There’s a Star Trek: TNG episode where the Good Guys come up with a paradoxical logic puzzle that is designed to drown the Borg Collective in a massive feedback loop, trapping the Bad Guys in a neverending attempt to solve an unsolvable puzzle. Paralysis by analysis, if you will.

I wanted to respond to Brandon Chizum’s article comparing baseball and wine. What Brandon is trying to describe is the aesthetic experience: the sensation we get when we experience a pleasurable work of art, and how this sensation can be common across separate art forms. I started to try to describe this sensation scientifically, as a function of the brain. But I didn’t realize that Brandon’s article was, for me, a Borg Logic Trap.

My response kept growing and growing until it was no longer a short blog entry, but had evolved into some kind of horrific five-volume Manifesto Of All Things Ken, with no end in sight.

So I gave up. But I just wanted to say that there’s nothing particularly unique about the link between baseball and wine. You could find similar links between Skateboarding & Flower Arranging. Or Sumo Wrestling & Opera Singing. Or Marilyn Monroe & Manny Ramirez. Or Greg Maddux & Gilgamesh. Or…

This is your brain. This is your brain on fire. Stop, drop and roll.

For you see, art is like a program fed into an automata, and the automata goes into a certain state when…

Honey, where’s the remote? Oh, never mind, I found it. Click.

So then, the information “Oakland cuts Eric Karros”, is input into my brain, and my brain outputs “Not Surprised”. First of all, Karros didn’t hit. Duh. But there’s also the fact that Oakland first basemen have a rather unique requirement in their job descriptions: with all that foul territory, they need to be able to run down foul popups. Scott Hatteberg is pretty darn good at it. Karros, on the other hand, looked like a horse trying to swim through quicksand.

BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB. BLORP.