First of all, they're not doing it for the environment, they're doing it to try to save money. If they don't have to launder your towels and replace your sheets, they have lower expenses. But they won't pass lowered costs on to you, since they assume everyone will take up the option to have everything changed everyday.

Second, I agree entirely that the cleaning staff simply ignores the signs and replaces towels even if they're hung pretty carefully on the towel rack. Their job is to get through their work as quickly as possible, and have as few complaints as possible. If they had to make judgment calls ("is this towel trailing on the floor on the rack or off?") they'd never get their work done. And if they had to return to a room because, say, a customer who didn't read English was upset because how towels weren't changed, they'd be subject to discipline.

So the whole thing is a waste of time.

From 1979 to 1992, there was a different World Champion every year. The World Series featured teams from Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Toronto (which broke the string with back-to-back champions in 1993), Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Minneapolis, Oakland, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Atlanta and San Francisco. The Mets and Red Sox and Yankees made the Series once each in that time, the Dodgers twice (and along with the Twins were the only multiple winners).

And baseball was immensely popular. The 1984 Tigers were a cultural phenomenon. The 1991 Series between the Braves and Twins (both of whom had finished in last place the year before) was must-see TV. The 1979 Pirates were so associated with "We Are Family" that it was hard to remember it hadn't been written for them.

And then there arose a Commissioner who knew not Curt Gowdy and he handed over the marketing of baseball to a company run by an Australian who might or might not know the direction in which bases are run.

And suddenly, all we heard about were the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs and Dodgers. Interleague play seems to have been invented solely to air Yankees-Mets games on Saturday afternoon. Who cares if the Phillies and Blue Jays have to play each other every year to accommodate them?

A team can win 116 games during the regular season and have to play weekday playoff games at 3pm local time on F/X so the Yankees can appear in prime time on FOX. That happened to the Mariners in 2001.

The NFL promotes all its teams. There is no franchise with shallower roots in its community than the Indianapolis Colts, but the Indianapolis Colts are promoted by the NFL, so that not a soul, when they won the Super Bowl, was saying "who are these guys?"

Regular season baseball games, because there are so many of them, are not the television draw that NFL games are, but the NBA plays 82 games and no one has trouble remembering Steve Nash, who plays where the Diamondbacks play, Carmelo Anthony, who plays where the Rockies play, or LeBron James, whom I believe hasn't yet been drummed out of Cleveland. Why? Because the NBA will promote its stars regardless of where they play. The Knicks may play in New York, but they're not getting a lot of national TV exposure so long as they suck. Yankees-Red Sox or Yankees-Mets is on national TV regardless of their records, or the records or talent of teams playing at the same time.

So long as Bud and Rupert are in charge, that will always be the case. That "large market teams" get marketed by baseball is a choice, an approach, not a rule of economics. It's, indeed, a bad approach.

I was sitting quietly reading something while nursing my hot chocolate at my local hangout this afternoon, and some dude starts shouting into his Bluetooth headset while taking about five minutes to add cream and about every other additive they have to his coffee. He had his back to me the whole time, so he couldn't see the daggers my eyes were blasting at him, and he was so freaking oblivious to the barista, to the other customers, to pretty much everyone in this large atrium, all of whom could hear every word of his stupid business conversation.

My idea of the hell he deserves is where his Bluetooth doesn't work, and every single person whose quiet he has interrupted is standing around shouting into phones in unison and glaring at him, and he can't leave, he can't shut his eyes, he just has to take it.

King wrote, "The over-under on a nationally prominent typist writing a "who cares about the Rockies and Diamondbacks?" column is Friday at noon."

Bill Simmons posted this on espn.go.com on October 11, 2007, at 1:55 PM ET: "No matter how much you love baseball, it's nearly impossible to care about the Colorado-Arizona series. You might watch it, you might enjoy it, you might even gamble on it ... but unless you're an absolute baseball nut or a Rockies/D-backs fan, how could you honestly care who wins when neither franchise is older than Jamie-Lynn Spears? It's like going to a wedding in which you don't know anything about the bride or the groom."

Frankly, I find it much harder to care about the ALCS. It's been a long time since I've seen a team in the postseason as focused as these Rockies seem to be. I loved what Jeff Francis said after the game, they weren't analyzing how they got this far, they're just going to ride the feeling as long as they can.