Do you listen to the radio? My friends don’t seem to listen to the radio or watch regular television in real time anymore. Podcasts and DVR are the way of things, and I do that stuff too (not DVR, but TV on demand through Comcast, Hulu, or Netflix), but real time has great appeal, especially radio. I listen to NPR every morning, and in the car, and while I wash dishes, and, and, and.

Last weekend was Liane Hansen’s last Weekend Edition Sunday. She has Will Shortz on every week to do a live word puzzle (a crossword puzzler’s dream come true, and I am one), and this week as a fantasy final interview she had Ray Davies of the Kinks. At the very end, after a nice little talk, she broached a tough topic — Davies’s potential for reconciliation with brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies — by saying that you always ask the difficult question last because, if the interviewee walks out, at least you already have a whole interview.

Davies was a total sport about it and gave an optimistic, exciting answer (if you’re a Kinks fan, and Hansen clearly is), but the whole thing reminded me of a recent New Yorker blog post on Terry Gross. Her preternatural level of preparedness is astounding, except that now I learn she’s actually not in the studio with most guests, so she gets the 30-point IQ boost. But I love this:

Tellingly, [writer David] Rakoff, who has appeared on the show twice, said that he remembers both interviews having taken place in person, though in fact neither did.

Terry Gross! Liane Hansen! Tess Vigeland! My tough-talking lady radio idols.

(There’s also Lynne Rossetto Kasper but she’s no tough-talker. She sure is smart and great, too, though.)

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.

I love moral gray areas as a general rule, which is almost a statement not worth making: Almost all moral issues are gray in our real everyday lives. (I also love air, whiling away the hours, weather, and waking up every morning.) In this case we are asked to decide: If you are in the business of making money for your investors, and you do that by exploiting a legal weakness of the accepted system, is it wrong?

Moreover: If exploiting that weakness breaks the bubble’s back and throws our country into turmoil that will last for years, is it any more or less wrong?

I realized what this episode reminded me of while texting with my dad about the Chicago Cubs. As a White Sox family, we dislike the Cubs; as a north sider dealing with Cubs traffic and the Cubs’ awful, awful fan base, I am not sympathetic. One night last year, drunken Cubs fans crowded around the Clark bus I was riding home, like shambling zombies in a Stephen King-ocalypse. They start drinking at 9 a.m. and finish at the end of the baseball season.

But fan base aside, because I’m not here to get all argumentum ad hominem.

According to Forbes, the Cubs are the fifth-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $726m — about 45% of the formula-busting New York Yankees at $1.6b.

Yet the Cubs have the most expensive average ticket price in baseball, despite last year’s sub-.500 season. The Yankees are only the third-most expensive average even with their $1.6b franchise value.

As the experts on This American Life pointed out about the investment firm, can you fault an organization for making money for its investors? In the case of the Cubs, when people will lay down absurd money to attend the games, buy merchandise, and carouse at the local restaurants and bars, can anyone blame the higher-ups for charging as much as possible?

Baseball is a business like any other, and if the goal is to put butts in the seats, the Cubs are a succes fou regardless of the team they put out in any given season. Foolhardily signing long-term deals with players who self-destruct as soon as the cap is back on the pen is a symptom of really, really poor judgment in the management. It also shows that the Cubs don’t value return-on-investment for fans who pay more than any other fans nationwide do to see their team.

Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:

Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.

Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.

They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing
Across a crowded room

The girl in “Some Enchanted Evening” may as well be me, because I am virtually always the loudest laugher.

Until a certain age I laughed quietly, and also never smiled with my teeth showing, because adolescence is a mental illness whose logic does not hold up to scrutiny. But things change, and in my case for the better, as related on last weekend’s Car Talk:

While exact caloric expenditure is not yet known, it is thought that 100 good laughs equals some of the physiological benefits of 10 minutes on a rowing machine, even though it doesn’t boost aerobic fitness.