The Markives For 2K5

-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is wheeled into a hospital where he is described as being conscious but confused.

"Conscious but confused"? Our leader is like that pretty much 24/7, but I don't recall ever getting email about it. Just another difference between America and Israel, I suppose.

*--One of their "Breaking News" email alerts that hits your inbox as news happens. I highly recommend this service. Sign up here.

This picks up something I used to do in the mid- to late-01970's* and updates it for new media. With far less artwork and far more analysis, though.

First, though, a disclaimer: Some people aren't going to be happy until there's a full-blown D-IA football playoff, which isn't going to happen.** Some of then, I'll grant, are at least decent enough to recognize in print or in e-print that the BCS got it right this year. (In the pre-BCS [but post-Southwest Conference] days, USC would be in the Rose Bowl and Texas in the Orange Bowl.) Why, then, must they follow it up with a tiresome screed about the lack of a playoff? They cannot be reasoned with, and would say the same about me. So enough of that.

Observation 1: For a bowl game at risk of losing its certification due to low attendance, the Las Vegas Bowl made a curious selection. Brigham Young? Las Vegas? Those go together like, well, Dan and golf, as he would well agree (Monday Moanin', 16 May 02005). The LV Bowl had the #2 pick from the Mountain West Conference. Surely they could have done better than this--I note that Colorado State and New Mexico were both available with comparable records.

Observation 2: Were it not for Winter Camp, which is far more important than college football, I'd be spending a lot of time in Texas this December. Two of my alma maters are playing in bowl games in that state, two days apart, and I think I'd've made the trek.*** Michigan-Nebraska in the Alamo Bowl may not have the shine it might have most other years, but should still be a good game. Northwestern-UCLA in the Sun Bowl? The scoreboard operators need to be ready for triple-digit scores on both sides. The over/under on that game will probably be in the 80's.

Observation 3: Steve Spurrier said something on ESPN Sunday night that has, in all likelihood, never been said anywhere on Earth before: "We're really excited to be going to Shreveport". Now, I am as big a fan of the Independence Bowl as probably exists outside Louisiana, but come on. It's Shreveport. Is that more exciting than...well, any other bowl city? Even in Boise, you get the cheap thrill of Smurf Turf.

Observation 4: Central Florida lost the Conference USA championship game to Tulsa, 44-27. Tulsa is going to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis. UCF is going to the Hawaii Bowl in Honolulu. I'm trying really hard to believe that this possibility wasn't on the minds of any of the Golden Knights players or coaches near the end of that game.

Observation 5: The Orange Bowl is trying really hard to pitch their game as something other than "Paterno vs. Bowden". It's not. Florida State, at 8-4, doesn't belong in the BCS mix. There needs to be a "really bad conference champions" exclusion clause installed the next time they tweak things.**** Start by requiring 9 wins, not including conference championship games, which should just be eliminated in D-I anyway.

Observation 6: New Rule: Notre Dame has to play by the same rules as everybody else. An at-large bid is automatic if a team lands in the BCS top 4, except for the folks in northern Indiana, who get in at 6 or higher. It happened this year, and steps should be taken to ensure that it never happens again. I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that ND, beginning next year, will get its payoff cut to the standard at-large allotment. Once again, if you're not going to align with a conference, you must take the bad along with the good.

*--That youthful obsession (together with my tenacious memory) makes me one of the very few people on Earth who remembers that Salisbury State (now Salisbury University) defeated Inter-American in the 01976 Coco Bowl, played in Puerto Rico.

**--Of course, they won't stop complaining in the unlikely event that one comes together. They'll just find something new to whine about.

***--I've seen Northwestern live in 2 bowl games, but have never seen Michigan in one.

****--I thought that that would apply this year to the Big East champions, but West Virginia has a respectable record.

So we're into December, which, of course, means Christmas music on the radio, and in the streets. I recently completed an online survey (www.ratethemusic.com) gauging my thoughts on a large batch of holiday songs, and came away with something approximating an idea rather than a moderately hysterical rant into the ether.

In running through about 50 versions of songs o' the season, I found my ratings gravitating toward higher marks for the original (or at least, the definitive) artists, and relative, bordering on forceful in some cases, disdain for remakes*. For example, "Have A Holly Jolly Christmas" needs to be sung by Burl Ives, and everyone else should leave it alone. Take the energy that would be put into re-re-re-re-re-recording that standard and write something new. (Country and western artists are specifically excluded from this call to action, being as they are responsible for a lot of the worst of new holiday tunes.)

Not that the original artists can save a truly bad piece of work, but I've addressed that before (The Markives, 2 December 02004). Let's focus on the future. One of the non-comedy Christmas records that gets heavy airplay around my corner of Michigan is "Christmas Eve and Other Stories", by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. For two reasons. One: I'm a fan of good instrumental work**, and their work certainly exemplifies that. For two: There are new tunes coming from them. On all three of their Christmas CD's, truth be known, but this is the one I listen to the most.

Of course, not everything that is new is good, just as not everything that is good is new. There are vomitrocious Christmas songs of relatively recent birth, to which I am loath to give publicity by mentioning them. But just as I have my list, you probably have yours. Recording a Christmas album should only be done when you have something new to offer, not some misguided belief that your n^th rendition of some holiday chestnut*** is something that the world should get in on. Save the singing of classics and standards (whatever the difference between those two may be) for the shower.

*--I'll make one exception here. It seems to me that "Mistletoe and Holly" is ripe for a remake, provided that it lands in the lap of someone who's capable of carrying a tune. Harry Connick, Jr. might be good for this, so if you're reading, Harry...

**--Which is why I'm a little more tolerant of remakes that leave out the lyrics. (TSO avoids that problem with new instrumentations of old classics--see, for example, "A Mad Russian's Christmas"--which, by the way, seems to be the required background music in TV commercials for December movies the last couple of years--and especially "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24".) This applies particularly to hymns, which don't work on mainstream radio.

3 December 02005: Io Saturnalia! Or, Everybody Wants To Be An Aggrieved Minority*

I have so many thoughts running through my mind about the now-annual** complaint festival from extreme right-wingers whining about the whole "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas" idiocy that it's difficult to know where to begin.

And then this: It's actually kind of a depressing reflection on the political correctness inanity in this corner of the universe. We've put so much time and energy into elevating the status of any group that can claim "victim" status that it works for anyone seeking attention or stumping for a cause--valid or silly--to portray themselves that way.

If it weren't for the fact that a lot of 21^st-century people who "celebrate" the Winter Solstice are approximately 75% as annoying (which is too high for my tastes), I would advocate going back to the real roots of a late-December holiday.*** Nonetheless, the greeting "Io Saturnalia!" has such a nice ring to it that I shall be adopting it for this year, and I'll continue to do so for as long as the right wing continues to complain about this particular flavor of nothing.

However...I have no compunctions about being wished "Merry Christmas", "Happy Holidays", or even (gasp!) "Happy Hanukkah"^†. If Hanukkah has meaning to the person issuing the greeting, and they're wishing me good tidings o' the season, I have no objections. Even if it's their season and not mine.

**--And evidently it's going to be annual forever, since there's no real way to resolve these hurt feelings, that particular wing has now become so oversensitized that they will be seeking out examples of offense until infinity, and there's no chance of the most offensive proponents getting a life and just shutting up.

***--I will concede that the early Χtians got the late-December holiday thing kicked into high gear w/ Christmas, but there can be no escaping the fact that they co-opted a pagan celebration.

^†--I have borrowed this line of reasoning from Mom, who absolutely got it right.

This may well be the dumbest sentence uttered in my memory by a government official not named Bush. From FCC chair Kevin Martin, speaking on the issue of regulating TV programming: "You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don't want, but why should you have to?" Reason magazine has the sharpest retort to this: "The Answer Is: Because It's a Free Country, You Idiot!".

Martin has shown his stripes: In the battle over cable TV content, he has come down squarely on the side of the "I don't want certain programming on my television set, so no one anywhere should be able to see it" loons. A public official coming out for active censorship is something I find amusing. And more than a little distressing.

I admit to being intrigued by the idea of a la carte cable channel selection, but:

2. Being that I possess something of a renegade streak, I would be looking to craft the most family-unfriendly lineup possible*, just to bug the moral zealots who are responsible for this craziness. Not that they'd notice, but I would.

*--But then again, if it were possible (and I suspect it's not), I'd like to program a V-chip-equipped TV so that nothing rated below, say, TV-14 could get through. Largely as a goof.

So it's a Tuesday morning in Michigan, and Red Wings coach Mike Babcock, who has coached 26 regular season games, is the senior coach (as measured by time in current position) of Detroit's four major professional sports teams.

My take on the Steve Mariucci firing is this: Were I the owner of the Lions, and had my fifth-year team president come to me asking for permission to fire the third-year coach, my response would have been something along the line of "Go ahead, but you'll be out the door right after him." Maybe before him. Accountability, in this situation, would seem to me to rest with the guy who put the current team together. Unfortunately, that totally undeserved five-year extension that Matt Millen got this past year made that highly unlikely.

The reality of the situation, though, is that the Lions aren't likely to get any better unless there's an ownership change. On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that this will spell an end to the long-term trend that former Lions head coaches never get another NFL head coaching job (Marty Mornhinweg, Gary Moeller, Bobby Ross, Wayne Fontes, Darryl Rogers, Monte Clark, Tommy Hudspeth, Rick Forzano--the list goes on...).

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. " That may have been all well and good for the 19^th century, but we're in the 21^st now. In the hometown of The Markives, we're facing a modern version of that credo: "Buy a slot machine [better or not; the standards are different now] and the College will beat a path to your office."

Evidence here, in a brief article taken from the new-look alumni magazine. No negative fallout...yet. (Some of the questions and answers they didn't use are pretty amusing, as well--but those will have to wait for my autobiography.)

With full credit to Manfred Mann and his Earth Band, whose album of that name includes the best-known FM radio version of "Blinded By The Light", that's what we're hearing out of Tuscaloosa, AL--and, indeed, the entire Southeastern Conference--today. No more are college football aficionados across the country being assaulted by the idiotic proposal that the SEC champion should get an automatic pass to the BCS championship game. Yea, the University of Alabama has tumbled from the ranks of the unbeaten, possibly fallen right out of the SEC championship game , and is likely headed to the second-tier Cotton Bowl* if all plays out as expected.

What LSU's victory last weekend saves us from is another round of whining from the Southeast about how the best brand of college football in America is axiomatically played in their corner of the world and how it's just wrong on so many levels that an unbeaten team from the SEC is left out of the BCS championship game--as we had last year with Auburn. Disirregardless** of the arguments against the BCS and its current setup, this is proof that the system works--that schools such as Auburn and Alabama who continue to schedule serious cupcakes and teams from Division I-AA pay a price when it's time for the real gonfalons to be handed out. For Auburn in 02004, it was a game against the Citadel; Alabama's self-inflicted Achilles' heels were Middle Tennessee State and Utah State.

Part of the problem here is divisional--that it's probably easier than it should be for a university to move up to Division I-A without really having a football program that could be called "major". This is how we have the Sun Belt Conference*** pretending that it ranks with the five^† major football conferences. A bigger part of the problem is that some major schools are intent on inflating their schedules with games against absolutely unworthy opponents for the purpose of making themselves look better on paper. Kansas State rode this train from obscurity to prominence in the late 01980's, but that doesn't make it right. This, of course, should be stopped--and it can be done with only a minor BCS rule change:

A game by a BCS conference school (or those folks in South Bend) against a Division I-AA or Division II opponent, or against any team in its first 5 years in Division I-A, automatically goes on their BCS record as a loss, regardless^‡ of the outcome.

I'm open to negotiation on that "5 years" rule. I picked 5 because it's the period of an individual player's eligibility, thus after 5 years in I-A, it's reasonable to assume that no players from the college's days in I-AA or D-II remain. Hence, at that point, you're truly dealing with a Division I-A football team, albeit probably a weak one.

Now we can go back to concentrating on important things. Michigan-Ohio State is this Saturday.

*--Fabric, by the way, is not exactly the most inspiring name for a football game. That having been said, it's better than the recent trend of merely attaching city names (Seattle, San Francisco--though those names are now in the past) or corporate sponsors (MPC Computers, EV1.net) to ballgames.

**--A couple of colleges back, I was chastised by a student for using "irregardless" (which is indeed, in some sense, not grammatically correct) in a lecture. I responded by using this double crime in the next class.

***--Thankfully, a blow for truth in advertising was struck when the University of Idaho left this conference for the WAC. Idaho has about as much to do with the Sun Belt as the Dallas Cowboys have to do with the "East".

^†--ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC. I do not consider the Big East a major football conference (The Markives, 22 November 02004).

We need to define some terms up front here. "Variety hits" is the tag that's been applied to the new radio format dubbed "Jack" in Denver and Chicago, "Doug" in Detroit, "Ed" in Albuquerque, and "Mike" in Lansing, just to list the ones I've personally heard.* This is also described as the iPod Shuffle format; it's on-air identity is frequently something along the lines of "We play what we want."

"Arrow" is an extended acronym for "All Rock-and-Roll Oldies", and is/was an industry name for radio stations playing all-70's music. These, of course, flared briefly onto the radio landscape in the mid-01990's or so before fading--you don't see too many of these anymore.

The questions at hand, then, is this: Will variety hits find a semi-permanent place on the American radio landscape, or will its rise, like Arrow, be that of a supernova, flashing brightly for a brief time before crumbling to ashes?

I think that the VH format will be around for awhile, and I base this on one simple rule: The formats that make it in commercial radio, by and large, are those that have the ability to evolve. And make no mistakes, VH still has a lot of evolving to do. While listening to Jack-FM on a recent Windy City sojourn, I heard the following three artists in order: U2, Jewel, and Bon Jovi. Now, one of the alleged features of VH is said to be its ability to sound like an iPod on shuffle play. Fair enough. I would, however, challenge the assumption that many iPods have this kind of music mix loaded, or that there's a lot of overlap among the serious fans of those artists. People (Eric, for one) speak of the unusual diversity of the playlists under this format, but I'm not completely convinced yet that that represents something that people really want. They're putting songs on the radio that have been gone for quite some time--which is a net plus--but there's still a glitch or two to be worked out regarding the small details.

Coming back to the point of format evolution: Arrow wasn't a long-term success, in my opinion, for the simple reason that its playlist was artificially restricted. A similar fate afflicted classic rock, which I regarded from its inception as an impotent format--yes, the stations are still there, but their number is not nearly what it was in the late 01980's.** No great loss, in my opinion. It bugs me when people get nostalgic for someone else's past. VH doesn't have that restriction--it'll be a simple matter for stations programming this format to tweak their playlists to include newer tunes along with the recurrent stuff. Add in the economy of a DJ-free on-air presence, and you have some ingredients for a winning format.

*--I'm still waiting for someone to go with this format under the name "Mark FM". I think it's a natural. Given my standard signature, "Mark-Arrow" might be a combined format worth hoping for, but I don't see that happening, for reasons detailed above.

**--Disclaimer: In 01988, WJJX-AM flipped (slightly) from contemporary hits to classic rock. Part of my response to that was to launch the Late Night Laugh Attack, and so carve out an hour of my airtime when I wouldn't have to be playing that stuff.

...but I still don't have to like it. Leaving out the undeniable mathematical reality that Halloween (Oct 31) and Christmas (Dec 25) are the same [Oct 31, or 31 in octal, is 3 × 8 + 1, or 25 in decimal, or Dec 25]*, Christmas Creep (a term scattered about the I'net that I'd like to trademark) has backed into October. At 10:10 AM EST today, I heard a Christmas parody tune** on my preferred Internet comedy radio station (KQNG isn't coming in today.), and WNIC in Detroit already has their "all-Christmas all the time" banner up, just waiting to drop the holiday bomb on the Motor City. (As I type this, they're apparently playing "Monster Mash", so the flip has not yet happened.) No word yet from WMGC. (Update: 2 November 02005, 10:00 AM EST: WNIC has flipped--in both senses of the word. Evidently they did so at 3:00 P.M. on November 1. WMGC hasn't.) Nonetheless, when I find myself in metro Detroit between now and December 10, my car radio will be pulling in CIDR. Other markets are no doubt also poised to drop--we'll see if the link from last year that followed this sort of inanity works again.

It could be argued that I'm looking for trouble--that since this hasn't infected mid-Michigan radio yet, I'm complaining about nothing. Nope. Once again, I'm trying to be out in front of the curve. In my college radio days on Ann Arbor's WJJX, we played Christmas music only between Thanksgiving and Winter Break--and then it was one song per hour, from a rotation of three***. Sounded about right then, and would sound about right in 02005.

*--And approximately every 6-7 years, they're also equal to Thanksgiving, when the latter falls on Nov 27 (In novembal [base 9] notation, 2 × 9 + 7 = 25 decimal). The last time was 02003; the next time will be 02008.

***-- "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town", by Bruce Springsteen; "Do They Know It's Christmas?", by Band-Aid; and "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", by Elmo & Patsy. I had nothing to do with these selections, but in the course of a three-hour shift, I would have played all of them--were it not for something called the "Late Night Laugh Attack" that occupied hour #3 of my shift.

Explanation: This is Saturn's moon Dione, photographed by the Cassini space probe that's currently kicking around the original ringed planet*. That's Saturn in the background, with its rings edge-on near the bottom. You'd have a hard time concocting a better argument for unmanned spaceflight than this.

*--Original, that is, from the perspective of us Earthlings. It's a safe bet that the rings around Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are approximately as old as the Saturnian ones.

1. It's slightly strange to drive a car where the steering wheel no longer controls the front tires. Toward that end, the tie rod, like the back of the front seat*, is a car part frequently overlooked.

2. It's entirely possible to find someone to haul** a car from Madison Heights to Albion (100 miles) at 11:00 at night. Hey, that extra arm and leg I had were just making my clothes fit funny. To be sure, it's not as easy as finding a dentist in Las Vegas who's open on Saturdays and takes walk-ins (3 in the phone book under "A" alone), but I suspect that that may not be an entirely fair comparison.

3. A messy repair bill is still cheaper than buying a new car.*** And so the quest for 300,000 goes on.

And one puzzle that I'd like to solve: When watching The West Wing, I find it amusing to read what is on the TV screens within the show that are carrying MSNBC coverage of things political. Usually this is just the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, but...In each of the last two episodes (2 and 9 October), I have noticed what purports to be a sports score (probably basketball, judging from the magnitude of the numbers) between Santa Fe and Nashville.

Santa Fe and Nashville? As an advocate of bringing major league sports to New Mexico, I welcome this fictional development (If it were up to me, the Albuquerque Thunderbirds would be taking their most-excellent name and logo to the NBA this fall instead of to the D-League.). I can't help but wonder why Santa Fe was chosen, though. Does someone at TWW have roots in the oldest state capital in America, or is this just a matter of 7 letters (and one space) fitting the graphic better than 11? It appears that no one else on the I'net is admitting to having caught this. Another watch begins.

Nashville is also a question, but one far less interesting to me. No doubt this is an effort to avoid infringement lawsuits, but I can't help but wonder what the rest of the story might be--and why these are the only two cities that seem to be involved.

*--Apologies/credit to Paula Poundstone. (Caution to those clicking through: this site is loud.)

***--Of course, 1% of that total (which is, tragically, not an insignificant amount) is coming back to me courtesy of the good people at Discover Card.

With the debut today of the JFI take on movie quotes, I thought I'd throw in my small contribution and correct an oversight that JFI and the less-esteemed AFI have both missed in their compilations:

Oversight: The best quote from Animal House is neither "Toga! Toga! Toga!" (AFI) nor "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son." (JFI). While I have no quarrel with the second, and great respect for those who would vote for "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?", my favorite quote from that movie has always been the oh-so-innocent "May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"*.

1. "Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect."--2010**

2. "If someone had asked me yesterday, I'd have told them that the Quebec Conference is made up of six professional hockey teams."--The American President. (Almost as good from this movie is "Janie, make a note. We need to schedule more events where somebody gives me a really big fish.")

*--My instinct tells me that this reads better when the number is written out in words rather than digits.

**--Which will be confirmed as science fiction in five short years. More's the pity. I had, at one point, really held out hope that there would be a manned landing on one of Jupiter's moons by 02026.

In the spirit of Dan's call for more response posting*, here's something that caught my attention and connects to his commentary about the Doc and what she finds irksome (Monday Moanin', 20 June 02005).

Leave out the medical implications of this development. Read the last quote, from the bozo** from Human Genetics Alert, which is described in the article as "an independent watchdog that focuses on the ethics of human genetics"--this, of course, is usually code for "shrill opponents of science".*** This guy is claiming that we need "a lot more public debate" about things like this.^†

He's wrong. What we need is a lot less public debate--for the uninformed/misinformed public to stay out of things about which they've formed only a hysterical response. Including the public in a sophisticated medical/scientific issue^‡--and make no mistake, that is what genetic engineering is--is a recipe for disaster. George Carlin was right about the stupidity of the median person. The amount of study and training necessary to give these issues the consideration they deserve is beyond almost everyone on the planet, and the progress of science is invariably impeded when we stop to take a poll. I am certainly aware that some unpleasant things have been performed in the name of science, but that's no reason for handing over any measure of control to an ill-informed segment of the population.

*--Which reminds me, I need to get back to working on the message board for this site.

**--My deep apologies to Pinto Colvig, who doesn't deserve to have his alter ego tied to these freaks.

***--A look at their website (No link. I look so you don't have to.) reveals that they claim not to be opposed to genetic research. I'm not buying it.

†--Which I'm sure he favors because he's well aware that public sentiment is easily manipulated to generate the result he and his group of followers want.

‡--Also political, economic, ..., matters--the list goes on. Frankly, the lack of respect for disciplinary expertise has been a source of much chapping to me for a long time.

In the coverage of Hurricane Rita*, I find it interesting that the Saffir-Simpson numerical scale (1-5) is getting so much prominent mention. What annoys me about the numerical prominence is the belief/fear** that ordinary people are going to start treating these scores like earthquake survivors treat the Richter scale: by bandying about numbers ("It felt like about a 6.1.") like they have any idea what those numbers actually mean. Any day now, I expect to see Brian Williams interviewing a bedraggled Houstonian who says something like "They said it was a 5, but it felt like a 4 by the time it got here.". If you're not a practicing meteorologist, or someone with enough of an understanding of weather to comprehend what this numerical shorthand means, stick to "It was real windy! And rainy too!".

Better yet, get out of the way. It's not like hurricanes catch minimally-aware people by surprise.

*--Gotta love hurricane news (I imagine that the announcement that a tropical depression is forming is cause for much ambivalent excitement at The Weather Channel. Except for the guys who have to go out and stand in the rain.)--there aren't many news stories where you get a week's advance notice.

Once again, my talents as a critic take a hit. Today/yesterday, a Shell gas station in Wailua on Kauai* dropped its price per gallon to $3.279. That was a drop of 50¢ in a single day--exactly the kind of thing I was claiming never happened. I hope the folks calling the shots at the Albion Shell are paying attention.**

However, redemption is not far away. The new TV season started officially last night, and the first three new shows I watched have all failed the Minneapolis Test (The Markives, 5 November 02004). Fox's "The War at Home" appears to have a Long Island base (this discerned from the area code of a non-555 phone number that showed up in the first episode) without any need. On CBS, "How I Met Your Mother" makes no effort to hide its hometown, and while "Out of Practice" wasn't blatant about this, the reference to traveling to a World Bank protest on the subway tells me what I need to know, until and unless they clarify things.***

Speaking of the new season...My TV Deathwatch is back on. Each year, I watch the TV critics' columns quite closely, looking for the first new show to be canceled. (Hey, someone has to.) Here's the current collection:

Season Show Network Episodes/Notes
02009-02010 The Beautiful Life CW 2 (updated 25 August 02010)

02004-02005     Studio 7                                                 WB                    7 (debuted in July, canceled 9/2/4)
02003-02004     The Brotherhood of Poland, NH         CBS                   3
                             Luis                                                        Fox                    4
02002-02003     Push, Nevada                                       ABC                  7 (canceled ~10/22/2)
                            That Was Then                                     ABC                   2 (“on hiatus”–never returned)
                            girls club                                                Fox                     2 (canceled 10/29/2)
02001-02002     Danny                                                   CBS                   2
02000-02001     Tucker                                                   NBC                   4
01999-02000     The Mike O’Malley Show                    NBC                   2
01998-01999     Costello                                                Fox                     4

As with my State of the Union records, there are a few earlier shows on my list (Anyone remember "Angel Falls" or "The Montefuscos"? I didn't think so.) but some gaps remain. Tracking these things has become a bit trickier the past few years, what with Fox tweaking the start of the fall season, and thus the early cancellation date cutoff, by more than a little bit. I've found myself turning to "# of episodes" as a separate criterion--if a show debuts late but runs fewer episodes than the first official cancellation, it goes on the list. That's what makes 02002-02003 so cluttered.

*--As it happened, I bought no gas there during my recent Kauai sojourn. I'll have to go back and throw some business their way as a thank-you. Really. It'll be my pleasure.

**--I'll be happy to show them how to connect to KQNG's Internet broadcast, which fills the air in my office during the days. As does this: (photo courtesy of Albion College--soon to appear in an alumni newsletter)

***--Suggested new hometowns, respectively: Omaha (why not?) Chicago (there was a reference to finding a train station, hence we need good public transportation), and Minneapolis (lots of doctors means decent Mayo Clinic tie-in).

A couple of amusing developments for the new fall television season have caught my eyes and ears. In an odd effort to gain some traction in the increasingly messy TV market, ABC and Fox* have greenlighted shows with very-oddly-named lead characters.

1. ABC's "Commander in Chief" features a female President of the US** whose first name is, implausibly, "Mackenzie". With an exception or two aside, I submit that almost every Mackenzie in America is a lot more worried about what she's going to wear to her junior prom than about the messiness of governing this country. (Appropos of nothing, it's worth pointing out to the trendoids that the prefix "Mac-" means "son of", which puts the recent "Mackenzie" glut among young girls in its properly-mocked place.)

2. In the other direction, Fox has cleared a show called "Bones" with a lead character named "Temperance". Unless this show is set in Salt Lake City or 18^th century New England--which it's not--this makes no sense.

I understand (I think) what ABC's up to--they're trying to make that character sound modern. They've succeeded in making her sound like a 10-year-old. Not the best way to go for someone who, from the few clips that I've seen out there, is spending a lot of time trying to convince people that she's capable of handling the job. She should start by changing her name. This Mackenzie thing won't become an issue for the country for about 40 years, of course--right around the time that the nursing homes of America will be filling up with Amy's and Debbie's, which will be another amusing name shift.

Fox completely escapes me, though. If every episode includes ol' Temper (and using an archaic name like that would be just barely under the threshold of acceptable if she actually goes by that nickname) explaining her name with the line "My parents were idiots" or some variation, I'll let this one go. I don't think that will happen.

It's time for a reality check here--and this has an actual track record. Back in 01989, ABC launched a sitcom (about which I've written before) called "Anything But Love" whose female lead was named "Hannah". She turned 30 in an 01990 episode, thus placing her birth year as 01960. Some enterprising pre-I'net researcher did some serious digging and claimed that no Hannah's were born in the greater Chicago area (the location of the show and of the character's roots) in 01960.*** It's hard to vouch for the accuracy of this research, but a quick check with the Social Security Administration turns up "Hannah" as name #928 on the list of popular girls' names for that year, so if not completely true, this is surely not far off.

The effort to give a fictional character a certain image with a name that is totally out of step with the time frame of the show needs a name. While the obvious "anachronym" has been scarfed up for other purposes^†, I propose^‡that we take that term over for offenses of nature like this. Until and unless I come up with something I like better, that is.

*--Nitpicking: Until such time as Fox sees fit to program the 10-11 P.M. (Eastern) hour again (they did, briefly, on Sundays in 01992-3, giving us two shows I and very few others enjoyed: "Flying Blind" and "Woops!"), they're a minor-league network as far as I'm concerned. No matter how many Super Bowls they air.

**--Ground previously trod by ABC with "Hail to the Chief", starring Patty Duke. There may well be no new ideas left...

^†--Most of which seem to play off the similarity in sound to "acronym", which wastes the etymology of the prefix "anachro-".

^‡--I subscribe to logologist Dmitri Borgmann's maxim that, as a long-time user of the English Language, I have the right to coin a word now and then.

First things first: According to this site, the depths of which are crying out for plumbing in a later post, "Katrina" ranked #281 on the most popular names for newborn girls in 02004. The name peaked at #87 in 01982 and has been on something of a downward trend since 01985 (#93 that year). Recent events aren't going to help reverse that.

One of the more interesting things I have heard in Katrina coverage was a complaint yesterday from some New Orleans citizens that their city was being shortchanged in relief efforts--I can't find the article to link to, but the essence of their complaint was comparative: that if New York or Chicago had been affected, the response by the government would have been, somehow, "better"**. I submit that that's not a comparison among equals; that if we look at a more accurate set of comparative cities, New Orleans gets off far better than its peers.***

Version 1: There's no doubt that New Orleans is getting more attention that its fellow-sufferers in Mississippi and Alabama. No one not directly involved seems too concerned about the decimation of the gaming industry in Biloxi (although the reality that restricting casinos there to water-based operations might have been a bad move has received the play it deserves) or the devastation in the rest of that state. As someone else has so rightly said, having the French Quarter and an NFL franchise has focused a lot more attention on N.O. than on other stricken areas.

Version 2: For a more detached approach, consider this: My 02005 World Almanac states that, according to the latest-available data, New Orleans is the 34th-largest city, by population, in America. #33 is Albuquerque, NM, and #35 is Cleveland, OH. If a disaster of similar magnitude had struck either of those two towns, I sincerely doubt that there would be anywhere near the reaction that we're seeing today. No one would be suggesting that the Super Bowl be moved permanently to Ohio, or that the Republican party should book its 02008 convention for New Mexico. (Or vice versa--thus giving a little more credence to the "an NFL franchise matters" theory.) Indeed, I would submit that the question of "should we consider not rebuilding New Orleans" wouldn't be anathema if asked about Cleveland--folks would be far more inclined to say "Let it go!", and there wouldn't be very much outrage at all outside of northern Ohio.

On a semi-related^† note, I was watching CNN last night for over 3 hours (while being held hostage in a bar in Kalamazoo), and the news in the crawl all night was almost entirely about the aftermath of this hurricane. On the one hand, that was certainly newsworthy. On the other hand, a roll call of corporations and what they're donating to hurricane relief becomes, if this is possible, even less interesting the second (third, fourth,...) time through. And they never mentioned Bob Denver's death. Not once. It seems like the passing of a man who's never been off television since 01959 might merit a brief mention on television somewhere along the way.

*--For some reasons that are clear now (I know at least one person in the affected area.) and some that may become clear in the near future, this is a developing story that I'm following pretty closely.

***--Leaving aside, for the time being, the reality that crises are generally seen, in hindsight, to have been mishandled.

What do you get when you cross a catastrophic hurricane with a sportswriter who's looking at spending a week and a half in Detroit this coming winter?

For those of you not clicking through right away, this is a proposal that, once New Orleans gets rebuilt and throws up** a new football stadium, the NFL should simply make the Crescent City the permanent home for the Super Bowl. And if I could look forward to an all-expenses-paid junket every winter, I might think this is a good idea.***

Needless to say, I don't. This is approximately on the level of the equally-dimwitted proposal that the New York Yankees simply be awarded the 02001 World Series title without playing the games, on the grounds that it might help the city recover from the 02001 terrorist attacks to be awarded something it didn't earn.^†

Leaving out my previously-stated antipathy to domed stadiums in southern cities (12 October 02004), this idea is a financial windfall that no city deserves. Indeed, given the amount of money said to pour into a city hosting the Super Bowl, I submit that the pendulum should swing in precisely the other direction: that the Super Bowl should be rotated equally among all 31 of the league's cities (New Jersey may have two teams, but since they play in the same stadium, they get one game between them.). That, however, isn't going to happen--climate considerations alone guarantee that there won't be an outdoor Super Bowl in the north until global warming gets a lot further out of control.

In order to move closer to an ideal, though, here's an alternate proposal: The Super Bowl should be on some kind of strict regional rotation schedule. And by "regional", I mean that the game comes to a legitimately northern city approximately once every six years (3 out of 40 isn't enough), and that metro San Francisco/Oakland is not counted as a northern city. I'll go along with a requirement that northern Super Bowls be held indoors, if it is attached to a requirement that southern/western Super Bowls be outside. The implications of that rule for the folks ultimately charged with replacing the Superdome are left as an exercise.

***--Then again, I might not. I've been to New Orleans (during Mardi Gras, incidentally), and while it's a nice enough place to visit, I'm in no real rush to go back there--and that was before recent weather events. I readily admit that one who abstains from beverage alcohol^‡ might not be in the best position to appreciate some of the city's legendary ability to host a party. That having been said, they do make a good root beer down there.

^†--A mindset that represents a lot of what's wrong with the American educational system, but that's a matter for another day.

^‡--"Beverage alcohol" is another perfectly serviceable phrase that's fallen into disuse for no apparent reason.

Here in the hometown of The Markives, gasoline prices have topped $3/gallon for the cheap stuff with a vengeance, jumping from $2.799 yesterday to $3.199 today. With a sense that this sort of thing might be imminent, I filled up my tank on Monday night at the bargain rate of $2.719/gallon, leading me to wonder why it is that gas prices never go down by 48¢/gallon in two days.

As annoying as that is, it's not the point of this entry. As the sign monitors at the region's gas stations scramble to make sure they have enough 3's on hand (and the trendspotters suggest that a need for lots of 4's may soon be in the offing*), I have another issue to confront.

One of the most inane components of the recent media coverage of gasoline price insanity has been the repeated pointing out that "adjusted for inflation, gas cost more per gallon in 1980 than it does today". This may well be true** (I cannot, in good conscience, rail against what mathematics proves to be true.), but if you are like me and pretty much every American born since about 1962, you weren't buying a lot of gas in 1980. That being the case, it's difficult for me to find any sort of comfort in this economic pronouncement.

Actually, this seems to me to be an excellent opportunity to separate the baby boomers (membership in which I reject for myself) and the much-maligned Generation X. If this bit of economics matters to you, you're probably a baby boomer or older. If you were too young to be buying gas in 1980, and thus aren't capable of feeling any particular solace in this bit of calculation, 'tis X or something following*** for you.

*--Since it appears that "jawbone OPEC" is just another broken promise. Another list that's gotten a lot longer these days.

***--For a look at what some of those after-X folks think (and what I'm confronting daily), click here.

Seriously. According to a gaming supply company in Saginaw, MI, this is how my name is spelled (I use the terms "name" and "spelled" very loosely here). I don't know if this massive mangling occurred on this end (where the order in question ran through the campus services folks) or on theirs. I thought I had seen my name misspelled in just about every way possible (top prize, of course, going to "Marke" from my whirlwind trip through the ACT in 01981*--which echoed for months on address labels from colleges hoping to enroll me), but this one is one I never would have come up with.

What truly baffles me is how anyone else would have come up with this. It almost looks like something computer-transcribed from an OCR scan of someone's handwriting, which could probably account for the last name. But how you get a "t" in the middle of "Mark" escapes me. Somewhere, a cry for human intervention is going unheard.**

**--Not unlike when a credit card company claims that I've paid my bill in full, except for 2¢. A human would recognize that this isn't something someone would be likely to do; a computer has no such good sense. This kind of thing is why artificial intelligence research remains necessary--and why "artificial intelligence" continues to go hand in hand with "real annoyance".

Some commentary on the universe after a couple of weeks away from the e-world with CNN and Headline News as my primary sources for what's been going on:

1. I've been examining the TV listings from American Movie Classics* for several years now, and frequently commenting that a lot of the movies they show can't really be called "classics" in any meaningful sense of the term. (My examples include anything starring the Three Stooges, which only qualify as classic films if you're showing at least 5 of them in a row.) It appears that people with power in the cable TV world agree with me, as Time Warner has now been supported by the New York Supreme Court in their contention that a cable channel showing fare like "Look Who's Talking, Too" can scarcely be called "classic". This decision clears the way for TW to drop AMC from their cable lineup, although it's unclear whether or not that's going to happen.

Good on Time Warner. I think there's a place for emerging classic films (it doesn't have to be old to be a classic, although I'm sure I'll disagree with the anointments of the film community on many occasions), but once again, we find the world tripping over my "test of time" criterion for greatness. If AMC was sold as filling the "classic film" niche--and it appears that they were--then they should be held to that standard.

2. I am as excited as anyone about the possible discovery of a tenth planet in the solar system. Not just because of my long-running interest in astronomy, where I've been reading about this possibility for over 30 years, either. After all of the false alarms provided by Kuiper Belt objects like Quaoar, Ixion, Veruna, and Sedna recently, it's nice to confirm that there's something larger (if, perhaps, not a lot larger) lurking out there. More importantly, this puts another dent in the ultimate pseudoscience that is astrology**. In the words of the late, great Douglas Adams:

Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day must take a bit of a

knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.

Not that this will matter a bit to astrology fans***, but the conclusion follows quickly. Back to Doug, from the same page in MH, and speaking on the discovery of a tenth planet:

Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that [astrology] was all a load of hogwash and

instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis?

Currently, this object has been dubbed 2003UB313, which is temporary and no name for a respectable planet. The discoverers have evidently proposed something to the International Astronomical Union that's being kept quiet for now, but they comment on their Web site that the obvious choice, Persephone, isn't available, having been used for asteroid #399. It seems to me that there's room for an exception here--a lot of folks have invoked Perri in science fiction involving a tenth planet (Mostly Harmless included), and I doubt that anyone will confuse the two on any serious level.

3. When reading or viewing a news story about a golf tournament, there are two things I want in the first sentence:

There is one thing I do not want to hear or see in the first sentence, unless it's covered under a. above:

c. How Tiger Woods, Michelle Wie, or Annika Sorenstam (as may be appropriate for the tournament in question) is doing.

Indeed, unless one of those three is in contention, I have neither the need nor the desire to know their status. And I mean realistically in contention. If you wouldn't inform me that David Ogrin is in contention with that score, spare me the information about them. This applies also to TV channels with golf news in the bottom-of-the-screen crawl.

It's the media's obsession with these three folks that is, ultimately and in my opinion, bad for golf as a whole. This applies, to a certain extent, also to auto racing. Lost in all of the Danica Patrick hype, at this year's Indianapolis 500 and subsequently, is the fact that she has yet to win a race on the Indy car circuit^†. Once again, excellence is forced to take a back seat to publicity.

*--Full disclosure: I hold a small grudge against AMC for the too-quick cancellation of their original series "Remember WENN" a few years back. The plurality, if not the majority, of my AMC viewing over the years has probably been that show. (I'm an easy target for pretty much any TV show set at a radio station--chalk that up to 4+ years in college radio.)

**--If the creationist zealots (excuse me, "intelligent design ~~advocates~~ wackos") were at all consistent, we'd see them lobbying for the teaching of astrology in the schools alongside other theories for personality development, or together with astronomy. We don't, which tells me what I need to know about the true aims of that crowd and exposes the "intelligent design" lie for what it is. And don't get me started on the whole "teach the controversy" idiocy. Among scientists, there is no controversy about evolution.

***--Full disclosure #2: There is astrology-based art in my living room. It was a gift from the artist, and is some very cool-looking stained glass that doesn't require any pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo to look good. You can just sit back and stare at the colors without having to buy into the claptrap buried deeply behind it.

^†--This applies also to Dale Earnhardt Jr. and NASCAR, although the hype surrounding him is slightly more justified and has, thankfully, diminished somewhat.

News Item: In addition to awarding the 02012 Summer Games to London*, the International Olympic Committee dropped baseball and softball from the 02012 lineup.

I shall pass over without much comment the inevitable complaints from the "woman: good :: man : bad" school of thought: in this case, the whining that it's unfair to cut women's sports so long as women comprise fewer than 50% of Olympic athletes. You can't force people to watch (or, for that matter, to care about) anything--and make no mistake about it: the Olympics are about making money for someone. I don't agree with that decision, but I can't object to a lot of the arguments that went into it (facilities issues, especially).

I have for years held that streamlining the Games could be easily achieved by applying one simple test:

If the outcome of the event in question is determined entirely by human judges, it's not a sport,

it's a judged exhibition. That being the case, it has no place in the Olympic Games.**

For the Winter Olympics, this spells the end of figure skating in all its permutations, including ice dancing; and certain acrobatic skiing events. (Frankly, the presence of the word "acrobatic" is a good indicator that you're not watching a sport.) In the summer, we can wave goodbye to gymnastics, both rhythmic and acrobatic (See!); synchronized swimming; boxing; diving, including synchronized (Another red-flag word, that.) diving; and trampolining; and we can short-circuit the nascent boneheaded idea that ballroom dancers should be eligible for Olympic medals.***

This cuts down the number of participants enough to satisfy the very real concerns of IOC officials, and allows room to add a real sport or two. Nominations are now open.

Another absolute standard comes to us from Rockwood (The solutions are, of course, left as exercises for the viewer.):

One clarifying point needs to be made here (since it tends to come up when I present this argument in person): There will always be a need for human officials in sports--someone has to rule on whether the soccer ball crossed the sideline or whether the simultaneous crash, on the last quarter-lap, of 4 out of 5 short-track speed skaters merits a restart or not.^† However, they shouldn't be the final arbiters of the results under any but the most extreme of circumstances.

In closing: I don't remember where I first read this, but it fits my opinion precisely: The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius", which, being translated, is "Swifter, Higher, Stronger". There's nothing in there about artistic impression. To say nothing of style points.

*--I was rooting for Madrid among the finalists--I favor cities that have not yet hosted the Games, and I've followed everything that was wrong with New York's bid. Besides, the IOC wasn't about to put two straight Games in North America.

**--The Olympics are, of course, also a cultural and artistic festival. Move these weak-sister events there.

^†--Which was one of the highlights of the 02002 Games, in my opinion. Short-track skating may well be akin to Roller Derby on ice (I have no problem with that, of course, being something of a Roller Derby history buff.), but it carries a huge advantage over the long-track version of the sport: You can easily see who the winner is.

Click here--because you're never too young to have your face on the I'net. (Usual disclaimer: This takes time to load over a slow connection.)

Bruce Springsteen has proved himself visionary yet again. I speak here of his 01992 work "57 Channels (and Nothing's On)". The current state of much cable programming, where throwing together a list of items that somehow hang together, however weakly, passes for entertainment, indicates that we, as a culture, are there.
The Discovery Channel achieved something I wouldn't have thought possible a few days ago as this piece was germinating in my mind: they've come up with a list program more vapid than anything that E!* has yet come up with. I refer, of course, to their attempt to single out the 25 "Greatest" Americans.

Said search has, of course, already been suitably trashed (6 June) over in the other corner of the family e-space, and it would be the utmost folly for me to try to add to that. I shall look at the bigger picture. First, though, a disclaimer: I am as big a fan of lists, in printed form, as probably exists. Three volumes of The Book of Lists from the late 01970's/early 01980's are a favorite part of my library. However, as Woody Allen (channeling Socrates) once wrote, "What is evil but merely good in excess?".

There's probably a cable channel or two where this sort of obsession with the past fits in with the format--TV Land, for example, although in their case, there would seem to be hours of classic TV** that they could be re-airing instead of using up so much bandwidth on clip shows. The History Channel, probably--although they seem resistant to this trend. Good on them. The list is not much longer.

I suppose that this is a natural side effect of the evolution of cable television***--as the medium has become less about syndicated reruns and Australian Rules Football and more about "original" programming, such is the sort of thing we ought to expect. But that doesn't mean we have to like it.

The last straw for me in this arena was broken a while back by, of all stations, Comedy Central. I was mildly interested in their "100 Greatest Standup Comedians" list (although why it had to run over 5 days and be rerun each succeeding night, totaling 15 hours of programming in all, escapes me). I disagree with their choice of Richard Pryor at #1, but I recognize that an argument could certainly be made for him at the top.

Then they announced that, by some stroke of fate, coming up next was an hour-long performance by...Pryor. Coincidence? I think not. If the criterion for #1 was to have something languishing in the vaults at Comedy Central...well, let's just say that I didn't see that in the official rules. For better, worse, or otherwise, this is at least not the start of a trend on that channel.

There's never going to be an objective standard for best child stars, or celebrity trainwrecks, or any number of other things you can find by trolling the dial 24/7****. And while that may be the point of this new quasi-genre, it's not a point that the results justify.

**--With all of the hours of television that have filtered across cables and into the ionosphere over the years, there are thousands of hours that would pass most reasonable standards of excellence. Most of us could throw together a list of our favorites without much effort. Trio, I'm led to understand, recognizes this with "Brilliant But Canceled". However, Trio is not a channel in my "Enhanced Basic" cable package, so I take this on faith.

****--While I am usually ranting for excellence, I might be able to make an exception and get behind some efforts to put together really good lists of "the worst" of something--so long as it defined "worst" in the "so bad, it's good" sense of the term. From this side of it, I can't say I'm thrilled about the prospect, though--there's no evidence to suggest that it would be worth watching.

"Resistance", that is, to the notion that this little enterprise is a Weblog (abbreviation deliberately suppressed--some resistance remains strong). I stumbled across this MIT survey while running my usual circuit o' the I'Net today. It's an odd little piece of work--one of its features is that it browses your Web site, picks 5 links at random, and asks what they are and why you put them there. Ergo, some folks in Massachusetts will soon be puzzling out the "Indigo Ribbon Campaign" link from 28 January. Also the link to TV test patterns from 2 February.
We all contribute to knowledge in our own way, it would seem. On the other hand, I won't deny that, as a past*, present**, and future*** statistics teacher, the appeal of becoming one of these things I've been making people study was very strong.

Here's a little scale that treats the most obvious tangible product from the Department of Homeland Security with about as much seriousness as it deserves. (Click on the icon to see the rest of the scale.)

30 May 02005: The Chords Struck At Birth Grow More Distant, Yet We Strike Them Again And Again*

Time to back up a bit and update readers on some topics mentioned earlier in The Markives.

1. It turns out that the series finale of Everybody Loves Raymond did not qualify for an Emile Arturi Award for clunkiness (14 November 02004). On the one hand, good on them. On another hand (there will be more than the usual limit of two here; prepare to deal with it), the finale actually did something not seen much recently by not building up to some sort of grand closure. Indeed, one might view this in syndication years from now and not recognize right away that it was the finale.** It would be nice if that reignites a new trend in series finales, but somehow I don't see that happening.

On a third hand (see!), I am mildly disturbed by another failed television prediction of mine. I also said, recently, that the new prime time schedule at CNN's Headline News would crash and burn. Turns out that they're getting their highest ratings ever over there with their new lineup. That being the case, any further media predictions of mine should probably be taken with a grain of salt the size of a Buick.*** But, since I've never been fearful about making utterly pointless predictions, I'll go one further: It looks to me like Desperate Housewives is in danger of deteriorating like Twin Peaks did. That is to say, it's running a serious risk of being so caught up in its own expanding web of weirdness that ordinary viewers get turned off by the developing complications. We shall see. At this point, missing an episode leaves a pretty significant gap in your understanding (although double-stripping episodes on Saturday night is a nice backup option)--but not so much that the next week's installment is utterly incomprehensible. How long will that be the case?

2. I deliberately suppressed blogthings' "You Know You're from Detroit When..." list on 1 May 02005 because it didn't have the impact for me that the other one did. Since then, though, I've had a conversation that gave me an idea for an addition to that list.**** A friend of mine, recently transplanted to metro Detroit by marriage, reported that she called her husband on her way home and told him that she was "at the corner of Outer and Allen".

You know you're from Detroit/Downriver when you always refer to the road at Exit 3 off the Southfield Freeway^† as "Outer Drive".^‡

**--That was my experience the first time I saw the last episode of The Bob Newhart Show, many years after the fact. Until the final tag, where the cast members bid farewell to the audience, it wasn't completely clear to me what I was watching.

***--Either that, or just bet the other way. If that works, I get 10% of your winnings.

****--This actually works as a hypothetical "You Know You're From Downriver When..." item as well.

^†--If Outer Dr. has a number or some less clunky identifier, I'd like to know about it.

^‡--(Math geek alert!) Technically, what this incident tells us is that "If you don't always refer to that road as Outer Drive, then you know you're not from Downriver/Detroit." Since the contrapositive of a compound statement is logically equivalent to the original statement, and the rule above is indeed the contrapositive of what I've stated, we're on firm logical ground here. You may have to trust me on this, but what it comes down to is:( ~Q → ~P) = (P → Q).

On a TV commercial recently (can't remember the offender, alas), I saw a toll-free number consisting of 11 letters after 1-800, thus breaking my personally-experienced record of 10 that had long been held by 1-800-SAY WHITECO, somewhere along I-94 in Indiana**.

I suspect that most reasonable humans above the age of 10 or so understand that only the first 7 digits after the toll-free designator are processed by the telephone, so unless this is a massive experiment to see how much useless activity the American people can be tricked into***, it needs to end. Now. Unless someone's burying an area code in their alphanumeric code and getting a kickback from the telephone companies, there's no rational reason for having more than 8 characters in a phone number. (I'm reasonable enough that I'll go one more than 7. But only one.)

As long as we're talking about alphanumeric phone numbers, it's time to agree on where Q and Z go--I've seen them consigned to the 1 button, and I've seen Q shoehorned into the 7 and Z tacked onto the 9. Again, we as a planet need to pick a standard and stick with it--and then cut way back on alphabetizing phone numbers, which will have the undeniably cool effect of obsoleting a standard pretty much as it emerges.

Additionally, something needs to be done about actors and actresses (and those who write for them) trying to be cute about the fact that almost all phone numbers in movies and TV start with "555". (I agree with Roger Simon, who wrote once that he understands why this is done, but it still bothers him.) Just rattle off the three 5's and get on with the show--we don't need telephonic atrocities like The Cosby Show^† perpetuating the fiction that people under 80 still used names of exchanges (KLondike) in the late 01980's. Friends at least took a different angle with the "55-JIMBO" phone number in Season 1, but except for a wrong-number gag in the episode, this was also pointless.

*--In about a week, you should be able to Google that monstrosity and have this page come up. Sort of like what happens when you search the I'Net for "asparagus crayons" now. (Note that the quotation marks are important in that second search.)

**--This one's particularly vexing because 1-800-WHITECO would seem to be a reasonable alternative.

^†--One of the most overrated television shows of all time, in my opinion, by the way. But that's a matter for another time.

There's an error in today's Doonesbury strip--B.D. is evidently so disoriented by his loss of a leg that he's calling his daughter the wrong name. I was toying with the idea of running an I'Net search to see if anyone else had pointed it out, then I decided to lead rather than follow.

The folks over at blogthings.com have put together lists like this for a wide range of locations and ethnicities. (There's a parallel "You Know You're From Detroit When..." list which just didn't ring as true to me.) Since they explicitly encourage and facilitate copying, here goes, with a certain amount of annotation:

*--Comedian Geechy Guy built a joke based on this into his act. It bombed the one time I saw it, probably because this list is correct and that joke doesn't work outside Michigan--and he was in Los Angeles at the time.

***--Another reach. I understand their point, but as far as I know (I admit, however to being only an amateur cook), everyone calls this stuff "baking soda".

****--Absolutely correct. I discovered this in college. It's too bad that so few of the people who know what a "millage" is don't know that it comes from "mill"--the so-called "bastard child" of the American monetary system.

^‡--This one indicates that the people who wrote this aren't really from Michigan. In my experience, Michiganians (not "Michiganders") are just as likely to point to their right palm as to the back of their left hand when discussing geography. What amazes me is when comedians mention this and act surprised that the state is shaped like a mitten. Jeff Foxworthy and Kevin Nealon are guilty here.

^¶--I always refer to "metro Detroit", or "the Detroit area" when discussing my origins--unless I'm talking to people who are likely to know where Allen Park is. Not because I have any objections to being from "Detroit", but because it's accurate.

^§--For many people, "Up North" starts a lot further south than that. Lansing, for example.

^§§--Honestly, I don't think that this term has a long history in Michigan itself. I don't remember hearing it until at least the 01990's.

That would be me* and the Detroit Free Press. I saw word of Alex Trotman's death yesterday on their front page, and was immediately reminded of his appearance on the second episode of Michael Moore's TV Nation program about a decade back. On this episode, Moore challenged corporate CEO's to perform the simple tasks at the root of their businesses--Alex was the only one who took the challenge, and he successfully changed the oil in a Ford Bronco** before the cameras, winning a golden putter for his efforts. I was quite pleased to see that that event got mentioned at the end of the obituary***.

Maybe there's some hope for my ongoing quest to get the world to lighten up after all.

*--For those questioning the greatness of my mind, one more time: My site. My rules.

**--I think it was a Bronco, not an Explorer as the Free Press article said. I'll check on that. (I have the episode on videotape somewhere.) It was certainly not a Jeep, as Time magazine claimed in their 01994 review of the show.

***--The Detroit News obit didn't mention this important fact. Make of that what you will.

Click here. The green region in the upper right corner is Sudman Park. If you look closely, you can just make out Manhattan Island and the parental magnolia tree. If you stare hard enough, you can see the backyard putting green--I think. I may be deluding myself into seeing what I know is down there.

Those of us who have been reading Foxtrot this week are familiar with what's going on here. Some of us, however, might just regard the whole thing as "spooky".

In the interests of equal time, click here for a picture of Thomson, GA that I'm pretty sure includes Dan & Anne's house. The satellite images aren't available any further down (just as they aren't for Albion).

It's nice of the people at Google to make this stuff available for free, thus giving American taxpayers some decent tangible return on the billions of dollars we've pumped into the space program over the years. HBO and other satellite TV stations need to do the same--we footed the bill for almost all of their R&D, yet we're still charged a monthly fee for their programming.

In his seminal first book Braindroppings, George Carlin expresses his deep hope that, within his lifetime, a new Pope will choose the name "Corky". Specifically, "Corky IX"--the thinking there being that he'd have to jump right to #9 to give the name some credibility while shaking up the Catholic Church. We can only hope...

Since this is one of the few times in most of our lives* that the papal name selection process is more than an academic question, and since there's still a week before the conclave starts, some speculation on this vital issue might not be amiss. Part of my thinking is inspired by a recent Time magazine article listing the entire roster of past Popes. In addition to containing the name of the first Pope not currently a saint (Liberius--evidently there was some scandal during his turn at the wheel), it included the revelation that there have been five Popes bearing the name "Sixtus".

Here, then, is an opportunity for some cardinal** with a streak of whimsy. "Pope Sixtus the Sixth" is ready for the taking. (An I'net search clouds the question***, but the official list o' popes includes only 5 Sixtuses [Sixti?].)

I fear that we're in for "John Paul III' when this all comes down, which only serves as a reminder of what Albino Luciani had in mind when he became JP the first. His mission, of course, was to recognize his two immediate predecessors. I pointed out at the time^† that this was a dangerous precedent that, if it caught on, would lead to his successor being "Paul John Paul", then "John Paul Paul John Paul", and so on. Unless the new guy goes with "John Paul John Paul" (which I suspect is a little too far out there for even the most whimsical candidate), another quirky Vatican tradition will have died an early, although probably not premature, death.

*--Ten times or less, I would imagine--although events of 01978 dealt a blow to the notion of papal longevity, and current speculation swirling around VC seems to suggest that this question will crop up more frequently in the future.

**--Yes, I know that it's not necessary for the College of Cardinals to elect a Pope from among their ranks.^¶

***--On the other hand, it points one to a lot of good tongue-twister sites. "Pope Sixtus VI's six texts", for one.

^‡--For a complete explanation of what's wrong with the name "Kryslyn", one needs to navigate to this site's "Bottom 25" list, where the name checks in at #11. Kakinston's also there, at #23.

^¶--If they were to suffer a massive lapse of reason and tap me, I'd keep my own name. "Pope Mark" has the right ring to it, it breaks new ground in papal monikers, and I'm not going to second-guess the people who came up with that name.

With the death of Pope John Paul II, head of (among other things) Vatican City, on Saturday and the passing of Monaco's Prince Rainier this morning, all I can say is this: If I were a citizen of Andorra, I'd be watching my leader's health very closely these days. Same goes for the head honchos in San Marino, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Palau*, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands**.

I scoff at those people who believe that celebrity deaths come in threes (for one, the definition of "celebrity" in those pronouncements is just way too loose to be taken seriously***), but as a long-time micronation ~~geek~~ aficionado, this coincidence is too interesting to let pass without comment.

*--Another nation where my knowledge of trivia has been co-opted by the folks at Survivor.

**--I still intend to get to these last three countries sometime relatively soon.

***--For example, Saul Bellow and Johnnie Cochran take it to four without even breathing hard.

I was zipping about the TV dial* last night and came across ESPN2 living up to the "Entertainment" portion of its initials** by televising the Collegiate Dance Team Championship, which is certainly not sports. While I was thinking about how it must be annoying to be in charge of a cable sports channel on a night when the day's major sporting event is the province of broadcast networks (as was the case last night with the NCAA semifinals)***, I saw an item in the crawl at the bottom of the screen:

This was not news to me by 10 PM, but then I realized something interesting^†:

John Paul II is the first Pope in history to have his death announced on ESPN2.

Despite all of the firsts being attributed to Karol W. these days, I suspect no one else will come up with this one.

**--Initials, not an acronym. An acronym (RADAR, SCUBA) is pronounced as a word. And don't get me started on the people who have named their kids "Espn". Idiocy does not an acronym make.

I refer here to the National Anthem Project, which is intended to get Americans to learn all four verses* of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and the inevitable carping in news accounts that the anthem is too hard to sing. The music shouldn't matter. I don't claim to be a zealous American patriot**, but it seems to me to be enough that the anthem is sung with feeling. Technical precision, while a nice bonus, isn't a necessary requirement.

With the recent attention that the NAP has gotten has come the inevitable complaining that we should just chuck TSSB all together and pick a new national anthem. Those people are wrong. I've heard the arguments, and they don't stack up against my sole criterion:

I mean, by the way, a nice brassy instrumental rendition, not the gauzy track that was played in Athens in 02004. The leading contenders (God Bless America, America The Beautiful) are sleep-inducing tunes that simply don't make it when measured against this standard. Don't even get me started on God Bless The USA.***

*--For the record, I know all of the first verse, almost all of the fourth, and enough pieces of the second and third that they add up to almost one more full one. Why I've learned it in this order is a mystery, but I'm working on the rest. More as a memory challenge than as any display of patriotism, but this isn't an essay question.

**--Looking at some of the atrocities perpetrated over the last week or so by a lot of people who would wrap themselves in the flag and bear the "zealous American patriot" mantle with (too much) pride, I'm not sure if that's an aspiration worth having. Sort of like my take on the environment vs. my take on environmentalists.

***--Okay, one comment: Those who would seriously propose this piece of work for anthem status are, to my mind, exactly the type of people against whom John Kerry was railing last year when he pointed out the difference between declaring that God is on our side and aspiring to be on God's side. No doubt about it, Kerry will be remembered as another losing Presidential candidate whom America wasn't good enough to deserve. Strange how that list has gotten a lot longer in the last two election cycles.

No disrespect intended to those with a genealogical connection to St. P.; it's just that I firmly believe that this holiday (and others of its ilk) should be left to people who have a legitimate connection to it. If we're free to adopt nationalities on a whim, I'd rather have been faux-Finnish yesterday, for St. Urho's Day. This has the nice advantage of being a completely artificial holiday for all of us. (Ordinarily, I would rant against fake holidays, but I'll make an exception for an excellent prank like this one.)

*--I'm a little sorry to see this form of negation (used by Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live in the late 01970's long before Wayne's World took it to the forefront of popular culture) fall into disuse. There's a quiet elegance in its spare language that I miss--and it's a nice teaching tool.

Tonight, we have two chances for the scenario I posted on 26 February to come true. In a curious coincidence*, both of the games involve teams from here in Michigan. In the Mid-Continent Conference championship game, Oakland University** takes its 11-18 record into a match with Oral Roberts University, and can advance to the NCAA tournament (probably--nay, almost certainly--the Dayton play-in game) with a win. Over in the Horizon League final. Detroit Mercy*** is one win from the tournament at 14-15 as they prepare to take on Wisconsin-Milwaukee tonight.

Technically, UDM would have been an acceptable conference tournament qualifier under my plan, because they posted a 7-7 regular season conference record. Press accounts today are focusing on the Titans peaking at the right time--which is not what I believe postseason play should be rewarding. Oakland is a different matter entirely. With a 9-18 regular season record, you should be settling in to study this week, not nurturing active pipedreams of playing basketball next week.

That having been said, I'll be rooting for both Michigan teams tonight. Partially because I'm a loyal fan of state teams^†; partially because if both win, that would make for an interesting game in Dayton next Tuesday (should "The Committee" think the way I'm thinking, and should no other trainwrecks break into the field of 65); and partially because it'll take multiple travesties in a single year to get this situation reworked the way I think it ought to be. In short, there's a lot of reasons to hope this plays out badly.^‡

*--As both Ron Shock and George Carlin have pointed out, this sort of thing is a coincidence, not irony.

**--The Oakland University Name Watch continues. As the institution has raised its profile (not merely athletically), there's occasional commentary from Rochester that they're too often thought of as a California school. I favor "Southern Michigan University", but at the same time, I don't see that happening.

***--Which can't seem to get the world to use its correct name. Maybe some national exposure would change that.

^†--Toward that end, congratulations to Rochester College on their second straight USCAA Division I national basketball title.

Just a couple of things that have been on my mind recently but haven't morphed into a full-blown entry. In a sense, this is intruding on the original meaning of "Out of my mind on Monday Moanin'"--but since the originator isn't around to object, and the family member using the name isn't in a position to challenge me*, I figure I'm on safe ground.

*--Meaning, of course, that he's at least four states away and that I control whether or not anything he writes makes it to his version of MM.

**--Another cultural infection that has run its course (see The Markives from 7 February).

ESPN is gearing up for college basketball's conference tournament championship week, where the final games of obscure conferences' tournaments are given cable airings, and players from little-known schools celebrate just making into the 65-team field for the Division I basketball tournament. Then they take a week to a week and a half off before getting blown out in a first-round game against a legitimate basketball powerhouse.*

There's so much wrong with the conference championship system that I haven't got the time to collect all the objections here. Let's start with the annoying phenomenon that, every once in a while, a team with a losing record over the course of the season gets hot in a tournament and plays its way into the field of 65 despite losing more than half its games. At this point, it's difficult to believe that the tournament field is an exercise in basketball excellence.

Once again, I have an easy fix (Imagine that!). Put a rule in place that says that conference tournaments, if held at all**, cannot include teams who have won fewer than half of their conference games. A .500 record against comparable schools doesn't seem to me to be too much to ask to gain the reward of postseason play.*** And this would limit the number of truly bad teams winning three games at the right time to move forward. At the same time, it would reinforce the value of the regular season in the traditional low-level, one-bid conferences. (Membership in these is, I suspect, occasionally determined by a quest for easy tournament entry. Here's an example. Take a look at the roster of schools [past and present] and tell me what the connection is between a university in suburban Detroit and one in southwestern Utah.^†) There is something wrong with the idea of a low-profile team going 22-4 in its regular season, then tripping in a first-round tournament game and staying home for March Madness while an 11-18 team moves on.

There should always be a place for excellence in athletics, and practices that diminish that need to be changed.

If that rule doesn't work for people, I have another: Put in a rule that says that if a team with a losing regular-season conference record wins its conference tournament, then the conference gets only that one bid. That could send some fear into SEC hearts someday--imagine the consternation that might ensue if 8-16 Georgia (records current as of noon EST today) faced off in the final game against 21-3 Kentucky, with absolutely everyone not from Athens, GA rooting hard against the Bulldogs. (This doesn't address the problem in the "one-bid" conferences, but someone having the nerve to take an actual shot at the big conferences might trigger a ripple effect down the line--and move those conferences toward some version of my Rule One.)

There's no chance of the NCAA approving this rule, but if it went in, I bet you'd see the first rule I suggested being adopted all over the land.

*--Or, in one case, winning the play-in game (between the two absolute worst teams in the field) in lovely Dayton, OH before absorbing that first-round shellacking.

**--Part of me says just to get rid of the tournaments altogether, but there's too much money around for that to happen.

***--And it is a reward. Remember that only the first game of a conference tournament needs to be counted against a team's season schedule limit.

^†--In a curious twist of fate, I have visited both of these campuses in the past year.

News item: CNN reports that this year's crop of Best Picture Oscar nominees is truly lagging in box-office draw. They seem to think this is a surprise.

Not to me. I submit that there are two reasons for this general trend (it may be more noticeable this year, but it's not a surprise to me). They vary in importance from year to year, but usually leave us with a cluster of Best Picture flicks that are, at best, obscure when they're announced.

Reason 1: The silly requirement that, to be eligible for Oscar consideration, a movie must only have been released in Los Angeles County, for a week. This is yet another farce.* There's a world--a country, at least--beyond Los Angeles. Someday, the film industry will realize that. The net result of this rule is that we get a slew of "serious" movies released at the end of the year, only in California (and occasionally New York), just to be eligible. When it takes a while for a movie to get to wide release, and when so many Oscar-type movies barely meet that minimum one-week standard, the only reason it should be a surprise to anyone that "Best Picture nominee" is frequently equivalent to "Low box-office draw" is if they don't know the rules, or aren't paying attention.

Fortunately, this one is easily fixed. Change the rule so that a movie has to be released in each of the 50 state capitals for some specified length of time--I'd like it to be more than a week, but it may be tough to change that right away. (The Grammy awards have a September 30 cutoff for the following February's awards show--this is a strategy worth emulating.) At least we will be spared the phenomenon of the list of nominees consisting largely of movies no one living more than 10 miles from a ocean has ever heard of.

An advantage here is that the state capitals are a nice mix of major cities (Boston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Denver) and smaller towns (Carson City, Salem, Montpelier**, Juneau***)--which might at least assure that a good representative mix of Americans would have more exposure to the nominees. I am, by the way, fully aware that the Oscars aren't a popularity contest, but there's no reason why they should be an unpopularity contest.

Reason 2: The Academy's indifference to, if not outright hostility toward, comedy, coupled with the public's enjoyment of a funny movie. In the last 30 years, the only comedies to take home the Best Picture prize have been Shakespeare In Love (01998) and Annie Hall (01977). Go back all the way to the beginning, and you'll find about 6 comedies. (This depends, of course, on your definition of "comedy" and your familiarity with the movies involved.) Say what you will about the Emmy Awards--and they get more cheap shots than they deserve over rewarding the same shows repeatedly--but there's a major awards show where comedy and drama are on approximately equal footing. The Academy Awards aren't even close.

On the other hand, I don't see any hope of ever changing that. There was some hope when the American Comedy Awards were launched in 01986, but they deteriorated so much over their run that I really don't think they've been missed since their 02001 demise.

*--It occurs to me that I use the word "farce" a lot in this forum. I write about things that strike me as funny, that's why. Most of the time, it's not intended as an insult.

**--Montpelier, VT is noteworthy as the only state capital without a McDonald's.

***--Which is again facing a challenge from advocates for moving Alaska's capital to a different city. The fact that it can't be reached by road is, to me, at least an argument for discussing the matter.

I mentioned a few days back that, to my way of thinking, beige is not a color. Let me explain why. To put it simply, if it's not in the original Crayola 48-pack, it's not a color as far as I'm concerned. If you're clicking through, scroll down to the second batch of colors; the set labeled "Colors Available 1949-1957". (Once again: My Web site. My rules.)

That excludes beige. And blond/e. And--and this is the one I find cropping up most frequently--teal. Crayola's early merger of the primary and secondary colors (except for complementary colors, of course--no "orange-blue" or "green-red" out of their factory) in both orders* should have been the end of discussion on the topic. Alas, it hasn't played out that way--and it bothered me immensely when the crayon giant succumbed to trendiness and reworked the 48-pack in 01990**.

1. Naming crayons after food is a bad idea. To quote Wayne Cotter: "Like kids aren't eating enough of these already?". I'll make an exception for orange, even though orange was named orange because of oranges; it's not like the orange was named orange because of orange. (To decode that sentence [and see its original appearance in print/e-print], click here.) This is one area where Crayola*** went off the deep end with a lot of their new colors--and that is what happens when you let the public decide important things like crayon names. "Macaroni and cheese", "Granny Smith apple", "Asparagus" (all added in 01993), and "Cotton candy" (01998)--among others--are foodstuffs^†, not colors. Given that we have scented magic markers--thus blurring the line between sight and other senses--how many crayons have been eaten because kids thought that the label indicated a flavor?^‡

2. I'm willing to allow the use of "dark" and "light" to modify color names from the basic list of 48, when done reasonably. Guidelines should be apparent to any thinking human being. "Dark white" isn't reasonable. "Dark aqua" is--and thus we have a solution to the whole "teal" question. Even Crayola had some sense here--they retired "teal blue" in 02003 following a bizarre "vote four colors out of the box" contest. On the other hand, I don't think the replacement, "wild blue yonder", was much of an improvement.

3. Computer and video game systems with the ability to display 16,777,216 (that's 256³) colors are fooling no one. No one can reasonably tell the difference between (RGB = 217, 88,145) and (RGB = 218, 87, 146), for example. They're either both pink or both magenta. Again from Wayne Cotter: "Kids paying a lot of money to look at a lot of different colors--does that remind you of any decade in particular?".

**--Part of that was because I'm a loyal Michigan alumnus, and maize was one of the colors that got the ax. Only part, though.

***--I hold no animosity toward the good people of Crayola--but when your product is #1 in market penetration in homes with children (Lego, by the way, is #2.), your visibility makes you a somewhat obvious source of examples. They don't deserve to be a target, though.

^†--I agree with George Carlin that this is a word that you don't hear enough these days.

^‡--All right, I'll concede that probably not too many asparagus crayons have been eaten.^¶

^¶--I just did a Web search on "asparagus crayons" and came up empty. I suspect that that won't last for long now...

Two quick thoughts on the madness in and around yesterday's Super Bowl (in which any loyal reader could deduce that I was rooting for Philadelphia):

1. The coin toss was a farce. I don't know if I'm out in front of the curve on this one or not, but that was a disaster. For those who weren't paying rapt attention, an approximately 8-year-old kid from metro Jacksonville was assigned this task. He tossed the coin in the air as directed by the referee, but it did not spin. From a purely probabilistic perspective, there's a chance that that may not have mattered a lot--if the coin bounced after landing, there may have been just barely enough randomization. However, it looked bad.

Of course, I'm willing to bet that not too many people noticed (although one of my students reported seeing it, this morning when I brought it up in a discussion of combinatorics and probability).

2. The Super Bowl commercial hype is officially over. The excitement of the commercials hit its peak before the wave of media obsession crashed down upon it. Very much like what has happened to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue over the years. When that wasn't such an omnipresent media spectacle, it was considerably more entertaining--including the irate letters from middle school librarians two weeks later. Now, those same complaining letters just seem hopelessly out of touch with the world. Much the same phenomenon has hit SB advertising--there are now, it seems, almost as many "Ad Report Card"s as there are game stories. And that's just wrong.

Some of the world pauses to hear what our President has to say about stuff, and the assembled government officials prepare for a good workout, pointlessly rising and applauding over and over. Me? My interest in the State of the Union address will end in about the first four minutes of the television coverage, when they announce which Cabinet member has been detailed not to attend the speech and thus to take over the country in the event of a massive disaster at the Capitol that wipes out the rest of the Presidential line of succession. Then I'll switch over to something more interesting.

I rather like this little tradition, that the entire line of succession can never be in one place at the same time. Personally, if I ever make it to the Cabinet (I'd really like to be Secretary of the Treasury someday. Long enough to get my signature [with arrow, of course] on the money.*), that's an assignment I'd volunteer for. The idea of suddenly skyrocketing in importance and thus being guarded by the Secret Service in an undisclosed location, where the luminary is question is frequently watching the SOTU on TV and eating pizza, appeals to me.

I keep a list of these lucky Cabinet officials, which I'll be adding to tonight (and in the years to come):