This probably sounds like a sacrilege, but how about this: cut the number of teams that make the playoffs in half.

I don't watch the NBA, but isn't it obvious that the way to get teams to play as if the games meant something is to make them mean something? I have the same view of this as I do of the NCAA championships: a team with no chance to win doesn't belong in the playoffs. We don't need 256 (or is it up to 512?) teams in the NCAA championships, and we don't need 96% of the NBA or NHL in the playoffs.

There are a couple of other possible solutions, but they seem too complicated to adopt, but how about these:

1. Limit each player's game time in the playoffs to his average over the last two weeks (month? 20 games?) of the season.

2. Base the draft on your team's performance in the last 20% of the season.

I also want to know if this is actually a vacuum cleaner. The earlier versions were nothing more than motorized carpet sweepers, and, as we all know, the carpet sweeper is the biggest scam perpetrated on the American public since One-Hour Martinizing.

" . . . (If it were soccer on Sundays she was into, Dad would probably just play along and do that with her, wouldn't he?)"

You're right, that would be different. Playing soccer on Sundays would be making the daughter stronger and healthier, and would help her to become a strong adult. Going to be indoctrinated by the fundamentalists is doing the opposite on every one of these counts.

Up to a point.

The point is that the networks' greed is only part of the problem.

There are a couple of other things that should really be done to solve this. The most important one is to trim the playoffs back to a single round. The ideal is to get rid of the wild card, which is guaranteed to advance unworthy teams (the wild card team always finished behind at least one team, so they just don't belong in the World Series). I would go back to two divisions in each league to accomplish this, but there may be other workable solutions.

Second, reduce the length of the regular season. Not the number of games, the number of months. How do we do this? Simple--go back to playing double headers. If every team had a double header twice a month it would end the regular season more than a week earlier than it's current ending date. Coupled with eliminating one round of the playoffs, we could end the World Series on a reasonable date.

I really do think this was a great piece. A good mixture of humor, without abandoning the necessary outrage.

But . . .

Why did you have to wrap it up with a gratuitous comment about kids who receive special education? This is not okay.

"A guy who writes movie music is the epitome of our culture?"

My wife thought I was making too much of it.

On the other hand, she also has a tendency to get annoyed every time she hears the announcer refer to a ball that bounces into the stands as a "ground rule double", because she knows that I will always feel it necessary to point out that it is decidedly not a ground rule double, but an automatic double.

Great game. Too bad we can't bank some of those runs for another night.

I don't have any trouble answering your question, because we already know for a fact that the airlines do lie to us. They repeatedly schedule flights to take off and land at choice times, thereby telling us they will take off and land at those times, when they absolutely know that a high percentage of them will be late. They go through a series of statements about the length of a flight delay when they know the arriving flight has not even taken off. They will claim a flight is delayed for mechanical reasons, only to later reveal that the real reason is that the crew has exceeded its allowed flying hours.

So yes, they lie to their customers on a regular, probably daily, basis.

Why? Are they engaged in a conspiracy to keep people on the ground? Of course not. Are they trying to cover up for unanticipated problems or errors in management? That much seems pretty clear.

Isn't this exactly equivalent to saying, "The Department of Justice has no current practice of executing suspected bank robbers without trial, so it would be irresponsible of me to give an opinion as to whether such a practice would be illegal in the absence of a concrete situation"?

I liked the fact that Munch is a Baltimore police here, while on SVU he's on the job in New York.

By the way, the prosecution can't get a directed verdict. It would violate the defendant's right to a trial by jury.

So now, who do we want to get Marlo: Omar or Bunk?

I sympathize with your situation, and I wouldn't trade places with you for anything.

Still, if you're asking: yes, it is the fault of people who refuse to have their kids vaccinated that rates of diseases like measles are going up.

We don't know that vaccines have any causal relationship with autism. On the other hand, we do know that in a population that is not vaccinated against measles, a certain percentage will suffer severe and disabling consequences. The fact that I had measles and mumps without those consequences is not an argument that what used to be called the normal childhood disease are safe.