Monday Medley

What we read while President Obama’s position on gay marriage was intelligently designed…

• Twitter tried to stand up for a user’s privacy, but was blocked by the courts. Speaking of Internet policing, a look at Anonymous, the online hacker collective.

• The Intelligence Squared debate on banning college football is worth watching, if only for the spectacle of Buzz Bissinger.

• In case you weren’t paying attention: On the heels of North Carolina’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and rights for gay couples, President Obama announced his personal support for gay marriage (just as John S predicted he would do three months ago). This is one of Obama’s better flip-flops. Posner and Becker opine on gay marriage.

• The NYPD released troubling numbers on its “Stop and Frisk” policy.

• Roger Ebert likes women.

• A DFW link to more DFW links!

• How did Wall Street kill Dodd-Frank?

• NBC surprisingly renewed all of its low-rated but well-regarded comedies. One of them, Parks and Recreation, aired its season finale last week. Showrunner Michael Schur broke down the season with Alan Sepinwall. Presumably, noted sabermetrician Schur would love this spinoff.

• Brewers’ closer John Axford sums up all postgame interviews in a note.

• Mad Men paid a small fortune for the rights to air a Beatles song last week, as I’m sure John Lennon would have wanted…

Talkin’ Baseball: NLCS

You’ve already seen how spot-on our resident baseball experts were in Game 1 of the ALCS — John remarkably predicted two rain delays lasting approximately 45 and 60 minutes, both occurring in the bottom of the fifth (he was half-a-frame off) — so you should be psyched to see them back at it for the NLCS — a battle of Central Division rivals who last met in the playoffs in the 1982 World Series. That’s right, it’s the first-ever rematch of a World Series in a non-World Series round of the postseason. History!

TIM: Alright, so I think I’m finally over the Mets loss in the 2006 NLCS to talk about…wait, the Cardinals are back in it? Didn’t they miss the playoffs by like 15 games?

JOHN: It certainly seemed heading for that a few months ago. But, hey, look on the bright side: They managed to make the playoffs thanks to a collapse by your hated Atlanta Braves!

MLB Preview Bonanza: NL Central

Ugh…whenever I find myself waiting in a line or at an airport and I need something to do to keep my mind occupied for a little while, I try to name all the sports teams. This isn’t all that difficult for me at this point; I usually get them all. But my strategy is always to go division by division. And the NL Central always screws me up. Six teams? Every other division in major professional sports now contains five teams or fewer…except the NL Central. And so I always end up taking longer than usual to run through them: Let’s see…Cardinals, Cubs, umm, ugh, Pirates, who else? Having six teams in the NL Central throws off the whole attempt at scheduling in the NL. I know the Mets play their division foes 18 times, but how many times do Central teams play other Central teams? It’s not still 18, right? Is it only 12? Twelve seems too few, doesn’t it? Well, you know how many it is? There’s no standard. The Cubs, for instance, play the Cardinals, Brewers, and Pirates 15 times, the Reds 16 times, and the Astros 18 times. This is the worst division in sports.

It wasn’t the worst division in the National League until recently, though. The Central had more representatives in the NLCS (eight) than the East or West in the Aughts. But only one of those teams–and ironically, the worst of them, the 2006 Cardinals–went on to win the World Series, and the Central hasn’t gotten a team out of the Division Series in the last three years. St. Louis is the favorite to repeat in 2010, but I’ve got other ideas.