Please, MLB, send A-Rod away. Free money, not accepted. And a fascinating look into stripping in an oil boom town

Please, let it be this week.
Please let this be the week that Major League Baseball suspends Alex Rodriguez from its sport.
I don’t care if it’s for the rest of this season, all of next season, or until the Jets win a Super Bowl (which will be never, us loyal fans admit).

Just please, send him away. Because I’m sick of it. And so are millions of other Yankees fans, who have watched this disgrace of a human being, this slimeball, this pus on the end of a wart, wear the pinstripes for the last nine years.
Many of us never wanted him in a Yankee uniform, and except for one freaky stretch in the fall of ’09, the stench of failure has surrounded him.
It started with his ridiculous smacking the ball out of the glove of a Red Sox pitcher in the 2004 ALCS, and continued for the next several years, with playoff strikeout after strikeout, and admitted steroid use serving as a lovely distraction.

We’re just sick of it. He’s a selfish prima donna and a guy who was never a good fit for the New York spotlight, and his lying and obfuscation over this latest steroid mess is a fitting coda to a disastrous time in New York.

So please, Bud Selig, we Yankee fans are begging you: Throw the lying, cheating, bum out.
And may he never darken the doors of Yankee Stadium again.

**Proof that we live in a non-trusting society: Watch this guy in Boston try to give away dollar bills to anyone who walks by, and how freaking difficult it is for him to get anyone to take it.

I mean, it’s a dollar; even if it was counterfeit, wouldn’t you take it just in case it was real?

**Finally today, a very long but very interesting story on Buzzfeed.com about a part of American life I knew very little about. Like much of North Dakota in the past 10 years, the little town of Williston has experienced an enormous population growth thanks to oil drilling.
One of the byproducts of Williston becoming a huge oil drilling town is the vast outnumbering of men to women there, which made the strip club in town a very profitable place to work for dancers.

A woman named Elizabeth Shepard survived Williston during the last few years, and she tells a really fascinating tale of what it was like to be there, and offers a (PG-13 rated) window into her life.
It’s a long story but well worth your time.