I know, there was no Dose today and most of you probably curled up into the fetal position under your desk and went into withdrawal.

OK, you probably didn’t. And besides, Jake picked up the slack, so I don’t feel too bad.

But I couldn’t let another day pass without taking Chip to task for some of the things he said this past weekend.

Because really, for him, they were even more non-sensical than usual.

The biggest, most egregious of his errors was when he was plugging the available tickets for the game day part of that day-night doubleheader against the Cardinals. He encouraged those in the St. Louis area to come up and be a part of “the best rivalry in baseball.”

F@#$ them. Why would Chip even think this was a good idea? Just how daft is this jackass? Like we want more of the red horde than we normally get anyway. Honestly, does Chip just say stuff like this to annoy us? He wonders why most Cubs fans want to slap him from here to Orlando anyway. But, he was just getting warmed up.

A real Cubs announcer would have said, “Hey, those of you in St. Louis who figured out how to steal cable and are watching this right now, there are 18,000 tickets left for that game. Get grandma off the roof, put the wheels back on the house and see if you can distill enough grain alcohol to drive that bad boy up 55. Wait, on second thought, you’d better not. There’s rain forecast for that week, so the dirt holding your quarterpanels on might come loose.”

How about when he congratulated Sammy Sosa on his 500th homer and said, “Sammy has hit 500 homers as a Cub, and has 529 in his career. Those other 29 came before he was a Cub.” Gee–there’s no way we’d have been able to do that math on our own. Thanks!

The best part of the weekend was the worst part. In the third inning yesterday, the Cubs had runners on first and second with one out and Randall Simon hit a pitch over the head of right fielder Raul Mondesi. Raul leapt and clearly missed it. Well, it was clear to everyone over 5’3, because “Waivin’ Wendell Kim was not waving Tony Womack around third for an easy game-tying run. No, he was holding him up. You could tell on the radio because Ron Santo was screaming, “No! What is he doing! Why aren’t they running!” He then said to Pat, “Tony stopped because Whatshisface held him up!”

Whatshisface. I loved that.

Kim apparently thought that Mondesi had caught the ball. Womack couldn’t tell because he was busy running and looking for his coach. Moises Alou was at first base and saw Womack stop, so he stopped at second. Simon saw the ball bounce off the wall and rounded first, only to see Moises standing on second and he started waiving Moises to third. Womack, who had fallen down when Kim put the stop sign on, got back up and had to slide around the catcher to score the run. He injured his hand on the play and had to leave the game a couple innings later. Woof.

This, came one day after Kim sent a runner on a suicide mission to the plate when Junior Spivey made a diving grab of a Simon base hit to keep it on the infield. The Cubs would have had bases loaded and nobody out (a situation they routinely screw up) but instead they had yet another runner gunned by a good 20 feet. Sigh.

Then, we had the Sunday hyperbole of Chip about how wondrous Damian Miller is behind the plate. I’ll give him this, Damian Miller is the best I’ve ever seen at making an unproductive out with the bases loaded and nobody out. He’s the Ted Williams of that situation.

As for his prowess blocking pitches behind the plate, he’s good, I’m not going to begrudge him that, but he’s not that much better than an average defensive catcher that it makes up for the gaping, sucking hole that he creates in the batting order. He’s lousy. I knew things were bad when I saw Adam Melhuse playing for Oakland on Saturday and I thought, “Hey, he wasn’t too bad.” See what Damian Miller and Paul Bako do to us?

No recitation of the weekend would be complete without a critique of the umpiring. It was beyond awful. True, Bill Miller’s Don Denkinger-like brain cramp cost Carlos Zambrano a no-hitter, but the worst umpiring of the weekend was done by his buddy Kevin Kelley in the top of the ninth inning yesterday.

Three times during the game, Kelley had allowed check swing appeals and all three times the base umps (correctly) called them strike three on the Diamondbacks.

Luis Gonzalez got tossed, Bob Brenly got tossed, Bob’s creepy mustache got tossed, it was a scene.

Then, in the top of the ninth the Cubs had three batters called out on strikes that were somewhere in the vacinity of home plate. On the last one, with runners at first and second, Diamondbacks pitcher Matt Mantei actually laughed when he got a strike three called in his favor.

This was a laughing matter, except for the fact that in the bottom of the ninth, the Diamondbacks nearly tied the game. How funny would it have been that the umps were in a big hurry to end the top of the ninth and then saw the game go the other way in the bottom?

Not very.

But, the Cubs escaped the desert with a series win and they are in St. Louis as we speak where the humidity is approximately 198 percent. The big three of Prior, Wood and Zambrano take the bump this week against the Cardinals who recently sured up their pitching staff with Sterling Hitchcock (hee hee) and Mike DeJean (guffaw.)

The Cubs have been easy prey in the urine capital of the world the past few years. That ends this week. Wake the family, call the neighbors, they’re not going to miss this.