I’m a big fan of Kathryn Lopez’s “Twelve Things” posts, but since I’m only half as interesting as Kathryn, you’ll have to make do with six. (Note: I wrote this in a Harvard Square coffee house, like the boho guy that I am.)

1. When we sat down to dinner on Sunday night, the pre-game ceremonies for the Cardinals-Cubs game were well under way. When we paid the check, they still hadn’t thrown a pitch. I know this was MLB’s Opening Day, but they used to just line the teams up along the foul lines and do the national anthem and that was it. Now you’d think Russia had invaded Iran. Oh, and the game itself, which ended 3–0, took 3:04.

The people who run Major League Baseball will decrease the length of games about as soon as the Republicans decrease government spending. In both cases, they don’t really want to. The longer games run, the more beer and nachos will be consumed; the more time between innings, the more commercials; the more in-game delays, the more dot races and blooper reels and canned music can be played for the large fraction of people who aren’t there for love of baseball, but rather to have a good time at an entertainment event of which the on-field action is only a part.

The only constituencies strongly in favor of shorter games are (1) sportswriters who just want to file their stories and hit the bar and (2) grumpy middle-aged fans who remember when baseball was about baseball, darn it. Both of these groups are vanishing, so it’s no surprise that no one cares what they think.

2. Wall Street Journal headline: “Rand Paul’s Challenge: Charting His Own Course.” Actually, that’s the one thing he’s had no trouble at all with.

3. We went to the Public Garden and the lagoon was dry, with just a few muddy patches at the bottom. One of our sons said, “I wonder how they fill it up. They must have a bunch of pipes built in underneath.” And the other one said, “Nah, everyone in Boston just brings a bucket and dumps it in.”

Just as a matter of interest, I looked up how big the lagoon is. Its surface covers about four acres and it’s about three to four feet deep. That works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million gallons. So if everyone in the city of Boston brought a one-gallon bucket, they wouldn’t come close to filling it, but if everyone in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area brought one, they would.

4. Boston’s best-hidden museum must be the Institute for Contemporary Art, tucked behind a bunch of tall buildings in an officeparkish waterfront area that on the day we visited was overrun by reporters and photographers covering the Tsarnaev trial (there’s also a courthouse there). After we finally found out where the ICA was and approached the building, one of us said, “Hey, today’s Monday. Aren’t museums closed on Mondays?” I spotted a pair of hiply dressed women striding in the same direction and said, “Well, they look knowledgeable, and they’re going the same place we are, so it must be open.” Which made for a great theory, but as things turned out, they had made the same dumb mistake we had. Anyway, it looked interesting from the outside.

5. There are still a few mounds of snow to be seen in Boston, mostly in corners of parking lots where snow was piled up. Some of them are a couple of feet tall. (Though early-April snows are not unknown in the Northeast; on April 6, 1982, the Yankees’ opener was postponed by an 11-inch snowfall. They couldn’t play until April 11, Easter Sunday, when they lost a season-opening doubleheader to the White Sox. This was a bad omen (or a good one, if you’re from Boston); after winning four pennants between 1976 and 1981, they would not win another until 1996.)

6. Cambridge is the birthplace of Ted Rall, a left-wing cartoonist who has received many accolades. He’s been called a racist by fellow progressives for being insufficiently respectful of President Obama and because his cartoon Obama resembles an ape. I’m no Rall fan, but I’ll defend him on this: He makes everyone resemble an ape, and as is true of any good editorial cartoonist, disrespect is his main operating principle.

There’s also this, however, from a 1995 article he wrote for a local New York newspaper (language warning) about his life as a cabdriver:

I quickly learned that picking up black people wasn’t a good idea. Racism had nothing to do with it; it’s just that most blacks in New York live in [bad] neighborhoods. The odds are that your passenger will leave you in peace with a nice tip, but stopping at red lights at intersections where all the lights have been shot out at two in the morning is another matter entirely. Early in my career, I dropped off a well-dressed black couple in Bed-Stuy, arguably the most dangerous area in the city. A block later, I was surrounded by a pack of guys with two-by-fours. I escaped by flooring the gas and aiming at the biggest one.

Racism? Or just practical self-preservation, in an occupation where your life is always at stake? Here again, I’m not inclined to judge, but I wonder how long a conservative commentator would last with something like that on his record.