Eco-Bally

Greetings, Hoops Nation. If I might interrupt your reverse-hibernation for a moment.

Mid-July is often the exact midpoint between the Epilogue and the traditional start of Essay Season. As of July 23, there are 100 days remaining until the beginning of Season 6.

Sports Bubble Blues: A Collection of Essays From The Mid-Majority's Season Five contains 221 pages of screeds and tweets -- all recycled previously-published content that everyday readers will recognize immediately. The 222nd virtual platen will bear a heretofore unseen seven-panel cartoon, featuring America's Favorite Talking Basketballâ„¢. There's only one problem, though: because the inside of the book is printed completely in black, white and grey shades, the cartoon is not in the kind of Technicolor the World Wide Web has featured ever since those federal standards were put in place back in 1997.

So here it is, in glorious RGB, for your mid-summer enjoyment. You've seen the whole book now, there are no secrets left.

If you still think it's worth it, though, you can order a paper copy of Sports Bubble Blues through this very website for $20, postpaid. The book will also be available on Amazon once the fall rolls around, and an exclusive excerpt will be published in the October issue of Basketball Times. Or you can read it for free (just like you did last winter) as a PDF.

(And hello, RSS readers! The middle of summer is the time when webmasters, journalists, scouts and SID's start thinking about thinking about the season ahead. For the first time, sister site Basketball State will be licensing custom stat feeds in 2009-10 -- in a wide variety of formats and frequencies. You can fill out the inquiry form if this is something that might interest you.)