These are a few of my favorite things

Actually I only want to share two of my favorite things, neither of which are raindrops on roses. The first is the CBS television drama "Numb3rs" (surprisingly pronounced "numbers"). What I love about Numb3rs is that the basic message is this: math wins, crime loses. The main character is Charlie Eppes, who is a math prodigy and professor at a university in Los Angeles that resembles USC. His brother, Don, is an FBI agent, and the challenge of each episode is to see how the writers will concoct a crime that inevitably requires Charlie to write some sophisticated equations on a chalk board that eventually help the Bureau catch the criminals and wrap up the case. Sometimes Charlie's first attempts to help solve the crime fails, but after a late night think tank and a few revisions his second attempt inevitably succeeds. My favorite scenes are of Charlie giving short lectures on statistics, probability, etc. to FBI agents as they walk the mean streets of LA. I'd really like to see a spinoff about Charlie's colleague the history professor who helps save the world from crime and nuclear war--but I guess there is always Indiana Jones and The Hunt for Red October. By the way, what did Prof. Xavier from X-Men receive his degree in?

(Here's Charlie giving a brief lecture on a topic that is both highly complex and crucial to solving the crime at hand.)

Ok, my other favorite activity is listening to sports reports on NPR. NPR does a lot of things really well, but sports reporting isn't one of them. I find it highly entertaining to listen to Robert Siegel or Michele Norris conduct interviews with sports reporters about the latest news in the sporting world. For me, the underlying theme of these rare but fruitful segments is "I understand what Barry Bonds and Michael Phelps say about the American psychological condition and the national economy, but can you remind me again which one of them plays baseball?" I think it's funny to listen to smart but elitist people try to engage with the sports world. So now I'm a critic of the critics--how high is my horse?