Oh, climbing steadily. It's been that kind of week.

Maybe we should all buff dive the bad taste from our mouths.

Lillian is going as a lion, on account of getting the costume for a buck-fifty at Goodwill.

Plus? You made her so she growls.

studiously avoids asshate racist nonsense as already has big headache

Oh. "Asshate" is a typo, but I'ma leave it.

Was the original article accompanied by illustrations from those old Sambo cartoons?

Clearly we need to just put them in boxes and ship them far away from the white people. They might be contagious, after all.

There's a more cost-effective way than that. We could set up a separate government interface system for the underclass. It would be equal to what is offered to what hard-working Americans have, only separate. They get their own school system, their own reserved seats in public transit, even their own drinking fountains.

I've dubbed this system "segregation," and I think it has a great future. Of course, we will need to put things in place to prevent the underclass from mooching off what hard-working Americans will have, e.g. preventing marriage between the two groups. We could also use law enforcement to keep them from mixing, but I don't think the underclass would want any trouble around hard-working Americans. And I'm sure some group of hard-working American citizens would band together to enforce "segregation" via some form of private organization. Such "privatization" would save the taxpayers money, for sure.

I think this is a great idea, don't you?

Very retro. Like formica. I like it.

And in instances in which two teams from the same division are guaranteed to make the playoffs, MLB does not use a one-game playoff, instead relying on head-to-head records to break the tie.

Am I wrong, or is there a hanging deixis in the last sentence? That "two teams from the same division" seems equally to apply to either of the pairs in the first sentence, and I have no idea what the author is attempting to say. Except that the stupid White Sox clinched the AL Central, for reasons esoteric.

The short version is this: Say the Red Sox, Yanks, and Indians end up 95-67. The Sox and Yanks would have a one-game playoff to determine who gets the division title.

Say the Yanks win:

New York 96-67
Boston 95-68
Cleveland 95-67

Cleveland would be one game ahead of Boston in the loss column and would be the wild card. This is because a division or wildcard playoff count as part of the REGULAR SEASON standings. There is no provision for a situation like this in the current rules, something that MLB, the MLBPA, and fans have known since we went to the three-division alignment in 1994.

The easiest solution would be to not have a division playoff, instead awarding the division pennant to the team with the best head-to-head record, with the second-place team dropping into a wild-card playoff. Unfortunately, this wasn't addressed in the 2002 labor pact, but a "nightmare scenario" where one of the Sox or Yanks gets left out would probably bring about a reasonable solution.

There's been talk, too, that Selig wants to go to a 10-team playoff where two teams would play one game to determine the wild card. There isn't a lot of support for that in the baseball community.

Betsy, don't let Toyota hear you call your car that. They started the Scion line to be cars that adults don't want to drive, so younger drivers could feel all trendy and differentiated and shit, and then subliminally become addicted to the rest of the Toyota offerings. They'd trade you for a 21 year old in a second.

When I was in LA, I was shocked at how many cars actually had flames on them, up to and including a minivan. We don't have that here.

Maybe in the case of the minivan, the flames were ironic.