8-7-89 Monday. It has been a depressing year—a year of anguish—for Detroit Tiger fans like me. As I write, the Tigers are mired in last place with a 40-71 record, seventeen and a half games behind division-leading Baltimore [the Orioles]. That’s the worst record in baseball. Even if the Tigers win two-thirds of their remaining games, they’ll finish the season with a 74-88 record. That’s pathetic. If they split their remaining games, they’ll finish with a 66-96 record, which is downright embarrassing. I guess I’ve been lucky. In my twenty-two years as a baseball fan, my team, the Tigers, has been consistently competitive. Now I know how the fans of the Cleveland Indians feel, for they go through this year after year. It must get hopeless after a while. Looking ahead, the Tigers must rebuild their pitching staff and acquire a couple of power hitters. When diminutive Lou Whitaker leads the team in home runs with twenty-five, something is wrong. Elsewhere in baseball, the division leaders are Baltimore by two games over Toronto [the Blue Jays], California [the Angels] by one game over Oakland [the Athletics], the Chicago Cubs by one game over Montreal [the Expos], and San Francisco [the Giants] by two games over Houston [the Astros]. The pennant races are tight and interesting, so it should be a pleasant autumn. The teams with the best pitching down the stretch will win the divisional titles.
Yesterday it was ninety-five degrees [Fahrenheit] in College Station. Today it was only eighty, with a relative humidity of seventy-six percent. Talk about balmy! We’re under the influence of a northern cold front. At least it didn’t rain. I set out at six o’clock this evening under overcast skies to ride thirty miles around Bryan and College Station, getting home ninety-six minutes later. My average speed was an impressive 18.60 miles per hour, not far from yesterday’s record-breaking 18.80 miles per hour. I averaged 20.29 miles per hour during the third and final ten-mile leg, with a light wind behind me. That gives me five consecutive average speeds of eighteen miles per hour or more. As a tribute to my year in College Station, and as something to remember it by, I’m going to strive for a nineteen-mile-per-hour ride before Sunday. It’ll be my first ever. To do it, I need a windless day, preferably with sunshine and low humidity. Willpower (and strong legs) will do the rest.
My favorite comic strip is no more. For several years now I’ve been reading and enjoying Bloom County, by a young artist named Berke Breathed. Recently, he announced that he was ending the strip to work on other things, so this past Sunday’s strip was the last. I’ll miss Opus, the naïve penguin; Milo, the entrepreneurial wunderkind; Binkley, the neurotic adolescent; Steve Dallas, the chauvinistic lawyer; Bill the Cat, the eyeball-jutting spastic feline; and all of the other zany characters introduced and developed in the strip. Breathed gave Americans a glimpse of themselves for the past few years, and it wasn’t always pretty. He poked fun at Donald Trump, the New York billionaire; the Mary Kay Cosmetics Company, which uses animals for research; fast-food restaurants; and just about every other American institution. When I moved to Tucson in 1983 and to College Station in 1988, it was a necessary condition of my selecting a daily newspaper that it carry Bloom County. Now that it’s gone, life won’t be the same. Comic strips such as Doonesbury just don’t cut it, as far as I’m concerned. They lack the goofy sentimentality, social satire, well-developed characters, and just plain outrageousness of Bloom County. So long, Opus!
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 
