I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.
I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don't feel any shame over it. It's only the opinion-makers and the 'opinion elites' who turn up their noses.
If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.
I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.
We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.
The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.
Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.
Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.
