When Carlos Ruiz sent another sacrifice fly to right three batters later, the buzz grew louder. Jayson Werth's homer in the fifth produced a crescendo.

But when closer Brad Lidge sealed Saturday's 4-3 Phillies win over the Nationals and capture a second straight National League East title -- Philadelphia's first back-to-back division championships since taking three in a row in 1976-78 -- it was downright euphoric at Citizens Bank Park.

The Phillies are going to the playoffs again.

Before the game, Jimmy Rollins grooved while singing along with Rick James' "Superfreak." Later, the lyrics "Celebrate good times" piped through large speakers.

A few hours later, the 45,177 fans at Citizens Bank joined the party.

Since the Mets declined to comply by winning earlier in the day, the Phillies sealed the division by beating the Nationals in Game 161. They clinched a day earlier than in 2007, when it went down to the final day.

White rally towels waved furiously as the game continued, punctuating a playoff atmosphere. After the game, the Phils doused themselves with champagne and shared the moment with fans.

For the second straight season, the Phillies chased down the Mets in the NL East. The Phils trailed by a season-high 3 1/2 games on Sept. 11, but rallied to claim first place for good on Sept. 20. In its best month, Philadelphia went 16-8 with one game remaining.

Veteran lefty Jamie Moyer, who won the 2007 NL East clincher, became the second pitcher to win 16 games at age 45, joining the Yankees' Phil Niekro (16-8 in 1984). In the 2008 clincher, Moyer held the Nationals to just one run over six innings.

The Phillies await either the Dodgers or Brewers in the NL Division Series, which begins Wednesday at Citizens Bank Park. Cole Hamels likely won't pitch on Sunday and will be rested for Game 1.

Bring it ON!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  Ordering IN tonight!!!!  Pork Chow Mein, Veggie Egg Rolls and Chicken Sate!!   Thai food!!  GOOD stuff!!  And NO!!  Not just for me!!  Please!! 

Oh wait!  Sate!!  Thin strips of chicken breast on a skewer, grilled, and then served with cucumber slices, and peanut sauce!!  YUM!!!

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Jimmy Buffett weekend continues!!  Saving my FAVOTITE for tomorrow  but this one kills me!!  Too funny!!

Have a Wonderful Sunday!!!!!!

When alligators roamed Orange County

Roots of OC amusement industry trace back to alligator farms, lion parks and the first invisible queue

YORBA LINDA

He never saw it coming. Thwap. The pain was searing.

Ken Earnest still remembers the bite that should've killed him on May 17, 1960.

Earnest, 70, is the son-of-a-son of an alligator man. He rode alligators bareback before he could walk. He wrestled them in movies. Bred them. Fed them. Stared them down and cleaned their pens.

He had plenty of other close calls at the California Alligator Farm in Buena Park.

"Nothing that ever put me in the hospital," he says matter-of-factly.

His wife Sharon adds perspective.

"He has scars all the way up his fingers and arms," she says. "He's had his thumb crushed. He had the seat of his pants torn out while giving a show. He came home to change his clothes and went back to work."

This bite was different. Doctors doubted he'd survive the night. Life Magazine and TIME Magazine followed his recovery over the next two weeks.

The nation rooted for the young man who provided gators to movies like "Tarzan" and cared for more than 1,000 gators, crocodiles, gharials and caiman – collectively known as crocodilians.

Some nights he had to unclog their pond drains, which meant wading into water with more than 200 crocodiles. In the dark. With nothing but his wits about him.

"He was born in 1938 – the year Superman was born," Sharon likes to say. "But he's not related."

He might as well be. Because no American had ever survived the kind of bite Ken Earnest did in 1960.

SMOKING FISH

Ahh, the good old days – when kids patted alligators like puppy dogs. When fish smoked cigarettes for our entertainment. When you could feed lions raw meat on the hood of your car.

Few people know these days better than Richard Harris. His new picture book, "Early Amusement Parks of Orange County," depicts a time when Orange County was the nation's epicenter of theme parks. Our bears threw basketballs through hoops. Our horses did math tricks. Our women water-skied behind dolphins and our alligators slid down slides.

Harris marched into this world at age 15 as a toy soldier in Disneyland's Christmas Parade. He later worked for Knott's Berry Farm and Movieland Wax Museum.

His theme park fascination turned to obsession. He collected photographs and stories about places he worked and visited – like the alligator farm, Lion Country Safari and the Japanese Deer Park.

"They had koi fish that could actually smoke cigarettes," he says of the 32-acre deer park in Buena Park. "They put a long filter with a cigarette on the end. They cued the fish to come up and take a couple puffs on it. It was the funniest thing you've ever seen."

Meanwhile, his aunt dated a ranger at Lion Country Safari, in Irvine, where some 100 lions, 24 cheetahs, 20 elephants, 53 zebras and hippos roamed freely among passing cars.

"He'd throw meat on the hood of the car to get the lions to come over," says Harris. "It freaked me out."

His biggest influence, however, was one of his first bosses – a carousel operator at Knott's who out-invented the colossus of the theme park industry: Walt Disney.

DISAPPEARING QUEUE

Knott's Berry Farm wasn't really an amusement park until Bud Hurlbut came along.

In 1954, one year before Disneyland opened, he convinced Walter Knott to let him install a merry-go-round he'd bought from Hershey Park in Pennsylvania.

The pair walked to an obscure corner of the farm. With the heel of his boot, Knott marked an X and said, "Put it here."

"That was the first ride at Knott's," says Harris, who later sold tickets to the merry-go-round as a teen-ager.

In 1960, Hurlbut changed the face of amusement parks forever when he built the Calico Mine Ride.

"At the time, it was the biggest authentic dark ride ever made," says Harry Suker, 82, of Sandy, Utah, who worked with Hurlbut. "Disney came over and watched it being built. He was impressed."

Hurlbut later built the first indoor flume ride, another idea Disney would emulate. And he invented something else we've all witnessed: the disappearing queue – or waiting line that disappears inside a building.

"Bud was an innovator of the amusement industry," says Harris, "but he stayed out of the limelight. He once told me, 'I don't want anyone to know who I am.' "

Hurlbut's rides, however, changed the face of Knott's, the face of the amusement industry – and the face of Orange County.

It is that early face of Orange County that Harris reveals in his picture book. Not bad for a guy who spent much of his youth selling orange juice on Disneyland's Main Street.

WONT SEE AGAIN

Feeding time – that's what nearly killed Ken Earnest at the California Alligator Farm.

His crocodilians chowed down some 2,000 pounds of raw chicken necks and backs each week – provided mostly by Knott's Berry Farm.

But this time, Earnest was holding a white mouse. He'd already fed his Indian cobras, his African spitting cobra and green mamba. But while trying to separate two Australian tiger snakes vying for the same mouse, he got bit.

The venom – some 70 times more potent than a large rattlesnake's – attacked his nervous system. Doctors cut open his throat to insert a breathing tube as they injected antivenom. Still, it would take 10 days in and out of an iron lung before he could even move his eyelids.

His crocodilians, he maintains, never gave him a problem – even the mammoth Nile crocodiles that weighed more than 1,000 pounds. Even Billy the Alligator who gave children rides in the early days.

Those days, however, are gone forever, says author Harris, whose book shows pictures from the old alligator farm.

They were simpler times. Short on technology, but long on bravery, outlandishness and a fascination with performing animals.

Harris recalls lions on his aunt's car, the koi fish smoking cigarettes and even Sierra, a horse that supposedly could add, multiply and spell your name at Knott's.

"You don't see that now-a-days," he says. "And you never will again."

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As a side note, Knotts Berry Farm has the BEST fried chicken dinners and some of the scariest rides!!  I won't go on half of them!!  But if you ever visit?  Ride before you eat!  Ha!

Music by Emerson Drive today.

LOS ANGELES - A Metrolink commuter train believed to be carrying up to 350 people collided with a freight train Friday, killing four people and injuring dozens of others.

Firefighters extinguished a blaze under part of the wreckage and were working two hours after the wreck to free people from a commuter car left mangled, toppled on its side with the train's engine shoved back inside it. Two other cars in the Metrolink train remained upright.

The Union Pacific freight train's engine was also turned onto its side, with the rest of the train splayed out like an accordion behind it.

Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said four people were confirmed dead and 30 to 40 people were injured.

Firefighters treated the injured at three triage areas near the wreck, and helicopters flew in and out of a nearby landing area on medical evacuation flights.

One of the largest medical facilities in the area, Northridge Hospital Medical Center, was told to prepare for the arrival of injured passengers, said hospital spokeswoman Christina Zicklin.

"We are expecting some people. I don't know the number yet," she said.

A male passenger told KNBC-TV he boarded the Metrolink train in suburban Burbank and was talking with a fellow passenger when the crash occurred.

"Within an instant I was in my friend's lap. It was so quick. It was devastating," he said. The man was visibly injured, but able to walk with the aid of firefighters. The man said he was involved in a devastating 2005 Metrolink crash in Glendale and was talking about it with the other passenger when Friday's crash occurred.

The trains collided at 4:32 p.m. in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley.

Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell said the train left Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and was headed northwest to Moorpark in Ventura County. She couldn't confirm how many people were on the train, but said that in rush hours there would usually be about 350 people on board.

"We don't know if we hit another train or another train hit us," Tyrrell said.

She said the Metrolink train was being pulled by its locomotive rather than being pushed. The push mode is controversial due to claims that it makes trains more vulnerable in accidents.

Firefighters pulled passengers out a rear door and down a ladder from the toppled commuter car, which had been separated from the rest of the train by several feet. Crumpled and charred freight cars were strewn across the tracks. Dazed and injured passengers sat on the ground and milled about on both sides of the tracks.

The crash happened in an area where the tracks form a "U" shape, about 2,500 feet wide. At the top of the bend is a 500-foot long tunnel that runs beneath Stoney Point Park, popular with climbers for its large boulders.

The worst disaster in Metrolink's history occurred on Jan. 26, 2005, in suburban Glendale, when a man parked a gasoline-soaked SUV on railroad tracks. A Metrolink train struck the SUV and derailed, striking another Metrolink train traveling the other way, killing 11 people and injuring about 180 others. Juan Alvarez was convicted this year of murder for causing the crash.

Elaine comes home and tells her drinking husband, 'Remember those  headaches I've been having all these years? Well,
they're gone.

'No  more  headaches?' the husband asks, 'What happened?'

His wife replies, 'Margie  referred me to a hypnotist and he told me
to stand in front of a mirror,  stare at myself and repeat, 'I do not have a
headache', 'I do not have a  headache,' 'I do not have a headache.'
Well, it worked! The headaches are  all gone.

'Well, that is wonderful' proclaims the husband.

 His wife then  says, 'You know, you haven't been exactly a ball of
 fire in the bedroom  these last few years since you have been hitting
 the bottle more often, why don't you go see the hypnotist and see if he can do anything for that?'

Reluctantly, the husband agrees to try it. Following his appointment, the husband comes home, rips off 

his clothes, picks up his wife and carries her into the bedroom. He puts her on the bed and says,
'Don't move, I'll be right back.' He goes into the bathroom and comes back a
few minutes later and jumps into bed and makes passionate love to his wife like never before.

His wife says, 'WOW! that was wonderful!'

The husband says, 'Don't move! I will be right back.'
He goes back into the bathroom, comes back and round two was even better than the first time.

The wife sits up and her head is spinning, 'Oh my God' she proclaims.

Her husband again says, 'Don't move, I'll be right back.' With that, he goes back in the bathroom.

This time, his wife quietly follows him and there, in the bathroom, she sees him standing at the mirror and saying. 'She's not my
wife.' 'She's not my wife.' 'She's not my wife.'

His funeral service will be held Friday.

.
 
Have a SUPER week!!!