Over the past two weeks, I've been on vacation away from St. Louis.  In my return home, I've noticed things are different.  Things are weird.  Things are... almost not even real.

 
Like Saturday, for example, I was watching a sports highlight show that detailed results from the WTA's Toronto Masters and could swear I heard the unthinkable: the Blues head coach lost his tennis match to the best player in the world.

 
Even worse, his knee problems flared up just in time for the Beijing Olympics.

Attempting to snap out of it, I turned to a reliable friend, the Post-Dispatch sports page.  Surely the Post would shed some light on this confusing matter.  Unfortunately, there was no coverage of Andy Murray and his aching knees.  There was however, more confusion.  I was still seeing things in two, or in this case, reading doubles.

Doing his part to pump up the Rams (and perhaps himself), award winning columnist Bryan Burwell repeated history (which had been previously repeated many times) with his assessment that the Rams were hovering around the year Y2K.

The conservative offensive style that was the signature of the first two Scott Linehan years has been replaced by a bold and beautiful up-tempo Greatest Show on Turf revival.

So Al Saunders, who like Martz comes off the flamboyant Air Coryell coaching tree, was hired as offensive coordinator to reinstall the Greatest Show, help reignite the energy in the Edward Jones Dome and make the Rams a dazzling offensive threat again.

It was the equivalent of a Chicago columnist writing about this year's Bears team making their strides to become the '85 Monsters of the Midway.

 
Sickened to the point of nausea, I turned to an old reliable friend: the baseball card.  I couldn't get through one stack of old Donruss cards before I realized that Gorman Thomas wasn't really Gorman Thomas at all.  The man who swung and missed on the final out of the '82 World Series had an alter-ego, like Finkel and Einhorn:

It was then that I reached for the TV remote to divert my attention.  I wanted to catch up on some of the Cards' action that I missed while away, so I chose the Tivo'd version of the Cards/Brewers from this past Tuesday.  When I witnessed Aaron Miles ground out against Jeff Suppan, my fingers were magnetically pushed onto the keyboard, where I had no choice but to Google minor leaguer Nick Stavinoah against my will. 

No longer was I seeing double.