposition to ObamaCare. (Summit County Republican Chairman was a paid DeWine liaison in northern Ohio, which paid adequately and required no heavy lifting). Although Outlook Ohio Magazine pointed out that 29 consecutive court decisions support marriage equality, DeWine is Ohio's King Sisyphus, who was  forced  to repeatedly roll a huge boulder up the hill and then see it roll back.

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Finally: It's getting harder every day for a baseball writer to cover the sport.  When Pirates star outfielder Andrew McCutchen was forced out of the lineup with a fractured rib, the medical report  called it an "avulsion fracture involving the costochondral cartilage of the left 11th rib."

Anybody?