Once upon a time, baseball was known as “America’s pastime.” Until 1947, it was played by players of only one ethnicity in this country. The best of those players became very very good at baseball, especially as it became a bigger and bigger business. Scouts from the teams in our country’s big cities would scour the small towns of the American heartland looking for undiscovered pitching, hitting, and fielding talent, and sign that talent to the big cities’ teams.

Now, many years later, not only do the major league teams hire amazingly talented athletes of all ethnicities, they hire from lots of other countries as well. And many other countries in Europe and Asia and elsewhere have baseball leagues, each of whose teams scour their own countrysides for great baseball talent to sign up.

How could baseball players not be getting better, faster, more agile, wilier? Watch this catch from a game between Yokohama and Hiroshima. I’m sorry, they couldn’t do that in the good old days. The game is now accessible to more brilliantly talented athletes than ever before because it’s being played in more and more places and the pool of talent available to the game is growing with each new team added somewhere in the world. And so you get this kind of incredible play, by a player from a Japanese city the size of San Antonio.

Western pop music is enjoying the same kind of expansion. There are rap artists from China, South American metal bands, Australian country stars. Every country in the world seems to be revving up its musical scouting efforts with its own home-brewed Pop Idol or American Idol. Every kid in the world with access to a computer and the internet can create a video clip of a musical performance and put it in front of, potentially, every other kid with access to a computer and the internet.

How could pop music not get better, more clever, more soulful, groovier, catchier? The doomsayers are wrong! Remember how Auto-tune was destroying music? Ummmm… music is fine!

When our garbage disposal turns on, it kicks up a tiny psychedelic light show in whatever water is pooled in the bottom of the sink. Sometimes the patterns are long string-like shapes, other times they look like this. I hope you’re having fun with your kitchen appliances today.