I'm so sorry to hear the news about your aunt, Tamara. Much ma to your family.

My fog story, I went to the drive in with my friend and her parents when I was about 7 or 8. It was a double bill of You Light Up My Life and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The fog was so thick we couldn't see the screen during the second show and left.

I've also been in some Newfoundland fog that was unbelievable.

all the West Coast teams will make it to the playoffs and there won't be a single team east of the Mississippi in the post-season

Ummm... That's not actually possible. The whole point of divisions by region within the league is that at least two teams in the playoffs have to be from east of the Mississippi. Which, presumably, is why you didn't mention the LA/Anaheim/wherever Angels, because they are the AL team likely to take the playoff spot in the West.

Also, you might consider: not only are the east coast games done earlier, making for more consistently easy-to-report games, the eastern time zone counts for half the US population. I have fantasized many times about how to redistribute the teams, because the leagues and regions having different team-counts bothers me (because I am crazy), and I really can't do it properly. Even giving Vegas an ML team (it currently has a AAA franchise), there just aren't enough distinct big cities to make it work on the west coast. As it is, Texas has to count as west (sometimes but not always) to make it work at all.

(Assuming that no one TV market -- LA, Bay Area -- would sustain more than two teams, one in each league, or else the owners would scream bloody murder, and assuming that Portland, Oregon just isn't big enough to warrant a team of its own.)

Las Vegas should be big enough by now to support a major league franchise, surely?

Las Vegas should be big enough by now to support a major league franchise, surely?

From what I understand from hockey and basketball, there's huge interest in the city for major league teams, but there's a big fear in the leagues about gambling and a hometown franchise and the chance of undue influence on games.

I didn't mention the Angels because they do seem to be the one East Coast team ESPN will talk about.

It's still tremendously irritating...granted, I've only been seriously following baseball maybe a couple months longer than you, but in the time I've been watching it seems that they'll talk about the Angels (a little, a very little, but more than any other West Coast team) year in and year out no matter how well or poorly they're doing or how likely they are to make the playoffs; the A's still didn't rate more than grudging passing mention even a couple of years back when they made it into the post-season and swept their first round. When Barry Bonds was closing in on the home run record the Giants got some airtime, but mostly around the edges of the Barry talk. And all the other teams combined? A web gem nominee here, a nod to Ichiro's genius there, and that's about it.

not only are the east coast games done earlier, making for more consistently easy-to-report games, the eastern time zone counts for half the US population.

Bah. There's still a whole other half. And even the coverage of that one half has been tilting more and more over the past year to Red Sox/Yankees/Mets coverage. Sometimes those three teams take up fully half a BT broadcast, with every other team in the country dividing up the remaining bits of time between them (unless even that is bitten into by some idiotic special report about Those Dangerous Shattering Bats! or Are Both Chicago Managers Short-Tempered Dipshits, Or Only One? or whatnot).

Ummm... That's not actually possible.

Well, okay, I'll settle for everyone east of the Mississippi just going down in flames sometime in the post-season so we end up with a repeat of 1989 (minus the earthquake).

Susan, one of the many current objects of scorn and hatred chez Zmayhem is ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" and its incessant East Coast MLB ass-kissing.

I KNOW!! I swear the most mediocre Yankees or Red Sox team gets more attention from them than the M's did in 2001 when we won 116!

I know, I know, population densities, etc. But still.

Work rush is making my shoulders incredibly tense. I wish our deadline would go away, but...yeah, no. It's only a matter of how much cleanup we'll have to do on the other side.

This post is taking me over half an hour, what with the interruption of nasty work things I have to do, with a phone ringing off the hook (my personal best of the afternoon is two lines going on the land line, and one on the blackberry and an incoming email ticker like a disco strobe light.

But if I only do that I'll stroke out.

Just not Dan Patrick. Keith would be sad if his bff's head burst. Weekend: Dem event Saturday. Sunday:videos grey & foggy sounds nice to me, JZ. But I'm held hostage by The Orb.

I just spent half an hour on the phone with an author friend from one of my writing email loops, asking her advice on an area where she clearly has more expertise than I do. At the end she asked me where I was located. I said Seattle, and she said she would've sworn I had a Southern accent. I told her I grew up in Alabama, but I'm feeling suddenly self-conscious about my speech. It's been awhile since anyone has said I sounded Southern unless I was deliberately putting it on. (Not that sounding Southern is a bad thing, you understand. I'm just suddenly listening to myself talk, you know?)

It's Friday, right? I can go home soon.

Mmm. Home.

In an effort to distract myself, I'm obsessing over Hall and Oates again. Poor SA is getting the brunt via IM.

Man, that fandom would have been HUGE if the Internets had existed 30+ years ago. Woulda made Popslash and Bandom into small potatoes.