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23 December 02004: Geography Gone Wild

            And I mean that in a bad way.

            News in the 517/269 area codes: The Battle Creek Yankees minor league baseball team, having been sold and re-affiliated, is changing its name to the Southwest Michigan Devil Rays.

            Blecch.

           Not because there's not a devil ray within 1000 miles of southwest Michigan (except, perhaps, at the Shedd Aquarium).  I have no real problem with "affiliation nicknames"--and I've studied sports team nicknames more than is necessary or healthy.  They're unimaginative, but they're not annoying.

            No, I have an issue with this geographic identifier.  For all practical purposes, "Southwest Michigan" does not exist as a distinct region*.  Certainly we can pull out a compass and point to "southwestern Michigan", but we can do that with any state.

            It doesn't mean that there's a regional community there that's ready to rally around a baseball team.  And it doesn't mean that tagging a team with that identifier will draw in fans from Kalamazoo (where the Frontier League Kalamazoo Kings seem to be doing just fine, thank you), or Niles, or Benton Harbor--or any other city that can reasonably be said to be in southwestern Michigan.

            Depending on how we read the map, "southwestern Michigan" could encompass Grand Rapids--but the minor league team there is saddled with the equally-silly "West Michigan" identifier.

            Time for some more rules:

1. A sports team can (indeed, should) be named after its city.

2. Or its state.  Even if you're running a franchise in Albany or Schenectady and want to call it "New York".  I'll let the NBA's Golden State Warriors in under the wire here, although they really ought to come off the fence and pick a city.

        Corollary: If you're using "New York", you must actually be in New York--either the city (not merely the metropolitan area) or the state.  This applies to the NFL's Jets and Giants, and retroactively to World Team Boxing's New York Pets (Trenton, NJ).

3. Teams in metropolitan Tampa/St. Petersburg, FL can continue to use "Tampa Bay".  As a tribute to the collective success of the Rowdies, Buccaneers, Lightning, and Devil Rays (as we come full circle), who have done so well with that moniker that there are way too many American citizens (including some of the programmers of Civilization III) who believe that there's an actual city named "Tampa Bay".  (A rant for another time, that.)

4. Naming a team after its home county is banned.  Exception: Osceola County, FL--former home of the minor league Osceola Astros.  Naming that team after its home city would have resulted in the Kissimmee Astros.  While they'd've** made out like bandits on apparel sales***, I can respect their wish for a modicum of decorum.

5. Any other geographic identifier must correspond to some clearly-defined region, and shouldn't be silly.   I wouldn't have any problem with a team in Marquette, MI going with "Upper Peninsula".  If the NBA's New Jersey Nets become the Brooklyn Nets, that's fine.  (Dan may not care for this arena, incidentally...)  The Quad City Mallards of the United Hockey League is a name I can accept--those four cities in two states are a very well-defined single place.  Allen Park, MI had an All-American Hockey League team called the Downriver Stars in 01986-7--that's another sensible identifier to anyone from metro Detroit.

           As far as "silly" goes, here are some examples of what wouldn't make my cut:

Rocky Mountain Extreme: One proposed name for the NHL's Quebec Nordiques when they moved to Denver.  It's also a stupid nickname.  Clearer heads prevailed, and we now have the Colorado Avalanche.

Bay Area CyberRays: Now that the WUSA is defunct, this is largely academic, although they did have the good sense to switch to San Jose CyberRays for their second season.  Any name with "Area" in it should be rethought.

Golden Bay Earthquakes: Suddenly I'm beginning to understand why the San Francisco Bay Area is at the bottom of my rooting interests algorithm.  This MISL team from the 01980's was hoping for a Tampa Bay-esque image.  It didn't happen.

            Back to the SMDR's.  In spite of all this low-grade venom, I like the fact that press coverage of their new name includes the fact that, for 102 days, the team was known as the Battle Creek Golden Kazoos.  There is a perfect combination of geographic identifier and nickname that might have spawned the regional identity they're casting about wildly for now.  However, they missed a chance to make some amends by not going back to the Michigan Battle Cats--great name, great logo, and a nice tie-in to local trends in nicknaming.

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*--I have a former employer who claims that they're located in southwest Michigan in their (frequent) job ads.  Frankly, if they're any indicator of what goes on in the region, the baseball team would be well-advised to avoid association with it.

**--I really like double contractions.

***--See the Macon Whoopees of minor league hockey fame/infamy.

21 December 02004: I Believe I Have Now Seen Everything

            When extreme conservatives are agitating for their own brand of political correctness, the thesis that "far-left" and "far-right" politics are adjacent to one another, and that the so-called political spectrum is in reality a circle, becomes considerably more tenable.

            Such are the times we find ourselves in this holiday season, when certain right-wing Christians, not content to be forcing religion into science classes*, are raising a fuss over being wished "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" rather than their preferred "Merry Christmas" by retail clerks and others.  This, of course, is a sterling example of the most egregious (to my mind) form of extreme multiculturalism, which may be summed up with the mantra "It's not enough that I be allowed to celebrate myself.  You must be required to celebrate me as well."

            What I find really amusing about this is that the folks plugging away at this are now aligning themselves with Mr. Garrison of South Park.  Check the lyrics to his contribution to the South Park Christmas music episode from Season 3.  Same message.

            I don't think that that's the effect--or the ally--they had in mind.

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*--Which, of course, is cloaked as what they hope will be a reasonable-sounding demand for "equal time"**.  It's not.  If the religious right was truly interested in equal time, they'd be opening up their churches for the teaching and open discussion of evolution.  I don't see that happening.

**--Which, curiously, only seems to apply to this one scientific principle.  As the sheet of disclaimers linked above indicates, there are other alternate explanations for scientific phenomena that no one's pushing to have forced into science classrooms.  For example, no one seems too interested in lobbying for geocentrism, even though the Church has a long history of backing that.

17 December 02004: Updates

            The Google situation has gotten very strange.  As of Wednesday, the main page had dropped to #9 in the standard search, so I buried a few more links.

            Now it's #70.

            Monday Moanin' is #27, The Markives is #50--and the source of those two is at least two pages further down.  We're even coming up below the News-Herald article on Allen Park High School's anti-intellectual college scholarship program and the Bollmanic four-peat therein, which is 18^th.  When you're losing to the News-Herald, action must be taken.

            I've gone back and restructured some links (I suspect that tinyurl.com isn't the best target for linking.).  We'll see what happens.

            In other news, the Frasier series finale has been released into syndication in two pieces, and "An Idle King" has been cut to ribbons, remaining a shell of its high-impact original self.  I can't say that I'm surprised, but I can't say that I'm pleased, either.

            Enjoy the weekend.

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14 December 02004: Travels With Mark-->

            Here's a neat little Web site that collects information from you about the states (and DC--though, unfortunately, not AS, GU, MP, PR, & VI [the last of which I've been to]) that you've visited and draws you a map.  And here's the map corresponding to my domestic travels (states visited appear in red):

create your own personalized map of the USA

            (It was something of an accomplishment in my mind last spring when I made it to Utah and thus could cross from Atlantic to Pacific in states I've been to without getting trapped in a debate about crossing from Colorado to Arizona in the Four Corners region.)

            Two of my big blobs of unvisited states are nice and contiguous, and thus understandable (I plan to hit New Mexico this summer), but I can't explain Delaware.  Other than that there's no renowned tourist attraction there and that math conferences tend not to be there, that is.

            On an international level, my work is much farther from finished--but at least the US Virgin Islands are lit up (really!), and there's the chance of turning some of the South Pacific islands red someday:

 
create your own visited country map

            You can, of course, have a little fun with this.  (The HTML is really easy to edit, and since the main site is sometimes slow, that's an advantage.)  It's an oddball goal of mine to eat a pizza in every state.  Here's how that's progressing--in short, not as well, obviously:

            And in an update, we're now #8 on Google as detailed on 6 December.

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6 December 02004: #9 With A Bullet

            A couple of days ago, I buried a link to the family page on my main Albion Web site, with the shameless goal of raising our profile so we might show up in a Google search.

            Mission accomplished.

            Searching on "Bollman Family", we were invisible yesterday.  Alerted to a possible change in stature by Dan's interesting email this morning, I checked again.

            We're #9.  Time now to go after those genealogy sites and the adopting Bollmans of Florida who were profiled on Canadian television.

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5 December 02004: Mark--> Rips Off David Letterman

            Time for some Viewer Mail.  Letter Number One:

            Dan from Thomson, GA writes: Yesterday I saw two examples of brand extension that you might not really care about (given your first post).  Both are soft drinks:  Pepsi Holiday Spice and 7-Up Plus (with fruit juices and calcium)

            Just saying…

           Well, Dan, as far as Pepsi Holiday Spice goes, I have as yet no opinion on it, because I haven't tasted it.  In the abstract, though, I have no real objection to it.  You have to remember, though, that I was one of the 4 or 5 people in the country who liked 7-Up Gold when it flared onto the landscape briefly in 01988.  This was an interesting experiment which added cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to 7-Up.

           Let's leave nutmeg and ginger to the side for the moment (although it's worth noting that trolling elsewhere on the I'net reveals that more folks than myself have been reminded of 7UAu by Pepsi Holiday Spice).  Two of the three components of cola flavor are cinnamon and citrus.  ("Citrus", by the way, is interpreted differently by Pepsi and Coca-Cola, but that's a matter for another time.)  So, in effect, what 7-Up hoped to accomplish with the Gold version was to appeal to that small subset of America who would drink cola (preferably, of course, 7-Up's own Like Cola)  if not for all the vanilla in it.

            And, of course, to soft drink thrillseekers such as myself.  Taken together, that's still not much of a market.

            As to 7-Up Plus, I have actually long thought that someone in the soft drink industry should take a shot at the soda scolds by producing something with genuine nutritional value.  Nice job, 7-Up.

            Thanks for writing.

            Letter Number Two:

            Jennifer from Livonia, MI writes: Okay, two additions to your HHL.  I happen to like Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, but we’ll leave that for another time.

It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year:  Aside from being an excellent theme song for the back to school commercials at Staples a few years back, this song always raises the question - who in the world tells scary ghost stories at Chrismastime?  Maybe that was a premonition that radio stations would start playing Christmas music at Halloween and they needed the tie-in?

Anything sung by Karen Carpenter:  I thankfully missed the era of being a Carpenters fan by being born in the 70s, but I can’t hear her voice and not see her scary, food-deprived, skinny face.   People can say she’s got a pretty voice all they want, but when I hear that voice I only see her skeleton head at a time when we’re supposed to be making ourselves jolly and fat.  She maintains that link to Halloween that I don’t get.

            Jif, it's like this: Upon further review, I agree with your reasoning about ghost stories and "Wonderful Time" (unless we're talking about "A Christmas Carol", I suppose) and wish I'd thought of that first.  Particularly the connection to Halloween/the onset of ACATT.  Well done.  I shall try to do better in the future.

            Karen C.'s oeuvre, on the other hand, is an example of "really bad holiday music that other people are trashing with far greater élan than I" that I mentioned.  It does not require going far out on a limb to take a shot at, say, "Merry Christmas, Darling".  Indeed, back in 01986, Jeff Elliott and Jerry St. James* of WFYR-FM in Chicago did their own "Hall of Shame" of all music, not just holiday tunes.  Sprinkled in among "Kung Fu Fighting", "You Light Up My Life" (#1 in the Hall), and three hits from the Village People was "MC,D".

            If you do a Web search for "bad Christmas music", chances are you'll find a lot of venom directed at Karen.  (And at Elmo & Patsy, but I run against the current on that one, as I said below.)  Hence, I aim at other things.  That notwithstanding, you're right about K.C.  (Note to self: There may be a good entry sometime next October about all of these Christmas/Halloween connections.)

            Thanks for writing.

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*--Jeff and Jer got their start as a team in Detroit at WMJC (now, of course, WCSX) before leaping to Chicago.  About a year after the Hall of Shame stunt (complete with airsick bags handed out in the lobby of their building as they played clips from the tunes), they decamped to San Diego's KKYY.  They remain in SD at KFMB.

2 December 02004: Holiday Hit List

            No, it's not a description of my favorite Christmas tunes ("hit" is an adjective here, not a noun).  December has dawned, and more and more radio stations have gone "all-Christmas, all the time".  In a backhanded sort of commemoration of this trend, these are a subset of the collection of holiday songs that will spur me to change the radio station, ideally before the first word issues forth from the speakers.  These are in no particular order, other than that in which they occurred to me.  (They are, however, the "less-obvious" atrocities.  I have a parallel list of really bad holiday music that other people are trashing with far greater élan than I.  Some targets are just too easy.)

            "Sleigh Ride", but only with lyrics*: Once again (see 9 November): The instrumental version of SR is a certifiable holiday classic and has been a favorite of mine for decades.  The vocals are a crime against all that is good and decent.  I don't know if they were written at the same time (I know that it was a long time before I ever heard the lyrics), but some lyricist somewhere should have knocked off work early.

            Actually, the words seem to indicate that she/he did.

            "Do You Hear What I Hear": This is one example of what I consider to be an unavoidable reality: Christmas hymns, by and large, do not translate well to contemporary radio.  It's my personal opinion, but that's what this corner of the I'net is for.  What you tend to get with recorded hymns is an overly grand performance, frequently featuring a lot of Whitney Houston-like bellowing of the final chorus (and some of the intermediate ones).  That's just not for me.  It works to some extent with a live choir and an organ or piano.  It doesn't work with full orchestration and a soloist on the radio.

            "The Little Drummer Boy": Another hymn, of sorts, that just doesn't cut it.  The line between religious and secular** gets badly blurred with this one.  It doesn't help my generally-low opinion of this song (on purely musical grounds) that the lead character somehow found his way into St. Cyril's annual children's dramatization of the Christmas story, which purported to be the tale of Christ's birth as recorded in the Gospel.

            The Gospel according to Ringo, evidently.

            "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas": This one's been getting a bit of abuse on other fronts in recent years.  Some of it is deserved--listen to the lyrics closely.  Maybe if you handed a depressing song like this over to a blues singer, it could work--but once more, the hurdles that need to be cleared for mainstream radio play have done something really unpleasant to it.

            "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree": I can't say that I've got a firm reason why this one appears on my HHL.   But it does.  Looking closely at the words to this and Sleigh Ride, maybe it's the mention of "pumpkin pie" in the lyrics.  I sense a theory developing about those two words killing a holiday song.

            Not on the HHL, although it's under fire everywhere else: "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer".  For one, I rather enjoy Christmas novelty music.  ("Christmas At Ground Zero" will never get the airplay I feel it deserves--even more so since 02001.)  For two, I am, every year, amused as I am reminded of how wrong I was in 1985 when I wrote a paper for Introduction to Music at NU claiming that GGROBAR would not take a place alongside, say, "White Christmas", as a holiday classic.  My argument made sense at the time (to the instructor as well as to me), but my talents as a prognosticator were clearly substandard.  I couldn't tell you what I missed, though.

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*--Incidentally, one way to rate instrumental versions of SR is to see how they handle the horse neighing at the end.  If there's an attempt to mimic a horse with a bona fide musical instrument (say, a trumpet or trombone with a mute), it's a good version.  If the sound is handed off to a weak trilling on some non-brass instrument, let it go.

**--If the world loses its mind and I'm ever invited to give a Christmas-era speech on the holiday season (I'm not standing on one foot with eyes closed, but it's good to be prepared.), I have a scheme in my mind about using the title "The Original Meaning of Christmas".  Then, I would speak about how the origins of the holiday are in pagan ritual (Homer Simpson: "God bless those pagans."), before the early Church co-opted the winter solstice.  The moral of the story would be "There's room enough in Christmas for everyone.".

29 November 02004: Thanksgiving 2K4--Photos By Patrick

            Click here.  This was completed on 30 November, and may take a while to load over a slow connection.

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23 November 02004: I Was Right About New York (Plus One)

            Details here.

            In other news, word on the street is that South Carolina and Clemson are foregoing bowl invitations in the wake of last Saturday's brawl.  SC was in line for a bid to the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, LA; Clemson was slated for the previously-mentioned MCS Computers Bowl in Boise, ID.

            Shreveport and Boise?  I'm not sure I'm impressed with this stance they're taking.  If they were turning down slots in the Hawaii and Las Vegas Bowls, that might be a different story.  Don't get me wrong--I agree with the decisions.  But looking at what they're giving up, it may well have been an easier decision than it could have been.

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22 November 02004: I Still Won't Root For Iowa (and other thoughts on the BCS)

            Let me be quite clear about this:

                1. I'm very happy that Wisconsin lost last Saturday, thus propelling Michigan to their rightful place in the 02005 Rose Bowl.

                2. Nonetheless, I couldn't bring myself to root for their opponents from Iowa, even though the Hawkeyes needed to win to bring about my desired conclusion.

                3. Sometimes things turn out right--just not as often as I'd like them to.

            My attention now is focused on this Saturday's Northwestern-Hawaii game, which the Wildcats need to win to return to a bowl game.  In the meantime, with the madness that is the Bowl Championship Series taking center stage, here's what I think of that interesting little misuse of statistics.

                1. I don't support the notion of a playoff in Division I-A football.  Part of this is because I'm a loyal Midwesterner, and any playoff scheme that builds the current collection of bowls into it (and I haven't seen any proposal that doesn't do that) will be seriously biased against the Midwest--and the North in general.  We're not likely to see a system which gives home games to any teams, and it's highly unlikely that there'll be a push to schedule more games in cold-weather cities, which works as a disadvantage to the Big Ten in particular and the northern schools in general.

                And from a practical perspective, it seems likely to me that any bowl which finds itself malformed into an early-round playoff game is going to suffer for fans.  Consider, for example, the Sun Bowl (a possible postseason location for Northwestern, by the way--go to their Web site and vote!  Not that I expect an Internet poll to matter, of course.).  I don't think it's all that likely that many fans from, say, Auburn and California will travel to El Paso for a first-round game, when the potential for further games in more attractive cities exists.  Triple that skepticism for the Motor City Bowl and Detroit, and quadruple it (at least) for the MPC Computers Bowl and Boise--although I suppose that "Smurf Turf" (scroll down to #2) might attract a few curious fans.

                2. With all the commentary this year about how the remains of the Big East Conference doesn't deserve an automatic BCS bid, something has been missed: The Big East has never deserved an automatic BCS bid.  And until this year, neither did the Atlantic Coast Conference.  Both of these conferences are primarily basketball conferences.  In football, and until this year, they've been primarily house organs for Miami (FL)*  and Florida State to progress right into the BCS mix.  Interestingly enough, both of those schools are very recent additions to their respective conferences.  Cause.  Effect.  If we dropped the weak-sister Big East, there'd be more room for outsiders like Utah and (maybe) Boise State to sneak into the mix.

                3. By the way, this deal where Notre Dame is eligible for BCS consideration despite being an independent is a farce.  If they want the benefits of being an independent, then they must take the risks that come with it.  "With great power comes great responsibility", as Spider-Man, Uncle Ben, and Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch (registration probably required) would agree, and as I tell incoming Albion students.  If they want guaranteed BCS access, let them join the Big East the rest of the way.

                4. Conference championship games in D-IA are another farce.  The Big 12, SEC, and MAC are taking unscrupulous advantage of a rule set up originally to help out the D-II Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference.  To write off a season of excellence in favor of the results of one game makes another mockery of the regular season.  If Iowa State happens to knock off Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game next month, you'll see what I mean.  Anyone clamoring for the Big Ten to add a twelfth team and set up its own championship game has forgotten this.  (I have my thoughts on whom they should add if it comes to that, but "None of the above" tops my list.)

                I feel the same way about conference tournaments in college basketball, incidentally, but we'll save that for next March.

                5. For my own part, I'd be happy with a system that returned to the old arrangement of conference tie-ins with bowls.  I rather like that the Big Ten has bowl arrangements for its top 7 teams--although I suppose I'd like to see the agreements rearranged every few years--and I see no real value in destroying a lot of tradition in favor of crowning an undisputed national champion.

                6. The only way to get out of this without the 4-, 8-, or 16-team playoff that the college presidents in D-IA are pretty clearly set against is to set up a national league for D-IA football.  Easily done: Take the top 16 or so teams by some fairly objective measure and drop them into a new nationwide conference.  Two divisions of 8, with a one-game collegiate Super Bowl at the end for the division winners.  And at the other end, the bottom two (or 4) teams get dropped out of the super league and are replaced by two (four) champions from the conferences that realign after the super league is formed.

                But the odds of that happening are even slimmer than the odds of a workable playoff system--for one, it probably destroys more tradition than a playoff would.  I'm not sure that the new system couldn't grow into something good, though.  For another, it would be a scheduling nightmare--with schools booked into games through and past 02010, this won't happen.

                It's a nice thought, though.

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*-- I love the fact that Miami (OH) "Miami was a university before Florida was a state" exists and requires us to tag that southern school with the extra identifier.

17 November 02004: Happy Birthday, Emily!

            And in honor of your birth, here's some serious drivel packaged as advice for you and Kate.  Let the record show that I chastised your parents about this when I heard that Brennan #3 was expected.

            Sometimes coincidences (like this article showing up on MSN.com today) are too amusing not to preserve for posterity--especially now that posterity has gone up by 1.

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14 November 02004: Thinking Too Much (apologies to Steve Forbert and Paul Simon)

            As I was re-watching the final episodes of Friends and Frasier recently (they're on the same tape, after all, and they hold up well), it occurred to me that both of these finales managed to avoid the "clunky final episode" that has been a staple of sendoffs lately, and about which I've developed a fairly intricate theory over the years (hence today's title).  The principle here is simple: in crafting final episodes, we judge the closure on two axes: artificial and universal.  Three principles aid us in analyzing the data.

            Principle 1: A finale can have a universal closure if it's not artificial.

            Principle 2: A finale can have an artificial closure if it's not universal.

            Principle 3: An artificial and universal closure leads to a clunky final episode.

Examples

            Principle 1 is illustrated by the final episode of M*A*S*H.  Certainly tying the end of the show to the end of the Korean War was a natural move, so the fact that there was a separate storyline for each of the seven major characters was sensible, and it worked.  Looking at hypothetical finales, I suspect that if The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer had lasted more than 4 episodes, it could have had a riveting sendoff centered around President Lincoln's assassination.  I'm fairly certain that no one else on the I'net has considered this possibility.

            For principle 2, the best example in my archive is the Family Ties sendoff.  The episode centered around one character--Alex leaves home for New York, and that's all.  There was no separate adventure for anyone else.

            For better, worse, or otherwise, many final episodes are evidence of principle 3.  Cheers, Seinfeld, Night Court--all are winners of the Emile Arturi Award* for clunkiness.  In each, we see a lot of competing story arcs converging within one extended episode, with the general result being something quite muddled.  (To be fair, Seinfeld did that in most episodes, and nothing could have lived up to the hype surrounding its final episode.)  This doesn't necessary mean that the episode wasn't in many ways a good one, but when we're looking at series finales, the bar is differently set, and the competition is on a higher plane.

            It's encouraging, therefore, to see that the writers for Friends and Frasier took themselves out of consideration for Emiles.  In the case of Friends, several features deserve commendation:

            1. The hour-long finale splits neatly into two half-hour episodes, each with its own single story.

            2. The two stories each focused on two of the characters, with Joey and Phoebe left on the margins.

            3. (Corollary to 2) There was no effort to set up the Joey spinoff--this, in itself, is highly commendable.

            For Frasier, the game was a little different.  As with Friends, stories that had been set up throughout the last season needed to be resolved, but they were handled almost off-handedly as the episode's focus remained close to Frasier himself.  In particular, the segment titled "An Idle King" (about 35-40 minutes in) was well-done.  Go back and watch the episode with that in mind.

            With the Everybody Loves Raymond finale on this May's docket, we watch to see what will happen.  Personally, I suspect that another Emile may be necessary there.

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*--Emile Arturi was, of course, the most famous bonded security agent in history.  Game show fans remember his appearances ("Yes, I did.") on The New Treasure Hunt, hosted by Geoff Edwards.  On that show, women selected from 30 surprise packages looking for the one that held $25,000 and trying to avoid the gag prizes, or "clunks", in the show's parlance.  When I was in college, I appeared in a short student film about him called "The Search for Emile Arturi".

9 November 02004: Christmas Comes But Once A Year...

          ...and let's get this straight: it's not on November 1.

          This business of radio stations going "all-Christmas, all the time" from the day after Halloween to midnight on Xmas Day itself needs to stop.

Now.

Please.

          Oddly, this annoyance hasn't infected any of the FM radio stations I regularly listen to in south central Michigan, and WVIC, WFMK, WQLR, WKFR, WBXX, & WWKN, as well as KQNG (my Internet favorite from Kauai) are to be commended for that. No, no, the prime offenders in my universe are Detroit stations WNIC and WMGC . Of course, they're not alone, but they're what I know. If you click on the links to the Detroit stations, you'll see that they seem to get a bump in the ratings from this stunt, which bodes poorly for my view of the universe.

          My standard in such things has always been Laura Brennan's birthday, even before she was Laura Brennan: After December 9, Christmas may be celebrated in all its glory. I am losing this war in a big way, although not on every front. It seems to me that the retailers have been less overt about rushing to promote the holiday, but as that has been won, we lose ground elsewhere.

          And the rush to dump the holiday tunes on December 26 also bothers me. I, for one, don't tire of good Xmas music just because the calendar has flipped to Winter Camp Eve. (Bad holiday songs--and my list gets longer each year, but let's just say right now that the lyrics to "Sleigh Ride" are a crime against humanity that destroy a wonderful piece of holiday music--are, of course, different.) To be honest, an occasional jolt from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra can be welcome in July.

          Key word: "occasional". As Dad would say, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." But that second "moderation" doesn't extend to 55 days of Xmas music. That's over 1/7 of the year. Think about it.

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5 November 02004: Announcing The Minneapolis Test

          As I stated below (in "Rooting Interests"), I have no automatic sports-related animosity toward New York City. However, there's another form of entertainment where it's time for someone to draw the line. And it might as well be me.

          Question: What do the following sitcoms from the last 15 or so years have in common: Friends, Seinfeld, Will & Grace, Everybody Loves Raymond, Night Court, Spin City, Mad About You, The Cosby Show, Caroline In The City, Fired Up, Ned and Stacey, Flying Blind, Becker, and Something So Right?

          Intended answer: All of them (and this is not an exhaustive list) are set in greater New York City--for no good reason.
          I am perfectly willing to admit that there are good reasons to set some shows in NYC, and I offer some examples: Sports Night, Just Shoot Me, and The King of Queens (I'll allow it even for as simple a reason as having a good name. Once per network at any given time.) come immediately to mind. Surely there are a few others. However, this trend of mindlessly setting a show in New York needs to be brought to a screeching halt.

          Which is why I now unveil The Minneapolis Test for TV series:

If a TV show's location can be changed from New York City to Minneapolis without having to make any significant changes, there's no reason to put it in New York.

          I'm not saying that the show has to be moved to Minnesota, by the way. St. Louis would be good, or Albuquerque, or Birmingham--I'm flexible about ultimate destinations. (Why Minneapolis, then? Why not? In short, I was looking for a big city, not New York, and not home to a lot of TV sitcoms over the last decade or so--which is why, for any hometown loyalists who might be reading this, it's not "The Detroit Test". Motown has actually fared pretty well (in numbers, at least) on TV over the last few years: Home Improvement; Martin; Rhythm & Blues; God, The Devil, and Bob; Freaks and Geeks; 8 Simple Rules; and so on.)

          For example, take Friends: In the reworked Friends: Minneapolis, the only changes that might have been necessary would have been tweaking Joey's career (although I suspect one can be a struggling actor in the Twin Cities) and probably killing off Phoebe by the fourth episode. Sensible Midwesterners wouldn't put up with that sort of airheadedness for very long. (Don't believe me? Go back and look at the first few episodes of Season 1.) It would have improved the show considerably.

          You can run down the list in much the same way. Seinfeld? You can lead a vacant life (times 4) anywhere in America. Move it to Anchorage. Raymond? Like sportswriters and intrusive in-laws (the latter about which I know nothing) only exist on Long Island? Take it to Phoenix. Will & Grace? See Seinfeld about annoying people, and relocate to Baltimore.

          This might also apply to California, but I haven't given that possibility a lot of thought. First things first--and besides, I've taken enough shots at them recently.

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27 October 02004: Merger

          I need to get this online before the World Series ends, which may be tonight. Yes, I'm rooting for Boston, but very reluctantly--watching last night's Game 3, I found myself cheering for the Cardinals to score some runs. Of course, they seem to have forgotten some basic principles of running the bases .

          The problem I have with Boston is twofold. The first is this inane obsession with the "Curse of the Bambino". If that gets dispelled, the Red Sox become a lot less interesting. It will be the same way if the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series again--a lot of mystique has been built up over the years centered on the ineptitude of both teams, which means that, should they ever win, a lot will be lost. Given baseball's interest in its history. that's somewhat tragic.

          The second reservation I have about the Red Sox involves my continuing rant about industries that are done innovating. That team logo mowed into the infield grass at Fenway is evidence enough for me that this "creative lawn mowing" trend has fully run its course. Not just because the infield looked like some freak burst water pipe had unevenly soaked the ground. The machinations required to get a pattern into the grass were interesting when they were first explained, but are so no longer.

          Just cut the grass. And for the benefit of my Scouting friends in Massachusetts, go Sox. But I can't get worked up enough about it all to put in an exclamation point.

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12 October 02004: Rooting Interests

               With the baseball playoffs and the NFL season in high gear, I am once again getting maximum mileage out of my algorithm for picking a rooting interest in a sporting event. (I truly believe that watching televised or live sports is more interesting if I'm actively rooting for one team.) Here it is, in one easy-to-find place.

Caveats:

          1. This doesn't apply if a team I really care about is playing--that's pretty much any pro team from Detroit, the NFL's Miami Dolphins (longtime favorites dating all the way back to 01972) and Jacksonville Jaguars (I was rooting hard for them to get one of the two 01995 expansion teams, but I would have awarded the other one to the Memphis Hound Dogs ), and any college I've attended (although there's a hierarchy there: Northwestern over Michigan over Central Michigan).

          2. There are a couple of exceptions to these rules--they will be detailed at the end.

          3. Some of this is not original with me--I think I read it in the Detroit News many years ago and have refined it for my own purposes.
If I don't have a dog in the hunt, here's how I decide whom to back. Follow these guidelines in order until a choice is made.

1. Root against a team from California.

          (Tiebreaker for intra-California battles: Root south to north: San Diego over Los Angeles over the Bay Area. No reason why.)

2. Root against a team from a city where the January temperature regularly exceeds 70ºF.

          (Tiebreaker for Southern battles: Root against the team that plays in a domed stadium in a warm-weather city.)

3. Root against the team that recently won the title in its sport.

4. Root against a city that's home to a recent champion in another major sport.

This handles a large percentage of professional matches. For colleges, there's an additional rule:

"University of X" over "X Tech" over <any college name not fitting this list (Purdue, Auburn, etc.)> over "X State"

          Exception: Major colleges primarily known for academics can bypass this rule--to me, that's Northwestern (which needs no help from this scheme), Rice, Duke, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, and Stanford at a minimum. I'll root for them, even though a shockingly large number are in the South and one is in--gasp!--California. If they're playing each other, we go back to the rules.

To the exceptions, which can override any rule:

1. I'll frequently root for a team from a place I've visited over one I haven't, or for a college where I know someone over one where I don't.

2. I'll occasionally root for a place where I know people over one I don't. This is important this year.

          3. Nothing in the universe can get me to root for the University of Iowa (read the Northwestern chapter in Bob Wood's Big Ten Country for an explanation) or, on a much smaller scale, Olivet College--although I'll gladly root for Hope College except against Albion College --unless Olivet winning advances Albion's cause, which is unlikely.

Example: So for the baseball championship series, I'm backing St. Louis over Houston (rule 2) and Boston over New York (despite Rule 4--this is where Exception 2 comes in. I know a fair number of people in metro Boston.) Despite what some have suggested, I have no built-in anti-New York City rule, although from time to time, like in the 02001 World Series, I have gone off the board and rooted against the Yankees.

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3 October 02004: It's Not Easy Being Geek (serious apologies to Kermit the Frog, Jim Henson, and anyone else connected with the Muppets empire)

          It crossed my mind again while not watching Survivor: Vanuatu (to me, "reality television" means ESPN) that the business of being a keeper of trivial facts requires near-constant updating. Before this new show hit, I feel safe in saying that I was one of the relatively few Americans who knew anything about Vanuatu--now, of course, the game has changed. Not unlike, I thought, the situation in the early 01990's. When I graduated from high school, not too many of my class of 293 knew where Kuwait was, or its capital.

          The first Gulf War changed that. So it was on to more obscure geographical facts (a subject near and dear to my mind since first or second grade). The Pacific island nations are terrific for that. So while many people may now know that Vanuatu is a Pacific nation and not, say, a mutant virus or an infectious disease, places like Tuvalu (currently making money by licensing their .tv Internet addresses) and Kiribati remain the province of the trivia aficionados.

          And the Polynesians, of course.

          So I'm hoping that Vanuatu's previous name and the term for the curious form of government it enjoyed before independence remain obscure for a good while longer--at least long enough for me to get out to that corner of the world and pick up some firsthand trivia and maybe some matchbooks.

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22 September 02004: Audience Participation

          Jennifer tipped me off to the latest unnecessary innovation in air fresheners here. (I would ordinarily be loath to give these people any publicity with a link, but since the size of the intended audience for this page is under 30, it's probably safe.) Scents on a disk--my mind reels imagining what ideas didn't make the cut at Febreze.

          Sometimes it's nice to be vindicated. On the one hand, someone should plunk one of these into a time capsule so that this spectacularly bad idea can be preserved for posterity--but on the other hand, it might be best if this episode of 21^st-century history is crushed under worthy developments.

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17 September 02004: More Stuff For List #1

4. Air fresheners. The Glade Wisp reminded me of this one. I had sort of come to believe that a hallmark of a good air freshener is that no one sees it working (Remember the Airwick Solid [whose presence on the I'net is nothing short of scandalously brief]? That was a worthy air freshener.).

          Apparently not. Amidst the mountain of questionable ideas in this industry are plug-in fresheners, way more scents than even the most discerning nose could distinguish, something about hot oil that doesn't stick in my brain (for which, truth be known, I am grateful), and on and on and on.

          Open the windows.

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11 September 02004: List #1 Revisited

          Watching a commercial last night for a razor with a AA or AAA battery in the handle reminded me of another industry that, for my money, is done innovating:

3. Razors. I honestly thought that when it took 20 years to go from twin blades to three blades, that the razor folks were more or less immune to minimal product upgrades of marginal value.

          I was wrong.

          It took much less time (2 years?) to go from three blades to four, and bizarre innovations in shaving technology have, if anything, ramped up in recent years. A razor with a battery in the handle in order to electrically stimulate whiskers to point in the same direction is, once again, something we didn't know we needed until someone found a way to sell it to us.

          And that, of course, is my #1 criterion for this list. My decision to grow a beard 9 years ago is looking better and better all the time.

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6 September 02004: List #1

          Since I can't let Dan get too far ahead of me, I offer my first list as a contribution to cyber-Bollmania. Laurie will recognize this as an ongoing rant of mine.

Industries Who Can Cut Their R&D Budget to Zero

          To the following industries, I say "Stop! You're done!" Basically, I think that these are fields where all the progress has been made, and that their time, energy, and resources are better spent elsewhere. Other suggestions are welcome.

1. Lip balm. For me, this could have been shut down when cherry Chap-stick was invented, but I had no real problem with them going a bit farther--sunscreen was probably a good addition, for example. But only a bit. They're done, as far as I'm concerned.

2. Toothbrushes. Let me make this clear: We don't need any more innovation in such minutiae as bristle configuration, bristle angle, or handle position. I need see no further television animation of how unusually-arranged bristles sweep away plaque--brush longer or smarter, citizens. It's a toothbrush--it's not diamond-cutting. That kind of intense precision is just silly.

          If the toothbrush people are looking for some other outlet for their creative energy, how about developing a dental X-ray film holder that doesn't make you gag? (Yes, I've just recently been to the dentist. No problems; thanks for asking.)

          I know I've got other industries in my sights, but these are the only two that come to mind now. More to follow.

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