Enter Mitch Albom.

Now, for those of you who don't know this, my wife and I live in the state of Michigan, home to the Detroit Free Press, a wonderful newspaper which has been so kind as to recently get in touch with us about our opinions on the topic of Star Wars. Point of fact, one of their reporters came to our house this past week and sat down with us for a few hours to get the whole story of Echo Station, as well as about Loren and I.

The Free Press also happens to be home to Mitch Albom, one of their sports columnists, who decided to tell all Star Wars fans to, and I quote, "get a life". For those of you who would like to be informed readers, please go read Mitch's column and then come back here to read this editorial.

Really. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

[whistling to pass the time]

Okay? Back again? Great.

Now, allow me to begin by asking "What the heck is a sports writer doing writing about Star Wars in the first place?" Slow news day Monday, Mitch? Perhaps so - the good ol' Tigers got shelled in New York (again), and the Red Wings actually lost a game after nine straight undefeated (8 wins in a row in that streak, mind you...GO WINGS!), and the Lions are just too depressing to think about even this far out, so perhaps Mr. Albom was just feeling a bit down in the dumps and needed to take a potshot at someone...you know, vent a little bit...but, for my money ol' Mitch went a little overboard.

First off, let me just say that he quite possibly would get a much better reaction from people if he'd actually stuck to the point of his column...the fact that those people that are already lining up in front of Mann's Theater out in Los Angeles, some six weeks before "The Phantom Menace" rolls into town, are complete idiots. Yes, that's right - I'm agreeing with him on this point. Personally, I think that for people to sit on their butts in front of a movie theater for six weeks is quite possibly the worst single thing that I've ever seen affiliated with Star Wars (and specifically the fans thereof) in the entire time I've been alive. They’re either doing this solely to get publicity, or because they really don’t have anything better to do.

I'm embarrassed to be associated with them in any manner. We've talked with several members of various publications over the past few weeks, and they've all asked the same question: "So when are you guys going to go stand in line?" For some reason, they always get a disappointed and stunned look on their face when we reply that we'll be standing in line right about the same time that the late night talk show monologues go an entire week without a Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky reference.

So Mitch, if you'd just stuck to the point of arguing that those folks are the funniest thing to hit the Earth since the record skipped on Milli Vanilli, I'd be right there with you.

But…

Mr. Albom saw fit to not just limit his critique to those specific few individuals. No, he decided that the entire Star Wars community of fans must be "in a mouth-frothing frenzy" about the forthcoming movie. Apparently Mr. Albom must have slept through the part of Journalism 101 and English 101 where they teach you that it's not good to make sweeping generalizations, like:

"When the first preview of "The Phantom Menace" appeared, they stormed the theaters, paying $8 to watch the two-minute trailer, then leaving before the movie began in order to race home and E-mail other geeks about the life-altering experience."

Actually, most of us didn't. But some did (and from what I hear, the trailer was much better cinema than the movies to which it was attached) and all they paid was about the same price a sports fan pays for a beer at a stadium.

You see, many of us simply downloaded the trailer over the internet first thing in the morning, and then watched it to our heart's content (for the record, only once in my case) at our leisure. Personally, I didn't see the trailer in a theater until about a month had gone by and my wife and I took our son to see "A Bug's Life"...by which time I'd already seen it on television several times...and yes, we even stayed to watch the movie. Silly us. Had I known that as a Star Wars fan I was supposed to get up and walk out...well, totally different story. Shame on me.

But while we've got that topic of trailers fresh in our minds, how many people took time off of work and paid money to go see their team in Spring Training this year? That's right...Spring Training...which is really sort of a trailer for the real season which won't take place for weeks (or months), and you really only get a very small, pretty rough glimpse of what your team is going to look like when they finally DO hit the field. But those "die hard" fans were out there, weren't they? In towns across America, "Dad" took "Son" (or, to be politically correct, it could have been "Mom" and "Daughter" in there too) down to a field, shelled out a few bucks for bleacher seats, and then sat on their butts for a few hours while grown men fought with each other over gaining a position on a team which would allow them to get paid exorbitant salaries to play a game. What do Cokes go for at a baseball stadium now, like 38 bucks apiece? So, you figure that for a fraction of the cost that got spent on that baseball game, fans across America sat down, spent a mere 2.5 minutes of their lives watching something that made them really, really happy...and Mr. Albom has a problem with that. How special.

He then goes on to write:

"In message boards you can find testimonials from people who have seen the previous films hundreds of times. They know every line. They worship George Lucas, the director. They collect every piece of minute trivia about droids, sand people and Jabba the Hutt."

Mr. Albom has obviously never been to our message boards, where you'll find people discussing topics ranging from "George Lucas Is a Revisionist Idiot" to "Obsessive Fanboys Suck". Not to mention the odd editorial now and then blasting Mr. Lucas for the commercial stupidity and feeding of the obsessive fanboys with poorly packaged and bundled bits of fluff wrapped in a pretty box and stamped with the "STAR WARS" label...but again, I digress.

Allow me to instead mention the various message boards, chat rooms, fantasy leagues, and other random nonsense sucking bandwidth away from public availability every day which revolve around sports (which again, just to remind you Mitch, is what you're supposed to be writing about). There are Fantasy Leagues for baseball, football, hockey and more (I'm quite sure that somewhere there's a fantasy badminton league), most of which charge you a registration fee to "enter the draft"...pretending you're a real, live owner/manager/coach of a team, and you get to pick whomever you want to be on that team. You then get to spend roughly 21.6 hours every day combing through newspapers, magazines, online "sports centers", and watching television to find out how "your" team did! I've seen friends pay as much as $400 and $500 to get into these silly "leagues". I then watched them swing from a wild high, comparable to a cocaine addict who's just hit pure China White, to depressive periods when "their" team lost, that held more pain and grief than the faces of teenage girls in Boston when the New Kids on the Block announced their breakup. Oh sure, they can quote you statistics chapter and verse on what batter hits better on muddy fields on days when Venus and Mars are in alignment in the Southern Hemisphere and the sky is 82.9% cloud covered anywhere within a 20 mile radius of their grandfather's farm...but go ahead and ask one of them how their significant others (those who have one, mind you...) feel about their "hobby".

They didn't invent the term "Sports Widow" for no good reason.

Mr. Albom continues:

"The move is not a religion. It is not symbolic. The purpose of "Star Wars" films is 1) to make money and 2) to make more money. This latest installment cost $115 million -- more than twice the amount the United States sent to Kosovo recently for relief efforts. The producers are hoping to make back close to $2 billion. None of that will be given to the people on-line."

First off, Mr. Albom, the word you're looking for in the first sentence, I'm sure, is "movie".

Now allow me to continue my Sports vs. Star Wars parallel with this point you've brought up. Yes, indeed, this film cost $115 million to make...but guess what? George Lucas paid every single dime of that himself. He decided it was time to make a new movie, and he used his own hard earned cash to make it happen.

How about those sports players?

Seems like every time I turn around, some team or other is whining about needing a new stadium, and guess who gets stuck with the bill totaling tens of millions of dollars to build it? Is it the whiny-butt overpaid primadonnas? Noooo...it's people like ME, the taxpayers, who couldn't possibly care less if they all played in sandlots and on the street, that get stuck picking up the check for these cry babies to have a domed, air-conditioned environment to play in with locker rooms that have enough steam coming out of the saunas and whirlpools to keep the entire square footage of all the rain forests on the Earth at the proper level of humidity. Seems to me that all the "great" players...the ones that are Legends Of The Game today...all played in open air stadiums through rain, snow, sleet, hail, and who knows what else...because they loved the game. Gordie Howe got a team jacket as a signing bonus, and some idiot coming straight out of high school gets millions of dollars to miss shots that my grandmother could make? Puh-lease.

Oh, and don't make them angry. Heaven Forbid that they not be making enough money! They might go on STRIKE! Football has pretty much recovered, baseball is still licking it's wounds, nobody even remembers that the NHL had a strike, the NBA is reeling now from the one-two combination of a strike AND the sport's most popular player leaving the game...and all because these fools can't seem to realize exactly how blessed they are to be making even a league minimum of a few hundred thousand dollars a year to play a game! There are even rumors that the WNBA, a league that's been in existence less than a year, might have a strike! So, to keep these spoiled brats happy and pay their ever-ballooning salary demands, it now requires a second mortgage to take the family out to a game these days. And forget about season tickets, unless you happen to be a major corporation with a budget to rival the annual operating funds of most countries.

Rah. Rah. go team. go.

"Maybe the saddest part of this whole thing is how many of these "Star Wars" sheep are young people in their early 20s. Isn't that the most exciting time in life? When everything is possible?"

Seems to me that these are exactly the same people that are sitting online all day researching those aforementioned statistics, not to mention shelling out big bucks for memorabilia, actually paying for someone's autograph, getting kicked out of school because they lost their tuition money gambling on a "sure thing" with their favorite team and winding up in Gambler's Anonymous (note: there ain't no Star Wars Anonymous, folks...), idolizing people who are routinely arrested on charges of (pick all that apply):

- drug possession
- abuse/battery
- rape
- criminal mischief
- carrying illegal weapons
- solicitation of a prostitute the night before the biggest game of your life when your wife and children are back at the hotel

Tell me again why looking forward to a new Star Wars movie is such a bad thing? We're all excited about something that we've been waiting on for about 16 years now. You sports writers (and the accompanying plethora of face-painting, pennant waving, foam finger holding, over 8 bucks for a watered-down beer paying, stupid chant and war cry screaming, burning down the town when your teams loses and having to get the riot squads out on you when your team wins maniacs) manage to whip yourselves up into the same "mouth frothing frenzy" year after year after year to pay homage to these exorbitantly paid spoiled brats that make our politicians look like the fine, upstanding citizens that their spin doctors proclaim them to be.

So yeah, my heroes might be a "crazy old wizard" and a little green puppet with Frank Oz's hand up his rear end, but at least Yoda never had to stand in front of a judge proclaiming "Innocent I am, yeeeees, mmmmmm!", and Obi-Wan never looked a cop in the eyes in a hotel room in Texas saying, with a wave of his hand, "These aren't the underage women you're looking for".