Sometimes you do have to pause and take a look at what’s going on in the world. You need to pause and try to understand the world that we live in. It’s not always easy. If you are like me, for example, you sometimes focus on the strange things that go on in the world. My mind just likes to work that way. I like focusing on the strange.

The good news is that there are plenty of strange things going on in the world these days. For a person like me it is almost comforting to know. It was a comforting sight for me to see the crazy man with the cardboard sandwich board with all of the tight, small writing that makes it impossible to read, was downtown one day. Normally I would see him way out in the suburbs parading up and down around outside some company that I think he claims stole the Bible. There he was, still in his jester hat, walking around with the sandwich board. If the crazy guy it still there then you know the world is still spinning in the right direction

* * *

The city of Boston was shut down because of guerilla marketing. If you are not familiar with the concept of guerilla marketing then you may be under the impression it involves sneaking down from the jungles and plastering the walls with ads. Well, in some ways this is correct. It is, essentially, sneaky marketing.

Sometimes there will be a guy in a café somewhere playing a great looking video game. It looks really great and he appears just to be a guy playing a game. In fact, what he is, is a guerilla marketer and he or she is just waiting for you to walk over and say what a cool game that is and then he or she will tell you about it and encourage you to play it and, well, there you go.

Or perhaps you are reading your favorite Xomba columnist and you like reading him because he is pretty funny most of the time and a great writer. Then you suddenly realize, right in the middle of the damn column, he is talking about his self-published novel, “Dust,” which happens to be available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com. OK, maybe that isn’t quite guerilla marketing as some kind of literary product placement but it’s close enough.

This was some kind of prank involving placing these goofy-looking light boxes all over major cities. It was to promote some kind of cartoon on the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” series of cartoons. It was for some kind of cartoon called Super Happy Fun Freaky Underwater Concern or something like that.

Anyway, people found these funky-looking Lite Brite kinda things all over the city of Boston. They were also in New York and Chicago and other major cities but only Boston freaked out enough to shut down most of the city.

Now a lot of people, including the head of Homeland Security, are jumping all over the Boston authorities. They are being accused of overreacting. Yes, in hindsight, now that we know what it is, it looks amusing and like and overreaction. However, if these things had actually turned out to be bombs of some kind and killed hundreds of people everyone would be wondering how, in this day and age, no one had bothered to check out the boxes.

Give the cops a break. It ain’t easy when you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

* * *

There is a very tall man playing basketball in Maryland. On the whole that sentence is not entirely surprising. There are a lot of tall men playing basketball and I bet there are a few of them playing in Maryland right now. The thing is that this guy is playing professional basketball, albeit for the ABA, and he is nearly eight feet tall.

Yes, his name is the rather redundant Sun Ming Ming and he is from China. He is seven-foot-nine and weight three hundred and seventy pounds. He towers over, well, pretty much everyone and everything around him. This is a guy who, upon walking into your home, would have to duck to get into your doorway and would probably be scraping along your ceiling.

The thing is none of the stories really give this guy’s story. How was he found? Is he any good? How did he get so big? Are his parents tall? Are they short? Did his mother survive his birth?

Of course right now he is just in the ABA. If you weren’t aware of the fact that the ABA had come back into existence then this will be news to you. Apparently someone has resurrected the league complete with the red white and blue basketball. The NBA says they have heard of the guy and will watch how he plays and then decide if he is good enough to play for an NBA team.

* * *

There is a giant baby in Mexico. He was born via C-Section, of course, and they call him Super Tonio. His real name is Antonio Vasconcelos and he weights 14.5 pounds is 22 inches in length and drinks up to 5 ounces of milk every three hours. The doctors cannot find anything abnormal about him other than the fact he is, of course, a giant baby.

I feel bad for the mother. She had to carry that monster around inside of her. She must have wondered if she was having some kind of alien baby or something. There’s a picture where the doctors put a “regular” sized baby and it looked like the giant baby might roll over and eat the smaller baby.

So, there you go. There’s a quick look at some of the funny things going on the world. Yes, there are terrible things happening in the world. There are wars and there are disasters of all sizes and shapes going on. Somehow it all makes sense of there are crazy guys doing stupid advertising campaigns, giant men playing basketball and giant babies being born in Mexico.

By the way, Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.