After the heaviness of last week's post, I think I'd better lighten up a bit with a few miscellaneous observations.

This morning I was in the doctor's office for a routine consultation and while waiting found a copy of ESPN magazine, the baseball preview for 2010. ESPN, showing great prescience, said the baseball division winners would be the Red Sox, Twins, Angels, Phillies, Cardinals, and Dodgers.

Well, that's two right out of six. Particularly egregious was their prediction that the Giants and Padres would fight it out for the NL western division cellar spot. Actually they battled down to the last day for the division championship. The Dodgers finished way up the track. (A mixed metaphor, I know.)

The Rockies here in Colorado boast two of the very best young players in the game in Troy Tulowitsky and Carlos Gonzalez. They have a prime right-handed pitcher in Ubaldo Jimenez, but the rest of their rotation looks a bit spotty and closer Houston Street (what a great name!) is injury prone. They badly need Chris Iannetta and Dexter Fowler to emerge and Ian Stewart to fulfill his potential. if all those things happen, they'll be formidable.

But I'm going way out on a limb and calling them the World Series winners this year.

I posted about movies recently and had several suggestions for additions to my list. So here are a couple more.

Calendar Girls - most of us would do almost anything to see cancer eradicated, but pose nude when we're (shall we say) past prime nude posing age? The interaction among the characters was very good and the humor was priceless. "We're going to need bigger buns!"

The Lion in Winter - the original version with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn is the best, the story of a Christmas confab with what is surely history' s most dysfunctional family. How they tear at one another! At the end you're wondering how there could be any survivors between the knives and the hypertension. Also, at the end nothing has changed, nothing is resolved and they'll have to do the same terrible things all over again at Easter, as King Henry suggests.

The Graduate - I'm surprised how well this movie has worn - still timely forty years after it was made. I saw it several times when I was a college freshman and the theme of the greedy materialistic hypocritical older people versus the idealistic youth really appealed to me at the time. Dustin Hoffman became a star and Mrs. Robinson entered the popular language as a symbol for everything wrong with the "Greatest Generation." Now that I'm on the other side of the age divide, I recall the wistful moment when Mrs. Robinson confessed that she was interested in art but had to leave college when she became pregnant. And, lets face it, our generation of baby boomers hasn't turned out any better than our parents' generation did.

Well, that's all folks for today. Coming soon: more with CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!