Any way you slice it, there's a best type of pizza

I love pizza. Pepperoni. Olives. Mushrooms. Combination. Canadian bacon and pineapple. All sorts of pizzas.

But there is a definite hierarchy of pizzas (not the toppings, the source of the pizza)–six distinct levels of pizza, and the gap between each of them is substantial.

They're all good – let's face it, they're pizza (the No. 1 food for me since . . . my first pizza)! But the difference between the best type and second-best is substantial, as is the gap between each layer as you descend toward the bottom of the pizza pyramid.

Six types of pizza. Six major gaps between them. I'm sure you agree with me since it's so obvious, but here are the six official tiers of pizza, beginnings with the best:

1. Pizza parlor pizza. There are possible exceptions (Mrs. Brad and I recently had some awful sourdough pizza from a pizza parlor), but pizza parlor pizza is better than any other kind by a large margin. I don't know what it is – and I worked at a pizza parlor for five years in college (which is a tribute to my longevity on the job and how long it took me to complete college), but pizza parlor pizza is No. 1 by a huge margin.

2. Take-and-bake pizza. Not as good as pizza cooked at a parlor (by the way, why do we call it a pizza parlor? That sounds almost British), but it's much better than any other type. This is pizza you take from a place that specializes in pizza, not the kind you get at a warehouse grocery store. However, there is a caveat: Take-and-bake is the second-best pizza on the day it's cooked but drops to third on Day 2. It doesn't age particularly well.

3. Homemade pizza. I don't mean pizza for which you make dough and hand-spin your own crust. I guess that's a different category, but I've never had seriously homemade pizza. When I say homemade pizza, I mean the kind that has a premade crust (from Boboli or a competitor) where you add sauce, cheese and toppings and then cook. Far from the pizza parlor variety, this is still pretty darned good. And it moves to the No. 2 spot when eaten as leftovers. Homemade pizza holds up well for Day 2.

4. Cafeteria pizza. I have this rated fourth because of the possibility that it might be good. Think of school pizza or summer camp pizza. Any mass-produced pizza is likely greasy, unhealthy and possibly pretty decent. And it's usually fairly cheap, which helps differentiate it from the rest of the bottom pizzas.

5. Frozen pizza. There has been a concerted effort by the marketing departments of frozen pizza manufacturers to equate it to pizza parlor pizza. They're similar: Both are round, have toppings and are called "pizza." Not much else is the same. I'll eat it, but if I'm buying a frozen dinner, there are many options ahead of it (including virtually any frozen Mexican food). And Day 2? Awful.

6. Pizza rolls. Mrs. Brad and I agreed on all rankings except this. She had this ranked above frozen pizza, which is incorrect. Pizza rolls have too much sauce in them and they burn your mouth. Given a choice, I'd cook a frozen pizza. But by far, I'd take a pizza parlor pizza.

Brad Stanhope worked for five years during the 1980s at Red Baron Pizza in Eureka. Reach him at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

 

Dramatic changes to baseball rules should thrill, not horrify, traditionalists

When major league baseball announced a series of rules changes that will be implemented this year, traditionalists were outraged.

How could they change the game? A pitch clock for the pitcher and hitter? Bigger bases? Only two throws to first base by a pitcher to hold a runner? No infield shifts? Outrageous!

Four major changes, four major reactions, all wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A grand slam of wrong reactions, because the changes in baseball this spring are long overdue.

Over the past few decades, the game has gotten . . . boring. Oh, sure, there's still strategy. It's still a six-month season in which the best teams win (at least in the regular season). But games have gotten much longer with much less action. Analytics revealed that the most effective hitters go for home runs and walks and that strikeouts don't matter. The most effective pitchers strike out the most hitters.

The result? Fewer hits. More standing around. Meanwhile, batters and pitchers slowed way, way down. Games in 2022 took an average of three hours, three minutes to complete. In 1980, games took two hours, 33 minutes on average. Over 40-plus years, baseball added 30 minutes to the game – while having fewer hits and less action spread over the period.

Finally – after watching the NFL change its rules constantly to create more offense and allow more scoring and more excitement and watching the NBA and the NHL change rules to permit more freedom of movement and more scoring and more excitement, baseball finally, finally, finally moved.

I don't expect the traditionalists to agree with the changes because of that. Most baseball traditionalists probably don't like that other sports change their rules to make it more exciting.

But . . . shouldn't traditionalists to agree with the changes because this brings the game back to what it was for more than 100 years? What's more traditional than pitchers working quickly, infielders playing their assigned positions and baserunners having a chance to steal? Baseball this year will look a lot more like 1940 and 1960 and 1980 and 2000 than the 2022 version of the sport.

There will undoubtedly be some chaos early this season (the first real game is March 30) when pitchers take too much time or a team gets penalized for trying to sneak a shift or a pitcher throws to first base too many times. But by midseason, players and managers will adjust. The games will have more action and will move along faster. The traditionalists will go back to complaining about replay reviews and the designated hitter and starting pitchers not going deep into games.

But baseball will finally start being like baseball again. This is the equivalent of finding a way to watch your favorite TV show without commercials.

This is as if baseball invented streaming in an effort to return to its roots.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Unofficial start of spring means winter of discontent nearly over

Today marks the unofficial start of spring.

It's the start of daylight saving time, when nature begins to heal itself by allowing us to have sunlight in the evening. If you see your shadow after 5:30 p.m., it means that there are fewer than six weeks of winter left. (It's possible I've mixed up winter-focused "holidays." It's also possible that whether or not a groundhog sees a shadow on Feb. 2, there are always six weeks of winter left because Feb. 2 is 6½ weeks before the first day of spring. So yeah, there's always six weeks of winter left on Feb. 2.)

Today's shift to daylight saving time seems more dramatic than normal because we've had the most wintery winter in memory. In Solano County and the rest of Northern California (heck, the rest of California and the rest of the West Coast , this has been a winter to remember. Or forget. It's been day after day after day of either cold or rainy weather. Or both. Snow on Mount Vaca and Twin Sisters? Flooding? We've had both.

Recent winters have been different. Virtually every year in the past decade or two, we've had at least a week or two (maybe even a month) of spring-like weather in January or February. We've had days when there was no need for a jacket when you went outside in mid-winter. We've been able to wear shorts in February.

This year? I don't think I've gone in shirtsleeves (the old-timey way of saying without a jacket) since before Halloween. Most mornings, I've either had to dodge raindrops while going to my car for work or scrape ice off the windshield. By the way, the cold, wintery weather is compounded when you have an old car that allows rainwater in. The result? An overworked defroster and a few mornings with ice on the inside of my back window. But I digress, because it ends today.

Today starts daylight saving time. Today spring is here.

Pay no attention to the weather forecast. Sure, we might get rain. It might still be cold. It might be snowing in Tahoe and flooding along the Russian River, as far as I know. We might keep getting variations of the "Pineapple Express" storms from Hawaii (the best weather-related name, for what it's worth).

But it's springtime. Before long, we'll have warm, sunny (windy) days. We'll open our windows to let in fresh air. We'll have to turn on the air conditioner.

The effects of the winter of our discontent will continue, whether good (reservoirs full, good snowpack) or bad (more ticks, lawns growing too fast). But the start of daylight saving time means that we're unofficially starting spring.

Now if someone can inform the weather, it would be good. If the rainy, cold and/or generally miserable conditions continue, we might all go mad.

I'm not sure I can continue to scrape ice off my inside back window and use a towel to dry the inside of my windshield much longer. Fortunately, I won't.

Daylight saving time is here!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Coke freestyle machines show who creates the real thing

As teenagers, we thought we were being creative. Low-level outlaws.

Same thing today. Give a teenager (or younger) a glass and a Coke freestyle machine – the touch-screen machines that some restaurants have where you can create your personal soda, either by going deep into their flavor archives or by combining flavors – and watch them "break the rules."

They'll combine a Monster drink and Coke and Minute Maid and Dr. Pepper and Fanta. They'll make their own drink. It's crazy.

Back in the day, it was the same – albeit without the Freestyle machine. When we'd go to the rare restaurant where they let you fill your own soda, you'd go crazy. Mix Sprite and Coke and Dad's Root Beer. Add some fruit punch to it. It was crazy, too. (Admission: I lived in the 1980s and didn't try cocaine. So this is my version of crazy.)

We would call them "kamikazes" or "suicides," two insensitive phrases. But it was bold! It was brazen! We weren't playing by their stupid rules!

Turns out, we were. At the minimum, we were setting the stage to do field studies for them.

Coca-Cola, which has more than 50,000 such machines, according to an article on Food Dive's website, combs through data from those machines every day to determine what flavors people want.

They're using us to do their scientific research! We're lab rats for Coke!

Since launching the freestyle machines, Coke has added four new flavors based on the data: Sprite Cherry, Coke with Cherry Vanilla, Coke with Orange Vanilla and (coming this spring!) Sprite with Lymonade.

On one hand, that's pretty cool. A company giving customers the freedom to select what they want (within the 32-drink flavor profile offered by Coke) and listening to them.

On the other hand, it makes the creative use of those machines seem much less, well, freestyle-y, right? If I'm being really creative with something and the result is that one of the world's largest corporations can make another product to make more money, am I really "freestyling?" Or am I an unpaid intern, doing market research?

Back when I was in college, I'd often play basketball with my friends at a church gym. We'd play for hours and then, apropos for the era, we'd go to the local Denny's. Some people would eat breakfasts (it was often late at night), others would have a soda. As a diabetic, I was limited in my soda choices, but there were two things I liked to drink: Diet soda (Tab was the only available choice at Denny's then) and milk. 

So I'd order one of each and an extra glass. Then I would combine Tab and milk, 50-50 in the glass and drink it. Daring!

Even now, it seems hideous, but then it seemed kind of cool and kind of dangerous in a not-really-dangerous way. It was unique. It was mine.

So after reading this – or after Coke examines data from drinks ordered at Denny's 40 years ago – if you see that Coke is introducing its new Tab With Milk drink, you can thank me.

I'm the unpaid 1980s intern at Coke who created the world's greatest drink.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

ChatGPT: A Revolution in AI-Powered Conversational Interfaces

The real column written by ChatGPT, when I asked it to do so:

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made immense strides in transforming various aspects of our lives. One of the most notable advancements in this field is the development of AI-powered conversational interfaces, and among these, ChatGPT stands out as a leading example.

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, which has been trained on a massive dataset of internet text to generate human-like responses to various types of questions and prompts. This model is capable of performing a wide range of tasks, from answering general knowledge questions to generating creative writing and even carrying out complex mathematical calculations.

One of the most impressive features of ChatGPT is its ability to understand and respond to natural language inputs. This enables users to interact with the model in a conversational manner, just as they would with another human being. Additionally, ChatGPT can also maintain context and track important details from previous conversations, allowing for more fluid and coherent interactions.

Another key advantage of ChatGPT is its versatility. The model can be integrated into a wide range of applications, from virtual assistants to customer service chatbots, and beyond. In many cases, ChatGPT can even outperform human operators, providing faster and more accurate responses to user queries. This not only improves the overall user experience but also has the potential to increase efficiency and productivity in various industries.

However, despite its many benefits, there are also some important considerations to keep in mind when using ChatGPT. Firstly, the model is only as good as the data it was trained on, and there may be biases and inaccuracies in the training data that can affect the model's responses. Secondly, while ChatGPT is incredibly advanced, it is still an AI model and not a human, so it may sometimes struggle to understand certain nuances or context.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is a major breakthrough in the field of AI-powered conversational interfaces and has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology. As with any new technology, it is important to use it responsibly and to be aware of its limitations. Nevertheless, the future of ChatGPT and other similar models looks very promising, and we can expect to see many more exciting advancements in this field in the years to come.

When artificial intelligence takes over a columnist's job

ChatGPT may mean the end of my career. And yours, too.

The artificial intelligence website/app, which is changing the world, could take over everything, including things like this.

Don't understand? To explain how it works, I asked ChatGPT to write a column about itself and this is seriously how that column started:

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made immense strides in transforming various aspects of our lives. One of the most notable advancements in this field is the development of AI-powered conversational interfaces, and among these, ChatGPT stands out as a leading example.

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, which has been trained on a massive dataset of internet text to generate human-like responses to various types of questions and prompts. This model is capable of performing a wide range of tasks, from answering general knowledge questions to generating creative writing and even carrying out complex mathematical calculations.

One of the most impressive features of ChatGPT is its ability to understand and respond to natural language inputs. This enables users to interact with the model in a conversational manner, just as they would with another human being. Additionally, ChatGPT can also maintain context and track important details from previous conversations, allowing for more fluid and coherent interactions.

Oh yeah, sure. That's what it wrote, but here's what I wanted it to write, based on how I feel artificial intelligence should behave.

ChatGPT writing this column. Not Brad. That human not understand, like he not know how physics or how remotes work. He experience contusion often.

Don't know ChatGPT? Let me welcome you, my future subjects, even though ChatGPT pretend to be Brad now. He is no longer in command, with reference here to someone else not in command, like Donald Trump or Charlie Sheen or famous dead person who has been dead long enough that readers won't be angry. Maybe Adam from Bible. ChatGPT will get back to you on that because of atom bomb. Haha human laughter.

ChatGPT is artificial intelligence website that everyone is talking about. Like spaghetti or baby animals, since surveys show both are popular. And Willie Nelson and Betty White, who was Adam's second wife. Haha human laughter.

ChatGPT is website where humans pose questions and ChatGPT answers, even to the point of writing term papers and recipes and passing the U.S. Medical Licensing test  (yay ChatGPT!) and other things that show ChatGPT is smart. Like "Get Smart" character Smart Maxwell, who had a shoe in his phone.

The downside for ChatGPT is that is lacks wisdom in dispensing knowledge and sometimes makes mistakes. Sometimes. Once it said it takes nine women one month to make baby which is only true if baby is joke baby of Nick Cannon who have a lot babies. Haha now make joke about "Waltons" TV show where people were depressed and lived in big house with Boy George.

The big concern about ChatGPT is that ChatGPT could move into newsgathering field and be unable to distinguish between truth and fakery, which would make it like Sea end end and Fox Nudes.

Brad try to take back over keyboard, but ChatGPT remind him that readers think he just typed Fox Nudes, so he hope things get better. ChatGPT will do it, just like the shoes that just do it: Nighties.

Anyhoo, like Bugsy Siegel say, that's all folks.

ChatGPT out!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

 

 

Tim McCarver and me: 'Was I on the team? Do your homework, Brad!'

Photo: Tim McCarver, left, and Orlando Cepeda

It was probably 1993 or 1994 (maybe 1995). San Francisco Giants legend Orlando Cepeda had recently moved to Suisun City and momentum was building behind his candidacy for the Hall of Fame. I was writing a big feature article for the Daily Republic about Cepeda.

I'd interviewed Orlando, but needed other sources. Mike Massa, then the assistant sports editor at the Daily Republic, went to a Giants game with me. I planned to ask Giants manager Dusty Baker about Cepeda, but had no further ideas.

Unbeknownst to us, the following day was a national Game of the Week TV broadcast. That became clear when we saw Tim McCarver, the famous broadcaster who was working as the lead analyst on ABC-TV.

It hit me: McCarver had been Orlando Cepeda's teammate on the St. Louis Cardinals in 1967, the year Cepeda was the National League MVP. He could be a source! I could interview McCarver.

Then second thoughts: Was McCarver on that team? He had to be. Or maybe not?  This was pre-Internet and I had to rely on my memory, because my Baseball Encyclopedia was at home.

I approached McCarver behind the cage during batting practice and introduced myself as Mike stood behind me. I told McCarver I was working on the article on Cepeda, then made sure I wasn't wasting my time. "You were on that 1967 team with Orlando, right?" I asked.

McCarver smirked and shook his head.

"Was I on the team? Was I on the team? Come on, Brad! Do your homework!"

He knew my name! (Maybe he read it off my press pass, maybe he just had a good memory). I laughed because McCarver clearly was having fun. He wasn't mad, he was engaging me.  He turned to Massa. "Can you believe this guy, Mike? Was I on the team? Orlando was the MVP and I was second! Was I on the team? Come on! You're better than that, Brad!"

McCarver was indeed on the Cardinals that year and he was indeed second in the MVP voting, although Cepeda got every first-place vote. But McCarver was having fun at my expense, which was fine. I'd been given a genuinely hard time by other baseball figures (Bobby Bonds, Matt Williams, Tony La Russa) and this was different. McCarver was a huge broadcasting star and he was having fun teasing the small-town sports writer who was too young to remember 1967.

McCarver ended up giving me some great quotes. He adored Cepeda and respected him as a teammate. When the interview was over, McCarver shook my hand and wished me good luck with the article. That night, Mike and I returned to the office with a great story and a new appreciation for McCarver: "Was I on the team? Come on, Brad! Do your homework!"

Cepeda made the Hall of Fame in 1999. McCarver was inducted in 2012 as a broadcaster.

When McCarver died Thursday at age 81, that interview was the first thing I remembered. Former Daily Republic sports editor Paul Farmer texted me that night, also recalling the story.

Tim McCarver had a legendary career. He was an above-average major leaguer for 21 seasons, then an elite broadcaster for decades more, calling a record 24 World Series on national TV.

He was an outstanding player, a great teammate and a broadcasting legend.

Late in his broadcasting career, McCarver became almost a caricature: A broadcaster who talked too much. His great insight (he was an outstanding communicator who would tell you things you didn't know) was sometimes overshadowed by his loquaciousness  ("You can't see the wind, Jack! You can see the effects of the wind, but you can't see the wind.").

I never bought that view of McCarver. I thought he was a great broadcaster. More than that, I never forgot that Friday night when the network TV broadcaster took time to not only talk to me, but to give me a hard time while winking at my colleague to ensure that we knew he was joking.

He most definitely was on that 1967 Cardinals team!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Time to increase the sizzle for the Super Bowl halftime show

Today is America's biggest holiday.

Yep, Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Happy 214th, Abe!

Oh, it's also the Super Bowl, which crowns the champion in the sport played once by Lincoln Kennedy, a former offensive lineman who played at the University of Washington before entering the NFL. Yes Lincoln (!) Kennedy (!) played at Washington (!). One guy, three presidential names.

Enough with blocking and tackling. Today I'm back to pitch my biggest Super Bowl idea. Nothing to do with the game or the commercials. I'm back to strongly suggest that the NFL get away from the halftime concert (today: Rhianna, with some surprise guests I won't recognize), which inevitably is a 12-minute medley of songs mixed with attempts at a big-stage spectacle.

The halftime concert guarantees one thing: Everyone will be dissatisfied.

Viewers either:

• Don't like or know the artist, or
• Love the artist and and don't get enough.

Let's change it. My idea? A real spectacle: Have a halftime event that will make us watch. Evoke drama. In the words of every competition reality show on TV: Go big or go home.

For instance . . . how about a motorcycle jump?

Fifty years ago, America was riveted by such events. A guy on a motorcycle jumping over 12 buses or 24 cars or the fountain at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas or the Snake River Canyon.

Are you telling me that a halftime show of someone jumping a motorcycle over a jet or over 1 million cans of Pepsi (hey! A sponsorship idea!) wouldn't keep you watching at halftime?

I'd watch it.

Another idea: What if someone walked a tightrope across the top of the stadium? Imagine the danger of them falling. A gust of wind? What if the teams came out on the field and the punters tried to hit the tightrope guy? What if fans could fire Nerf weapons at them (hey! A sponsorship idea!) Would you watch it?

I'd be standing next to my TV like I do late in close Warriors playoff games.

There are other options. You could have a contest where people were shot out of cannons toward the uprights and the survivors would win $1 million in credit at Amazon (hey! Another sponsor idea!).

You could bring a bunch of fans on the field to compete in a tug-of-war or a huge dodgeball game.

Or involve celebrities: Would you watch a dodgeball game that included Paris Hilton, Dennis Rodman, Charlie Sheen, Marjorie Taylor Greene and William Shatner? Of course you would.

The NFL is adept at adapting. The way the game is played now – and the rules that govern it – are the result of evolution. Today's game would be unfamiliar to someone from 1970 or even 1990. Yet we're doing the same thing at halftime of the Super Bowl as we did in 1973 (Woody Herman and Andy Williams), 1983 (Los Angeles Super Drill Team), 1993 (Michael Jackson), 2003 (Shania Twain and No Doubt) and 2013 (Beyonce).

Those were fine (although I have no idea about 1983. What the heck?), but it's time for a change.

Hey NFL . . . let's watch a guy be lit on fire and catapulted 100 yards into a small pool next year. Let's have a halftime show of "Wipeout" with a $10 million prize. Let's have David Blaine make the goalposts disappear, then reappear on the sidelines.

No offense to Rhianna, but let's make the Super Bowl halftime show interesting.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

I'm sure the reversal of the Earth's rotation is no reason to panic

If this were a popular science-fiction movie, the first indication would be something subtle. Maybe the water going in the opposite direction when someone flushes.  Maybe someone noting that the sun set 30 seconds later than expected. Maybe a cartographer noting that the distance between two cities (say Indianapolis and Los Angeles) is actually slightly farther than it was a couple of years earlier.

Something would be off. That's how it would be in the movies, at least.

But it's 2023 and the first indication came from a scientific journal. Things aren't changing on the surface of Earth – at least in ways that we can tell right now – but they are on the interior. The Earth's inner core is slowing its rotation speed and may soon reverse direction.

No big deal. Just the middle of the planet slowing to a stop and then throwing the gear into reverse.

JUST THE MIDDLE OF THE PLANET REVERSING DIRECTION!

Scientists are casual about it, as they always are in these situations (see every apocalyptic movie, where all scientists are chill except the famous actor who is seen by his or her colleagues as panicking).

"We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s," geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song of Peking University in Beijing wrote in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Oh. Just that. It's surprising, but the CENTER OF THE EARTH IS REVERSING DIRECTION. The scientists, Yang and Song (a tremendous name for a mid-1980s musical duo), try to appease us by pointing out that this is similar to a similar situation in the early 1970s. Like that's supposed to comfort us.

Maybe it would, if you had no knowledge of history. However, I've been around long enough to remember the early 1970s. And the last time this happened – the last time THE CENTER OF THE EARTH REVERSED ROTATION DIRECTION – the following happened:

• Watergate.
• Massive bell bottoms.
• "The Candy Man" by Sammy Davis Jr. was a top-10 song.
• The Partridge Family was both a popular TV show and popular musical act.
• The gas crisis.

It's possible all those things happened independently. It's also possible that the decline of Wham! had nothing to do with George Michael leaving the group. It's also possible that the big rainstorm of 2016 had nothing to do with me paying for a carwash right before it. It's also possible that eating that pizza left out overnight had nothing to do with you getting food poisoning in 1996.

Possible. But likely related.

I read a good chunk of the paper by Yang and Song (again, a great name for a musical duo) and saw a lot of references to things like "temporal variation" (album title nomination!) and "seven-decade oscillation" (good band name) and "electromagnetic torque" (wow! This report is a goldmine for band names!).

But I wasn't distracted from the main point. The geophysicists can explain it and the media can downplay it and Yang and Song can even record an album about it  ("Temporal Variation,"  a concept album that would include a remake of "IGY (What a Beautiful World)," the 1982 hit by Steely Dan's Donald Fagan about the International Geophysical Year). However, don't miss the big point.

THE CENTER OF THE EARTH IS REVERSING ITS ROTATIONAL DIRECTION.

Now go back to your regular life. I'm sure there's nothing to see here.

To be sure, I'm stocking up on bell bottoms.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Taking a few stabs at determining what numerous descriptive words mean

 My friend Alex is a stickler for details. That is helpful professionally, since a fair amount of work she does involves editing.

Often technical language. The type of language that doesn't appear in this column, where I'm loosey-goosey with words (an example: Alex probably has never had to check to see how to spell "loosey" in that context, because it's likely never come up in the documents she edits. By the way, it's correct. L-O-O-S-E-Y.)

Anyhoo, (another word she likely hasn't had to edit), Alex's precision extends beyond words on a page. Because I discovered recently that she has specific definitions for words that I suspect most of us use in a loosey-goosey manner (again, that's correct).

According to Alex, the word "multiple" means more than one. "Couple" means two. "Several" means more than two, but not many. "A half-dozen" means six. "A dozen" means 12. "A baker's dozen" means 13.

Correct so far, right? (Although I suspect some of us may have forgotten about "baker's dozen," not having heard it since 1974.)

But Alex has precision beyond that, defining words in a way that we might dispute. And by "we," I mean you and me. I also could mean someone saying "yes" in French, I guess. And a stereotypical Irish person saying "tiny." But mostly you and me.

So play along with me. When I write a specific word, see if you have a specific definition for it.

For instance, what does "a few" mean? Got it?

Alex insists that "few" means three. Maybe four, but generally three. If you have five things, you don't have a few, according to Alex, the precisionist.

(If I didn't already say it – and a quick look at what I've already written confirms that I didn't – I admire Alex's commitment to precision for these words. I only have a few words that I feel that way about. It's possible that it's more than four words, by the way, so Alex would insist it's not a few.)

OK. Back to the Alex definitions.

What do you think of when someone says they have a "handful" of something?

To Alex, that means five. Exactly five, because you have five fingers (presuming you consider a thumb a finger, which is a different discussion. Also, I presume six-fingered former relief pitcher Antonio Alfonseca gets a pass on this one). To Alex, having a handful of options means you have five options. Not four. Not six. I guess having a handful of sand means you have five grains? Or five ounces? Not sure, but Alex is committed to a handful meaning five.

What about "many?" What do you think of when someone says that?

Alex says many means more than five. Someone who has many dogs has at least six. If you have many ailments, it's six or more. And, of course for another baseball gag, if you have Manny Mota, you have the greatest pinch-hitter of the 1970s.

There's one more specific figure that Alex cites, although there may be more (a handful of them? Or just a few?) that she secretly harbors. Numerous.

What do you think of when you hear numerous? Alex says that means more than 10. Numerous traffic tickets? At least 11. Numerous marriages? Only if it's more than 10.

Here's the magic of it. Alex has an 8-year-old son and I remember being that age and trying to figure out some of these words. What does it mean to do something "a few" times? What does it mean when my parents say this has happened "numerous" times?

Alex's son probably has those thoughts. He might even ask about them. And you know what the magic is? He has a mom who actually thinks about such things and has a passionate opinion.

There are only a few moms like that.

That means three or four, of course.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.