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Mathball

By Larry Hodges

You are a baseball fan, sitting in the centerfield seats eating an overpriced hot dog. You are wearing a baseball cap, but not a batting helmet, of course. (Why would that be an issue? Hmm…)You smile brightly, but all will not end well for you unless you pay close attention.

“Play ball!” cries the umpire, crouching behind the plate. The crowd roars. The pitcher stares down at the catcher, waiting for the sign. They are the home team. Thousands cheer for them.

The batter waves his bat menacingly. He is a hero of this story.

Six scientists sit at their desks behind home plate, three on the third-base side, three on the first-base side. The three on the first-base side work for the pitcher and we don’t care about them—they are the enemy. The three on the third-base side work for the batter. They are from MIT. These latter three are the real stars of this story.

Well… mostly.

Unseen by all, a ladybug sits among the freshly mown grass directly in front of the pitcher’s mound. He’s smarter than the average ladybug—yes, he, he’s not a lady ladybug, he’s a very manly ladybug, or so he would like to believe—except he’s spent the last half hour sulking among the baseball bats in the clubhouse.

You know how tiny bits of important information are sometimes dropped in a story that are barely noticed, but later have major ramifications? This is one of those times.

This poor ladybug has had a bad day. Just this morning he’d been mugged by a wayward aphid gang and he ran away from them screaming. The Male League of Beetles (MLB) expelled him afterwards for this lack of manliness. And he’s just realized that, in the local human language, ladybug is an anagram for “Bald Guy,” which he technically is.

His depression has major ramifications for this story.

The pitcher’s scientists on the first base side signal what pitch to throw to the catcher, who nods and relays the signal to the pitcher, who nods and goes into his windup. He leans back, twists his body like a pretzel, and unleashes heck, for he is the best pitcher in the league, but not quite good enough to unleash hell.

The batter has one of those slack-jawed grins as he lazily draws his bat back, nonchalantly watching the pitcher. He is Tyro Rex, who has led the league in home runs three years in a row. He wears mismatched socks, partially hidden by his untied shoes. His hair is greased and combed into an impossible black pompadour, his batting helmet precariously and uselessly perched on top, that adds three inches to his six-foot four-inch height. He smells like stale pizza and beer.

“Freeze!” cries Dr. Blonde, one of the three scientists on the third base side who work for Tyro the batter. Dr. Blonde is not her real name, but Tyro found it easier to remember the three scientists by their hair color—Drs. Blonde, Brown, and Orange. As Dr. Blonde says this—it’s purely ceremonial as the baseball is programmed to automatically freeze on its own—the ball freezes in mid-air via the use of powerful magnets implanted in the baseball, underground, and on a small tower on the back of the pitcher’s mound. (All players go through metal detectors at the start of the game, of course, since any metal could lead to serious injury, as you likely know from the infamous zipper episode.)

The ball hovers exactly six feet from where the pitcher released it. The three third base scientists huddle behind their laptops, studying images of the baseball via high-speed cameras. They play back and forth in slow motion from the time the ball left the pitcher’s hand to when it freezes. They run diagnostics. They scratch their heads.

The outfielders toss a frisbee around while they wait. The infielders play Twister behind the pitcher’s mound. The first- and third-base coaches play ping-pong on the sidelines; they are quite good. The ladybug wanders about, wondering what is missing from his life.

That something is beer, but he’ll never know that.

“Wanna play poker?” Tyro asks the catcher. The pitcher jogs toward home plate, stepping sideways to avoid the floating ball. He barely misses stepping on the ladybug, who squeaks in protest. The pitcher glances around to make sure the umpires are not looking, takes a deep breath, and blows on the ball. Then he continues toward the plate. This is seen on TV and replayed over and over, but it doesn’t matter since the umpires did not.

“Hey!” cries Dr. Brown. “He blew on the ball! That’ll change the trajectory and spin and affect our readings!” He wrings his hands as a vein in his forehead pulses in a purple, veiny way.

“We’ll adjust for it,” says Dr. Blonde. “We’ll apply the Parabolic Magnus Effect filter.”

“Based on my PhD thesis, of course,” says Dr. Orange, somehow looking down on the others despite being a baseball’s width under five feet tall. “Should be called the Orange Effect.” She glares at the others, and adds, “Actually, I have a real name, so—” We cut her off because we don’t care about her real name.

Tyro joins the pitcher and catcher as they squat on the ground in front of home plate, which they use as a poker table. “Ante up, everyone!” Tyro says as he deals. They each throw in a hundred dollar bill.

“Can I play?” asks the ladybug, but none of them speak ladybug and he doesn’t think to ask in the local human language. He slowly and forlornly crawls back to his spot in front of the pitcher’s mound.

“That sucker is rotating at 3,843.1 rotations per second, at 77.246 miles per hour,” says Dr. Blonde, speaking of the baseball, not the ladybug.

“Oh no!” says Dr. Brown.

“It’s a curveball,” says Dr. Orange. “Duh.”

Meanwhile, the baseball players have been hard at work.

“I bet one thousand,” says Tyro in front of home plate.

“I raise two thousand,” says the pitcher.

“Fold,” says the catcher, throwing down his cards.

The scientists have also been hard at work.

“I’ve got its course mapped,” says Dr. Blonde.

“My God, it’s going to hit the low outside corner!” says Dr. Brown. “It’s an awesome pitch! What’ll we do?”

“Big deal,” says Dr. Orange. “We’ll just tell Tyro to crowd the plate and he’ll clobber it. As usual, he’ll get the credit and everyone will forget me. There should be a monument for me, maybe saying—” blah, blah, blah, we stop listening. Monument, indeed.

The poker pot is over one hundred thousand dollars, nearly as much as these players earn in an inning.

“I call,” says Tyro in front of home plate. He throws down his cards with the same smirk he uses when he hits a home run. “Four aces!”

“I win!” says the pitcher with the same smirk. “Five aces!”

“Darn,” says Tyro. He’s not that bright. He’s munching on a Red Delicious apple and only now realizing its name is only half right.

“Um,” says the catcher, then he shrugs his shoulder or something, but we aren’t really paying attention to him.

“Hey, Tyro, we’ve got the pitch mapped,” interrupts Dr. Blonde rudely. They actually had it mapped several minutes before, but the scientists had crowded around to watch the poker hand, the most exciting thing they’ve seen since the staring contest that broke out at the last Nobel Prize ceremony for physics. Scientists live boring, tedious lives, their quiet desperation occasionally broken up by major discoveries that benefit mankind that we all think God for. The money in the pot is more than they make in a year.

“Play ball!” says the umpire. He and the catcher once more crouch behind the plate. The pitcher goes back to the pitcher’s mound, his winnings jammed in his back pocket.

Dr. Orange walks over and whispers in Tyro’s ear. “It’s a curveball, traveling at 124.315 kilometers per hour.”

“I don’t do metric!” implores Tyro, sweat pouring down his forehead. “Speak English, doc!”

“The education in this country,” moans Dr. Orange, shaking her head in that irritating way she’s fine-tuned over the years. (Seriously, have you considered how many hours irritating people spend practicing their craft? Most people just take it for granted.) “Moron. Fine, I’ll convert in my head. It’s traveling at 77.246 miles per hour, and—”

“Point whah?” cries Tryo, his face now a river of panicky sweat.

“I’m surrounded by imbeciles!” Dr. Orange roars, somehow staring down as she stares up at Tyro’s towering form and frightened, confused eyes. Then she glances coldly at her colleagues and somehow at everyone else in the world. You probably feel that cold shiver down your spine out in center field. (It solves global warming in one shot, by the way.)

“Allow me,” says Dr. Blonde, gently shoving Dr. Orange aside.

“How can I bat if I ain’t got good infa—infra—infro—uh—” pleads Tyro.

“Information,” says Dr. Blonde. “Now, now, it’s a curveball, traveling around 77 miles per hour. It’ll hit the low outside corner. Since you have a 35-inch bat that weighs exactly 2.3 pounds, you’ll need to swing your bat at 72 miles per hour, starting when the ball is 26 feet from the plate.” She gestures at the markings between home plate and the pitcher’s mound that conveniently mark off the feet.

“Thank you!” cries Tyro. He takes a bite out of the Red Really Bad apple and tosses the rest aside. (The batboy scoops it up and will later sell it on Ebay for more money than you make in a year.) Tyro is a trained professional, and now that he knows where, when, and how fast to swing, he’s a dangerous hitter.

“Hey, money’s not everything!” you say. You are so wrong.

“And that’s why we get paid the big pennies,” groans Dr. Orange, somehow reading our minds.

You chant, “We want a hitter, not an apple-eating fritter!” You are not very good at heckling.

The ladybug says something macho but nobody hears him.

Tyro saunters up the plate. There is ease in his manner, pride in his bearing, and a smile lights his face.

(Short pause here as we respond to a lawsuit from the heirs of Ernest Lawrence Thayer, author of the 1888 poem.)

Responding to the cheers, Tyro lightly doffs his hat, and so on, yeah, all that stuff Mighty Casey did, right up to the defiance flashing in his eyes and the sneer curling his lip. (Another short pause as we’ve received a cease-and-desist order and should stop ripping Thayer off. Later we’ll learn that “Casey at the Bat” is in the public domain. We have bad lawyers.)

“Unfreeze!” cries the umpire, and released by magnets, the ball comes at the plate with the same speed, spin, and direction that it started with, exactly as predicted by the three scientists. Tyro follows instructions, and with a mighty swing, fouls the ball outside the third base line, right where our three scientists are standing. The ball smacks into Dr. Orange’s head, who falls to the ground and lays still. I think she’s dead.

“Strike one!” cries the umpire.

“Holy Hamburger Helper!” says Tyro. “I didn’t homer!”

Blonde and Brown stare in disbelief while Orange’s tongue lolls out of her mouth onto the ground. (She has a disturbingly long tongue.) How could this be? The laws of physics cannot be denied!

You chant, “We wanna scientist, not a pitcher-loving hedonist!” You really need to work on this heckling thing.

“Huddle!” cries Tyro. Blonde and Brown gather around him, but Dr. Orange persists in staying unconscious or dead on the ground. The others go back to throwing frisbees, twister, and ping-pong. “Why whudn’t that a home run? What happened?”

“I don’t know!” whimpers Dr. Brown, waving his hands like a weeping willow in a hurricane. (We’ll stop for a moment so you can admire that really vivid metaphor… or is it a simile? I don’t know!)

“I pay you a lotta pennies for a simple job,” Tyro continues. “I really like y’all. But I got three nerds from Oxford with big glasses that make their eyes look like dead-eyed bowling balls, and they’re all beggin’ to take your place and they’ll work for halfpennies.” He hesitates. “Though cuttin’ all those pennies in half seems a big job.”

“According to my calculations, you swung your bat at 74 miles per hour,” says Dr. Blonde. “You were supposed to swing at 72 miles per hour. Why’d you swing faster?”

“Oh, that’s cuz I borrowed someone else’s bat. It’s lighter. So?”

“Why would you do that?” cries Dr. Brown, slapping his forehead with a light thud. He wasn’t satisfied with that and so slapped it again, this time getting a more satisfactory smack sound. He smiled with satisfaction then returned to his normal frenzied look.

“There was this ladybug on the handle, and I don’t wanna get no ladybug cooties,” Tyro explained. (Remember how we pointed out how the ladybug’s sulking among the baseball bats would have major ramifications? Oh, and there’s a batting helmet in the clubhouse that could be important to you and this story. We’ll get back to that. Let’s just say, “If you wear it, it will come. If you don’t wear it, it still will come.” This will make sense later.)

“You idiot!” exclaims Dr. Orange, who is still lying on the ground but clearly alive and conscious, alas. “You foolish, silly, impudent, stupid—”

“That’s the problem,” says Dr. Blonde. “You can’t possibly swing your bat accurately if you practice with one size bat, and then use another in a real game.”

“—thoughtless, irrational, rash, reckless, idiotic—”

“Now why don’t you be a good boy and get your regular bat and we’ll do this again?” Dr. Blonde continues.

“—ridiculous, laughable, derisible, cretinous—”

“Dr. Orange, please put away your thesaurus,” says Dr. Blonde.

“—senseless, dumb, absurd—what? Oh, okay.” Dr. Orange Frisbees the book toward the pitcher’s mound. The ladybug barely dodges getting smooshed and screams profanity at her, but it’s all in ladybug. Dr. Orange lies down and closes her eyes and again goes silent and still. We don’t know why; she’s very strange.

“You left out ‘fatuous,’” mutters Dr. Brown.

“Play ball!” cries the umpire. The crowd screams their bored approval. Right about now they and you are realizing we’ve been here a long time and there’s only been one pitch. Baseball is a slow game.

The pitcher stares down at the catcher, waiting for his three scientists to signal the catcher what to signal him. Thousands cheer for them. Tyro again waves the bat menacingly. The ladybug moans about his misbegotten life. You take another bite of your hot dog, which has absolutely no bearing on this story. There is that batting helmet, however…

The pitcher releases another pitch from heck, Dr. Blonde cries, “Freeze!”, and once again the ball freezes six feet from the pitcher. Once again, the players and coaches go back to Frisbee, Twister, and ping-pong. Once again Tyro, the pitcher, and the catcher play poker. This time the ante is more than the scientists make in a year.

“That sucker’s traveling at 103.14 miles per hour,” says Dr. Blonde. The number makes her hungry for pie.

“Oh no!” cries Dr. Brown. The sweat raining down from his face forms a puddle on the ground. The groundskeeper glares at him, but we don’t care about her so we’ll ignore her.

“It’s a fastball,” says Dr. Orange from the ground.

“Duh.” Dr. Blonde kicks her in the head and Dr. Orange goes silent again.

Tyro gets a royal flush but loses to the pitcher’s super-royal flush (Jack, Queen, King, Ace, and Emperor of kidneys). There’s more Frisbee, Twister, and ping-pong.

Meanwhile, the scientists have been hard at work.

“I’ve got its course mapped,” says Dr. Blonde.

“My God, it’s going to hit the high outside corner!” says Dr. Brown. “Another unhittable pitch! What’ll we do?”

This time Dr. Blonde whispers in Tyro’s ear. “It’s a fastball, traveling around 103 miles per hour. It’ll hit the high outside corner. You switched back to your regular bat, right?”

“Of course!” Tyro says, tapping the ground with it. He’s spent several minutes scrubbing the handle to get off the ladybug cooties. (He misses one and, many years later, he will die of ladybug cooties.) “You think I’m an idiot?”

“Of course not,” Dr. Blonde says.

“Yes,” thinks everyone else.

“You’ll need to swing your bat at 77 miles per hour, starting when the ball is 33 feet from the plate,” Blonde continues.

“Got it!” Tyro says.

“Play ball!” says the umpire. He’s so boring he collects Get Out Of Jail Free cards from Monopoly. He’s so boring he watches sand dribble through hourglasses for kicks. He’s so boring he collects bugs, putting pins through their backs and pinning them in boxes.

“Wait, what?” cries the ladybug.

Once again the umpire yells, “Unfreeze!” and the pitch shoots towards the plate, exactly as predicted by the scientists.

“I’m not a bald guy!” cries the ladybug. It’s been a while since he’d discovered that anagram, but give him some slack, he has a brain the size of the period at the end of this sentence, assuming it’s in a reasonably small font. He’d have turned red in anger except ladybugs are already red, so he settles for stamping his six feet in rage. Then, in sudden remembrance that he could fly, he jumps into the air, spreads his wings, and soars off. “I’ll find you, you waywardly aphids, and when I do, I’ll—”

We may never know what he would have done to those wayward aphids. As he rises into the air he flies directly into the path of the fastball, traveling at one hundred and pi miles per hour.

Now a major league baseball weighs about five ounces, while a ladybug weighs about 0.0007 ounces. That’s a 7000 to 1 ratio. That’s like a head-on collision between a really fast elephant and an airborne rat. One gets a slight itch, the other gets smooshed like a bug. We’ll pause while you imagine this cataclysmic event and whether we’re using metaphors or similes.

Is this the end of the poor ladybug?

Regardless, it is enough to slightly throw off the ball’s trajectory.

Tyro takes a mighty swing… and foul tips the bottom of the ball. It shoots up, higher and higher, and drifts over toward the foul area behind third base, and then comes down like a hailstone near our scientists in foul ground near third base. (You know where this is going, right?)

“Where’d the ball go?” asks Dr. Brown, waving his arms about like Lucy in right field in Peanuts. (Metaphor or simile? I’m so confused!) With a pow, the ball conks him on the head. He falls over on top of Dr. Orange and lays still.

“Strike two!” cries the umpire.

You say, “Jiminy jellybeans!” in reaction to the surprising result. Then you chant, “We want a hitter, not a smally-brained critter!” (Were you referring to Tyro or the ladybug? It’s not clear. Regardless, you need help. You are the Babe Ruth of bad heckling.)

Tyro stares at Dr. Blonde, his sole remaining scientist. “Huddle!” he cries. He and Dr. Blonde huddle.

“What happened?” he asks. “I’ve never had two strikes before!” He scratches his head. “How many strikes does I get?”

“You get three,” says Dr. Blonde. “According to the computer, the ball collided with something small and red, so I’m guessing it was an angry ladybug planning violence against wayward aphids. It’s a common problem in baseball games.”

“Ain’t you jumpin’ to conclusions?” asks Tyro.

“Have you seen the latest ladybug violence stats?” asks Dr. Blonde. “My findings are based on science. An irate ladybug knocked the ball out of its expected trajectory. It’s the only logical explanation.”

“So I have a chance of striking him out?” asks the pitcher, who has wandered over.

“Maybe one in a million,” says Dr. Blonde.

“So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” cries the pitcher. “Yeah!” He wanders back to the mound.

“Play ball!” cries the umpire. The small percentage of the crowd that is still awake mutters its approval.

You chant, “We want a hitter hitting hits, not a non-hitter getting blitzed!” Okay, that’s a little better, but seriously, you should take up miming.

Once again, the pitcher winds up and throws the pitch, and once again, it freezes six feet away. Once again, much Frisbee, Twister, and ping-pong is played. Tyro loses his pants in poker and plays the rest of the game in his underwear.

Now working alone, Dr. Blonde does the calculations. It’s a changeup, and her calculations are easier it’s traveling exactly 75 miles per hour.

You chant, “We want a mathematician, not a faulty baseball diagnostician!” Jeez, you’re irritating . . .

Dr. Blonde is getting irritated at your loud heckling and stares at you, frowning, though of course you can’t see that since you are over 400 feet away in the centerfield stands looking up bad rhymes at rhymezone.com. You find another.

You chant, “We want a baseball scientist, not a slave-trading assientist!” (Yeah, that’s the only word in English that rhymes with but doesn’t actually contain the word “scientist.” It means, “A shareholder of the Assiento company involved in the slave trade.” You’ve learned something new today.)

Dr. Blonde nods and makes up her mind. She says to Tyro, “You’ll need to swing your bat at 100 miles per hour, starting when the ball is 22 feet from the plate. It’s coming right down the middle of the plate.”

“Gotcha!” he says. Once again there is ease in his manner, pride in his bearing, a smile lights his face, and then, as he’s about to swing, defiance flashes in his eyes and a sneer curls his lip. (Estate of Ernest Lawrence Thayer, eat your heart out!)

The ladybug has been sitting in the infield grass all this time, dazed yet miraculously alive. (Did you know that in scientific tests, rats thrown against charging elephants bounced off like ping-pong balls and went on to lead productive lives??) The ladybug decides he’s had enough and once again flies into the air. Up he goes, higher, higher, higher! He soars to uplifting new heights! Go, ladybug, go!

Pay attention, as this is very important to the story.

The umpire yells, “Unfreeze!” and the pitch shoots towards the plate, exactly as predicted by Dr. Blonde.

“Wait, what did you say?” cries Tyro. He’s completely forgotten Dr. Blonde’s instructions and now faces a pitch from heck with no foreknowledge of what the pitch is or any idea of how to spell foreknowledge.

“Screw it,” he says. Did Babe Ruth need foreknowledge to bat .342 with 714 home runs? Did Bartolo Colon need foreknowledge to his first and only home run at age 43? Did Mark Belanger need foreknowledge to bat .228 and hit 20 home runs in 18 years while winning eight gold gloves? None of these thoughts go through Tyro’s head as he stares at the ball. He doesn’t really know baseball history very well.

Instead, defiance once again flashes in his eyes and a sneer curls his lip as the ball streaks toward him. Then, eyes wide, he brings his bat back. He swings as hard as he can.

The air is shattered by the force of Tyro’s blow, sending the ball sailing.

The pitcher looks up as it passes overhead, shaking his head in frustration. The second baseman and shortstop both make heroic leaps and miss it by fifty feet. The center fielder tracks the ball, running back, back, back, and then stops, hands on hips.

The ball crosses the centerfield fence, going directly towards you. There is great joy in faraway Mudville, or whatever city Tyro plays for, since they are watching on TV.

But you don’t see the incoming ball. Remember the ladybug, who has now flown up to the stadium lights overhead? Still dazed from his confrontation with a fastball, he’s flown straight into the lights. They’re poorly maintained—do you know how big a hassle it is to wheel out a 200-foot ladder? And so, when the ladybug smacks into the lights, they explode.

Sparks fly everywhere. (Yes, we’re stealing this scene directly from “The Natural.”)

And so you are looking up at these sparks rather than tracking the baseball headed directly for you. In your defense, it’s a natural thing to do. When sparks fly explosively from a light, people look at it, just as people look at the Kool-Aid Man as he breaks through a wall, though strangely he never gets charged with breaking and entering.

You never see the ball as it smacks you in the forehead. You fall out of your seat, unconscious.

Tyro slowly circles the bases, chased by the running coach, a mathematician from CalTech who calls out proper approach angles for each base. Dr. Blonde smiles at you so smugly she must have practiced it in front of a mirror (she did), and mutters, “We want a heckler, not one whose brain to a ladybug’s is littler!” (Okay, I concede; Dr. Blonde’s heckles are even worse than yours.)

The ladybug rubs its head and miraculously flies away, muttering menacingly. This has been a life-changing day for him, as he’s survived a giant human foot, a collision with a speeding baseball, and an exploding light. He no longer cares about MLB or baldness, and a bunch wayward aphids no longer seems so scary. Like the lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” he’s found his courage. He almost says, “Play brawl!”, but even he realizes how bad a pun that is.

But what of you? You are in a coma, possibly living out some imaginary life that you now believe is real. Soon you’ll awaken to reality and your actual life, which is as boring as the umpires’. You’ll have no memory of the actual events that led to all this. Remember when I said, “There’s a batting helmet in the clubhouse which may be important to this story”? It continues to sit in the clubhouse, unused.

You should have paid attention.

Meanwhile, our very angry ladybug is beating the heck—no, the hell—out of that gang of wayward aphids.

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was Mathball, by Larry Hodges, narrated by Mur Lafferty.

About this story, Larry says:

I was inspired to write this story after watching the movie “Moneyball,” which features the analytics of baseball, and taking this to the madcap extreme from the point of view of a mathematician.

And about this story, I say:

I enjoyed how Larry takes a funny starting point — applying mathematical analysis to baseball, mid-game — and continues to build on top of that with more gonzo ideas–the point of view of the ladybug, the constant poker playing at home plate, etc. In fact, the whole story works as a vehicle for more and more jokes–I particularly liked the throw-away mention of baseball being a “slow game”, since even so, it has never been as slow as in this particular story!

But one running idea I particularly liked was the way that Larry chose to use the second person “you” here. It was funny to find out you are a bad heckler who makes up terrible rhymes. And then further, that the mathematician who is theoretically supposed to just help the team win has come up with a new agenda–to take you down. “You”, of course, is also used in interactive fiction stories where you choose what path the story goes down. And even though this story doesn’t have “turn to page 56” per se, I think it still uses that element to good effect–but being clear that YOU should have chosen to wear a helmet.

IN OTHER NEWS

You may have heard this elsewhere already, but just so you know, Apple has made some changes to their pricing policies. We here at Escape Pod are not changing the pricing of any of our support plans. But starting November 1st, if you subscribe to us through an APP on Apple, they will be adding a 30% fee. So, apparently you can get around this if you simply subscribe to us online instead, through a browser window, instead of through an app on your phone. I am also told this won’t apply to existing subscriptions, but only to new ones that start after November 1st. I guess we’ll see how this all shakes out. At any rate, those of you with Apple apps, be forewarned about how this might affect things you subscribe to in the future.

Escape Pod is a part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Yogi Berra, who said: Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.

Thanks for listening! And have fun.