Sketchy Saturdays

Some of the blogs I read are by comic book artists who try to include a daily sketch. Mike Wieringo used to post his daily warmup sketches as blog posts, and I followed them every day.

I know I simply don't have the time to do one every day, but I think I'm going to try to do one per week. I haven't drawn in I don't know how long, and this will at least force me to keep track of my pencil box better. It took 10 minutes to even find it. That's how long it's been since I drew something.

So, here's Dr. Sheldon Cooper from "The Big Bang Theory," one of my favorite TV shows. It's about geeks and I get every joke, so I feel like the show was written just for me.

Happy (Yawn) New Year

You know, I really don't care about New Year's Day. It's just a Hallmark holiday as far as I'm concerned. It's about as exciting as watching my odometer turn over every 10,000 miles and I don't go out and party when that happens, either.

Last night, my wife and I were reminiscing about New Year's in 2000 and how I was a grump when everyone around me was celebrating the new millennium. I said then, as I say now, was it really the new millennium? When you learn to count to 10, do you stop at 9 and say you're done? Do you stop at 99 and go, "Whoopie! I counted to 100?" Seems to me a millennium should be complete when the 1000th year in it is complete, not when the 999th year is at its close. Do people realize that the Gregorian calendar was adopted in different parts of the world at different times? Do they know that to change over from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, 10 days had to be skipped to make it consistent? That's right, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted, the four countries who adopted it first jumped from October 4 to October 15, 1582. This transfer wasn't adopted across the board, though. As each country adopted the new calendar, they had to skip days to catch up with the rest of the world. When Alaska was purchased from Russia by the US in 1867, they had to jump 11 days, repeating one of the days of the week because the International Date Line was moved. Holy Groundhog Day!

I guess my point is that it's not that big a deal to celebrate a new year for me, because it's really a contrived holiday based on math corrections. That said, I think it's kind of fun to whip out old calendars and post them in my classroom. Kids will start freaking out on Monday at school, wondering why the calendar says 1993. That's because 2010's calendar is identical to 1993's. There's even a cool little website, http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/ that can help you determine when your old calendars can be used again. Just hang on to them. The new year is so unexciting that identical years come back pretty often. I think it's more important to celebrate every day instead of picking some arbitrary point in the Earth's trip around the sun to have fun.

Now, I wonder what they'll think of my Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog calendar in 2021 when I can reuse it?

2009 Year in Review

On January 1, I set goals instead of making resolutions, and although my goal of blogging every day didn't pan out, it's understandable why. This year has been painful, one of the most painful I've experienced. The death of my father is something I never quite overcame. It hit me far harder than I would have ever thought possible.

But through it all, I've had my family. My wife and my daughter are always there for me. They are the ones I rely on, the ones for whom I live and work. Watching my daughter grow daily is a thrill for me beyond anything else I can imagine. Seeing her change before my very eyes is more than I could ever have hoped for in becoming a father. My wife is fulfilling her life's dream of being a mother and it is a role for which she is perfectly suited. Every day that I am with them is a day of joy and a reason to celebrate.

Happy New Year!

PlayStation 3

"You bought a PS3?"

Those were the words that my niece said to me when I told her what I thought of my birthday purchase. My in-laws sent me money as they always generously do, and I thought the best use of it would be something for our family. Now, don't be snide. When I say that it's for the family, know that it resides in the living room where we can all enjoy it. That said, I can honestly say that I want another one!

The PlayStation 3 is a complete entertainment machine. Those who think of it as simply a videogame console are seriously underestimating its value. The PlayStation 3 is a Blu-Ray player and an upconverting DVD player. That means that it not only plays high definition Blu-Ray discs, but also takes normal DVD's and converts them into a format more easily viewable on high definition televisions, making them look even better than they do on normal TV's. I didn't buy a hard copy of "Watchmen" until we had the PS3, and I was right to wait. The Blu-Ray is as close to watching it at the IMAX theater as one can get and still get up to go to the bathroom whenever one needs to. We've rented a number of Blu-Ray movies from Netflix and wow, does it ever make a difference. When we are able to get a bigger HDTV, I doubt we'll ever go to the movies again. You can't beat the seats of our living room sofa, and when you add the open-flame oil popcorn popper that my wife bought me for Christmas, we won't be missing a thing by staying home. Plus, no one talks during the movie! Heck, we'll be saving a load of money even if we buy the Blu-Ray of every movie that we would normally go out to see.

The PS3 also connects wirelessly to your home computer network and herein lay one of its greatest values to us: As Netflix subscribers we can use our existing Netflix account at no additional charge to instantly view several thousand Netflix programs, some in high definition. They have movies, and best yet, episodes of many of our favorite television shows in HD, like "Lost" and "Star Trek." We can watch any episode of those shows in seconds on our television in HD just by clicking a few times. We've been using that to watch the fifth season of "Lost" on Tuesday nights and we have it timed so that if we now watch two episodes every Tuesday night, we'll be ready for the new season on February 2.

We also use the PS3 as a videogame system, though not to play the typical fare that most people would expect. As a family Christmas gift, we bought Rock Band 2 and for the past two days, we have been playing the heck out of it. Sera sings into the microphone (though we don't plug it in) while Magi plays bass, my niece Theresa plays drums, and I play guitar. We're not great, but it sure is fun!

I don't know what the future holds for home entertainment, but I bet it looks a lot like Sony's PlayStation 3.

Happy Life Day, Everyone!

Logan's Run

Great article about one of my favorite novels, Logan's Run, over here. Lots of information about the movie, TV show and comic book, too.

Four Days

I'm about to have four days off and I need it. After a week of graphing on the coordinate plane, using myriad examples of how two things relate at the same time, my students bombed a quiz last Friday. I had used Black Friday sales to illustrate the rising costs of a single DVD player and multiple DVD's purchased as an example. I used purchasing two differently-priced kinds of meat for a barbecue to show the ways that increasing the amount puchased of one necessarily leads to a decrease in the amount purchased of the other given a set budget. I had them each plot their own points in the relationships on the dry-erase board with magnets to ensure that no one was just sitting back not paying attention.

After the quiz I spent two more days talking about it and most did exactly the same today if not worse. I reached a few who doubled their scores, but for the most part, my extra effort went for nothing. When I reprinted the quiz, I changed the numbers and that was all the modifications I made. A kid turned his in and said, "When can I re-take that first quiz?"

And the next time I point to a horizontal or vertical line and ask what kind of line it is, and I get the answer, "Straight," I'm going nuclear. No Child Left Behind can kiss mine. That isn't my fault. How in blazes can 13- and 14-year olds not know what vertical and horizontal mean, especially after a week of instruction???

Star Trek, Part 1

One of my earliest memories is of watching the "Operation: Annihilate!" episode of Star Trek--what people now call Star Trek the Original Series. Since it was broadcast on April 13, 1967, I was only two and a half years old. The show was very appealing to a young child such as myself because there were lots of garish colors, both in the uniforms and the sets. I remember my mother babysitting for a pair of twins named Matt and Mark, and they had shirts with traffic lights on their left breasts. I used to call them their Star Trek shirts. I had one with a bear on the left breast, but the shirt was black so it didn't qualify.

In the 1970s, Star Trek made a big comeback in syndication. Daily reruns allowed those of us in Mrs. Burkholder's third grade class to discover Star Trek's imaginitive adventure and to recreate it in pretend play. We used to take the cardboard backs of our notebooks and draw phasers and communicators on them. Then we would cut them out with scissors and use them as props on the playground at recess. We were even more excited when the cartoon began that fall, as if it had given us license to create our own Star Trek adventures. We loved the fights, the ray guns, and the action of Star Trek. We didn't get that the point of science fiction was to create allegory and parables from which to learn, but the show gave us plenty of excitement nonetheless.

My brother and I, on one of our trips to our grandparents' house, received matching Mego action figures of Kirk and Spock, and together we had many adventures on distant planets. I don't know how many times we re-enacted "Amok Time," but it counted in the hundreds. We also got one of the first trade paperbacks when we found the Enterprise Logs in a bookstore. The trade reprinted the old Gold Key Star Trek series. We read that thing dog-eared.

For Christmas in 1976, Jeff and I got matching phaser pistols from our father. They were the coolest toys for the time. When you pressed the trigger, it made a chirping sound, which was more like a communicator than a phaser, but we didn't care. The phasers were also projectors that, using a cutout that you slid over the lens, projected a picture of a ship on the wall. I remember they took a nine-volt battery in the handles for the sound, and two double A's in the back for the light. My dad probably regretted getting us noise-making toys for Christmas, but the phaser remains one of my favorite toys of childhood. When I moved in with him a month later, Star Trek was still in reruns and I was lucky enough to find a book from the library, called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield. My dog ate the cover of the paperback so we had to buy the book, but I sure didn't regret it. I was able to check off all the episodes of Star Trek that I had yet to see. We only had a black and white TV, but it didn't matter. I knew what color everybody wore! In my spare time, I created my own starship based on some of the production drawings in the book. I crewed the ship with superheroes, so that made for some interesting daydreams, to be sure. It wasn't until later that I started to get the deeper meaning behind the show, but that time would come. And that understanding only reinforced my love for this show.

More to come.

Old Time Radio, Part 2

My interest in old-time radio and radio dramas waned in my college years. There just wasn't anything going on in my world. But when the Batman craze of 1989 came along, a couple of different items came to my attention and sparked my imagination. First, there were some cassette tapes adapting comic book stories that came out. The associated comic books came with them, and the tapes served to add an audio soundtrack. The first one I bought was an adaptation of the Untold Legends of the Batman. It was like the old Power Records, but there was no album cover.

As the next decade progressed, DC, Marvel, and even Disney kept putting out audio dramas. Stories like "Superman Lives!" as well as the "Complete Knightfall Saga," along with the Rocketeer were all adapted to audio dramas. Later on, we would even see one for "Kingdom Come." But the real fun came in 1994, when the theatrical version of "The Shadow" was released.

As I wrote about here and here, I loved the Shadow, on radio, in the movies, and in the pulps. But when the Alec Baldwin version came out, the radio shows made a huge comeback. A company called Radio Spirits started releasing audio cassettes and CDs of the old radio shows and I bought several sets of them. Then with the advent of the mp3 file format and the Internet, old-time radio was everywhere. Streaming sites popped up, and suddenly the world of old-time radio was no longer restricted to small gatherings with tape exchanges. Suddenly you could buy hundreds of episodes of long-forgotten shows on CD for pennies and listen to them on a computer.

When the deluge began, I started doing research on this. My limited exposure to War of the Worlds, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, and Superman, suddenly expanded. I started listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, The Saint, The Whistler, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet, and more. I found books on the subject, and read the history. The more I learned, the more I loved it. I started making connections

One of Jack Benny's supporting cast was lecherous bandleader Phil Harris, a bawdy southerner who constantly kept Benny, whom he called "Jackson," on his toes. The first time I heard the voice, I just about jumped out of my chair. It was Baloo the Bear from Disney's "The Jungle Book!" Not only was the voice the same, but the character was very much the same, a jazzy, hedonistic fun-loving guy who could sing scat. Amazing! Then, when listening to another episode, the unmistakable tones of Mel Blanc appeared in a voice similar to Speedy Gonzales. Then it hit me. The mice in "The Mouse that Jack Built," a 1959 Warner Brothers cartoon, were the characters from this same Jack Benny radio program! When I saw the cartoon as a kid, I had no idea that Jack Benny was a radio star! On the Fred Allen show, I caught Foghorn Leghorn in the form of Senator Claghorn. Then the floodgates came open. Many cartoons, whether on television or feature films, featured radio performers of old, many doing the same characters or voices that they were famous for decades before.

It wasn't only voices and characters that were brought back for cartoons. When Mr. Whoopee's closet would open on Tennessee Tuxedo and everything would fall out, I thought it was hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Fibber McGee and Molly from decades before and heard the same thing happen!

Just this past year I was rummaging through stuff in my basement and found cassette recordings of a role-playing game session from 1988. As I thought more about it this past week, I realized just what we were doing. The gamemaster describes the action and plays the part of the characters not portrayed by the players. The players describe their action verbally and act out their characters' roles, often using voices not their own. We're not dressing up and acting things out (like LARPers do), but we are doing radio drama. There are a few static images and figures on a map to keep track of where everyone is, but otherwise everything is done by voice and description. They called radio "The Theater of the Mind." I think it's still alive and well. It's just taken a new form.

Overheard

"It's been said that an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time would eventually recreate the works of Shakespeare. The Internet disproves that."

Old Time Radio, Part 1

When I was a kid, I spent some weekends with my mother's youngest brother Mike and his family. I still remember the first time I heard an old time radio show. My cousin Peter had a reel-to-reel recording of War of the Worlds, by the Mercury Radio Theater on the Air. I had never heard of radio drama before, so we listened to it. I remember sitting transfixed while the drama played. My mind conjured images of the Martian invaders and their three-legged war machines. After that, we listened to the Lone Ranger, who was my dad's favorite hero. The episode he played for me was the origin of the Lone Ranger, and again I was fascinated. The story of how the masked man came to be unfolded and I was hooked for life. I happened to have a cassette recorder that I had received for Christmas that year, and recorded both shows to take back home.

When I was a much younger boy, I had always enjoyed comedy albums. Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers, and Homer & Jethro were among my favorites. Bill Cosby, in his "Wonderfulness" album, used his old time radio experiences to great effect in his "Chicken Heart" routine. He also references the Green Hornet and Lone Ranger in the go-carts routine. Suddenly, these references began to make sense.

I soon started seeking out radio drama, but there was really nowhere to turn. There were the nighttime shorts on local radio featuring Chicken Man, the White Winged Weekend Warrior, but it was tongue-in-cheek. Once I saw that there was a Superman radio show from ads placed on the back of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for a record giveaway, I was really interested! I never had a chance of getting those records, of course, but that didn't stop me from looking longingly at it every morning during breakfast.

Then there were those great Power Records, which combined a large format comic book with an audio drama, remember those? Featured at right is a Star Trek book and record set that I used to have with cover art by Neal Adams. I used to get these whenever I could, especially when they came out with one for the Six Million Dollar Man. There's a guy who has a whole blog about just these items!

It wasn't until I was in high school that I really got a healthy dose of radio drama. That was when our local NPR station started broadcasting the Star Wars radio show. What's that? You didn't know there was such a thing? Oh, yes. I hurried home each night to listen to it on radio in 1981. It took the Star Wars story and expanded it, filling in gaps where the movie had been edited. There was the usual clumsy expository dialogue that radio has to use to paint the images in your mind, but it used the original sound effects and some actors from the movie, including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels. The actors who replaced the originals were no slouches, either. Brock Peters took the place of James Earl Jones, for example. You'd be surprised how good it really was!

More on this subject later. This is too much fun!

Catching Up

Things have not exactly been looking up since this post. So, here I am sick at home. First, my wife Magi had minor surgery, then Sera caught H1N1, then Magi caught H1N1. Somewhere in there, I probably had it too, but with lessened symptoms. After, let's see, two trips to urgent care, one surgeon's visit, and three other trips to the doctor and pediatrician, we can look forward to all of us being healthy for the first time since the beginning of October--maybe by this weekend. I guess it's a good thing I had a lot of sick days saved up, because I've taken at least two per week for four straight weeks. And health insurance? Yeah, it's paid for itself in the past month. I can't imagine what we would have paid out for our all-too-frequent visits these past weeks, between urgent care, ordinary doctor's visits and the subsequent prescriptions. It would have been quite the kick while we were already down.

The bright side of it is that I get to drink Mountain Dew mixed with orange juice and not feel guilty about calories. I've been catching up on TV watching and DVDs that I've been saving, including the DVD set for the 1973 Star Trek cartoon, which I dearly loved as a kid but seldom got to watch. Twenty-two episodes were made, and I bet I haven't seen half of them! It was a big hit with Mrs. Burkholder's third graders in the fall of that year, and when we went out for recess I always got to play Captain Kirk. Why? For the same reason Bruce Hartman always got to be Batman when we were the Super Friends. For a reason that only third graders could invent. Because my name is Jim.

Coffee

I started drinking coffee when I was 12. Living with my dad and grandparents for a while after my dad divorced wife #3, we used to sit around the table in the winter and Grandma would make a pot of coffee. We'd have cookies that she would make, and everyone would chat about our days. I started with milk, but wanted to fit in so I asked for coffee. I drank it then like I drink it today, one cream, two sugars.

My dad bought me a coffee maker for my 18th birthday so I could take it to college with me. It sure came in handy, as whenever I had to pull an all-nighter, I would take my coffee maker down to the study room at the end of the hall in our dorm. It was while I was in college that I discovered good coffee. There was a Gloria Jean's in Crossroads Mall in Portage, and I would occasionally splurge on a pound of Jamaican Blue Mountain or some other outrageously priced coffee, just to see how the other half lived. Now, overpaying for coffee is a national pastime. Stop at any Starbucks to watch.

When I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, I had to quit drinking the real stuff. I switched to decaf, but unless you make it at home, it's not usually that good. Almost every time I order at a restaurant, it tastes like it's been sitting for hours. Sometimes, the wait staff tell me that my palate is correct, they apologize, and make a fresh pot. A couple of years ago, though, we were on vacation in Gulf Shores and Magi's dad had some decaf in his office that was just out of this world. It was from Royal Cup, a coffee service and distributor in Alabama.

We have tried various methods of taking coffee to work. We've made it at home and used air pots to keep it warm, French presses to make it on site and while camping, and our newest coffee maker seems to do a pretty good job, making the coffee and putting it directly into travel mugs. But a recent stop at Starbucks gave me the opportunity to tri their new instant coffee called VIA. I know, instant coffee stinks, but this is actually good stuff. Tear a packet open, add eight ounces of hot water, cold water, or milk, and voila! It's good coffee, if a bit pricey. I won't drink it every day, but man, if I'm living out of a tent or at a boring in-service at work, I'll have an option that I'll look forward to using.

No, they didn't give me any for free, either, not that I would be opposed to that.

Does Borders Know Anything about Teachers?

This ad came with a subject that said, "Teachers, Save on Holiday Gift Giving."

We can save big on gift cards and the discounts are incremented in purchase sets of $20,000. Uh, yeah.

Question of the Day

Superman's heat vision was invisible before the Crisis. Is it still invisible? I notice that artists draw him with these insane red eyes all the time now when he's mad.

The Lost Symbol

I read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown this week. Dan Brown is also the author of The DaVinci Code. Even if that fact hadn't been explicitly stated on the cover, I would have been able to tell quickly by reading the first few chapters.

In his previous book, Brown paints an opening scene with a dead man in the center of a round room with clues. This book features an amputated hand in the center of a round room with clues. In his previous book, Brown describes in detail the symbolism in the art and architecture of Rome. In this one he describes in detail the symbolism in the art and architecture of Washington, D.C. In his previous book there was a secret society called Opus Dei operating to protect secrets. In this book there is a society with secrets (the freemasons) operating to protect secrets. In his previous book, Brown describes a singularly focused villain, steeped in ritual and obsessed with his target. In this book, there is a singularly focused villain, steeped in ritual and obsessed...Okay, do you get the point yet?

This book WAS The DaVinci Code. It is so similar in structure and plot, that Brown refers specifically to the familiar beats of his previous work whenever (and it happens often) his hero, Robert Langdon encounters identical situations. I could almost hear Dan Brown, as Chris Farley saying, "Remember that part in the DaVinci Code where Langdon does X? That was awesome. I think I'll do it again."

I admit that there's only so many ways you can go with a hero with such a limited scope of expertise, and that just means perhaps it's time to write about something else. If you liked The DaVinci Code, you should like this book. But only if you enjoy reading books twice.

"Lost" in Space

My buddies are big "Stargate" fans. I hated the movie so I never watched the TV show. They have followed all of them, so there must be something to them. Having recently switched to Comcast for my television service, I started checking out the On Demand feature when I needed something to watch during my daily exercise yesterday. Since the newest Stargate TV show had been a topic of conversation at dinner the other night (I thought it would be an appropriate time to use the restroom since I hadn't seen it) I gave the pilot episode of "Stargate: Universe" a shot.

I liked the show well enough. It's just that I'd seen it before. The premise is simple: There are stargates that go to various places and planets and people on Earth have figured out how they work...mostly. The stargate in this show is on a planet that has unique properties seemingly designed to operate the mysterious "ninth chevron." I'm guessing that the other eight have been solved in previous incarnations of the show. Young Eli Wallace, a normal civilian video gamer, solves a puzzle in a game. Of course, it turns out to be the key to an alien code that the smartest guys on Earth couldn't figure out, so they embedded it in a video game to find someone smarter than they are. Eli is recruited to join the Stargate folks on the alien planet in exchange for health care for his mother. If that doesn't say something about our health care system, I don't know what does. This is just a little bit like "The Last Starfighter." Eli is played by a previously undiscovered clone of Jonah Hill, because he is most definitely a Jonah Hill character. He is the awkward smart guy with no confidence, formerly known as the comic relief.

Eli finds himself on the alien planet, consulting with Dr. Smith--I mean, Dr. Rush. Dr. Rush is the scientific genius who twists the stargate experiment to his own ends and no one knows whose side he is on. I fully expect he will call someone a "bubble-headed boobie" before all is said and done. Dr. Rush is also a retread of Baltar, from the newer version of Battlestar Galactica, with his hairstyle, sideburns, and British accent.

The stargate experiment is interrupted by an alien attack. It's probably not relevant who is attacking, but it is critical to the plot that the planet is attacked, and so it is. Dr. Rush is ordered to set the Stargate to return the people on the base to Earth, but he decides to push forward and sets the Stargate to go to wherever the ninth chevron is supposed to take them. So, the ragtag assembly of military personnel, scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats escape into the Stargate and end up on an ancient space ship. The ship is travelling at faster-than-light speeds, and in short order our heroes find that they are several galaxies away from Earth on a course away from it. And their doctor is dead. It's too bad they couldn't have borrowed an Emergency Medical Hologram as long as they were borrowing "Star Trek: Voyager"'s (formerly "Lost in Space's) plot anyway.

The story is told in clips alternating between the present and flashbacks to the past, not unlike "Lost." The only difference is that the flashbacks on this show serve no other purpose than to tell us where the characters came from. They do not, upon first viewing, reveal anything about the characters that would advance the plot.

I'm going to watch this show because a few of the characters intrigued me, even though we've met before. I'll be interested to see if they move further away from their archetypical doppelgangers or closer to them as the plot advances and the characters grow.

I am not naive enough to think that borrowing doesn't occur between television shows. I guess, though, that I am too familiar with the source material and too cynical because I recognize the source of so many plot structures and character types. I hope more episodes will change my mind about it because the real "Lost" doesn't start until January.

The Sponge

Sera sings. She sings a lot. From "Twinkle, Twinkle" to "Old McDonald" she has a repertoire of standards that is unmatched. But more and more often she rewrites the lyrics to suit her. Improvisation is the name of the game with my daughter on the morning drive.

But the cutest thing ever happened this morning on our way to daycare, when in the midst of a classical rendition of "Old McDonald," out came this gem, from the musical stylings of Nathan Fillion:

"Stand back, everyone! Nothing here to see..."

Magi looked at me and asked, "Did you hear that?"

I admitted that I was lost in thought and my inner filter had been turned on. "No, what?"

"Sera, sing that again."

From the back comes the tiny, sweet voice: "Stand back, everyone! Nothing here to see..." I laughed. Magi laughed. Sera, not knowing what was funny, laughed with us.

My daughter loves her "Captain Hammer Song," as she calls it. We play the soundtrack to "Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog" whenever we're on a trip that's longer than an hour and I admit, I enjoy belting out Captain Hammer's signature piece. I didn't realize she had been listening that carefully, but now I'll have to make sure I'm leaving out the juicier parts of the soundtrack. I really don't need my three-year old going to daycare finishing her cute little song with the exclamation, "Balls!"

Math is Hard

"Math class is tough" was the actual phrase that the 1994 Teen Talk Barbie doll uttered, but "Math is hard" will do for our purposes.

I'm crushed over the end of the Detroit Tigers' season this year. The Tigers had a seven-game lead on September 6, and the Minnesota Twins caught them on the 161st game of the season. They remained tied through the last game and had to play a 163rd game on Tuesday, which the Twins won in extra innings, 6-5. The Tigers finished second to the Twins for the third time in four years on the final day of the regular season. It's something to behold, reading fan reaction to the end of the Tigers' season. Words like "collapse" and "choke" dominate the message boards and blogs. But when it comes to actually understanding how baseball works, you have to have a basic understanding of mathematics, which most sports fans apparently don't. Math is hard.

To win a division of Major League Baseball, a team has to win more games than the other teams in the division. It doesn't matter if the games are won and lost in April or October, because they all count the same. I keep reading about how Miguel Cabrera was drunk on the morning of a big game with the White Sox during that final weekend. I don't question that his state of mind was the reason he went 0-for-11 for the series with the White Sox, but I do question that it was a big game. They're all big games. Angry fans are writing that the Tigers went 11-16 after September 6, which was the date of their biggest lead over the Twins. They fail to mention, however, that they were coming off a six-game winning streak in which they swept both the Cleveland Indians and the Tampa Bay Rays. When you take a look at the normal split of September/October, the Tigers were 17-16, above .500. But some people never let facts get in the way of a good story. Math is hard.

To really look at the season objectively, all we have to do is take a good look at July. In July, the Tigers went 10-14, losing no fewer than six games by scoring only one solitary run in each. In five consecutive contests, the Tigers lost by a score of 2-1 in four games. Five relievers from the bullpen lost games in that month. Not only were our starters not getting any run support, but our bullpen couldn't hold leads and we couldn't score late in games when they did get run support. One could easily argue that the season was lost more in July than October, but it would be lost on the media and angry fans. Why? Math is hard.

If the Tigers had won any one game that they lost during the season, there wouldn't even have been a one-game playoff in the Metrodome. Any one misplay gets fielded cleanly leading to a loss, or any swing and miss on a hanging curveball that a batter should have knocked out of the park for a walkoff win and the whole season could have a different complexion. It didn't come down to the last game, last series, or last anything of the season. In a 162-game regular season, any one loss turned into a win would have given the Tigers the divison title. But there are some people who just can't see past the heartbreak of that final week. Why? Because math is hard.

No Wonder...

It's no wonder we didn't get a really good view of the new Enterprise in the Abrams movie. It's ugly.