When a group of pre-teen Ugandan baseball players arrived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series early this month, they couldn’t believe what they saw: nice uniforms, brand new cleats, an immaculately-kept field with shiny green grass and a capacity of 40,000. The Ugandans, the second African team to qualify for the World Series and the first to actually make it to Williamsport, played their home games on a dusty field in the central part of the country — they had never played in front of a crowd and sometimes practiced or played barefoot.

That all changed last week in the team’s first game against Panama. The team from Lugazi, Uganda lost, and they would lose again two days later to Mexico, meaning the first team to arrive in Williamsport was one of the first teams eliminated. All wasn’t lost: Uganda became the first African team to win a LLWS game Tuesday, when it beat a team from Oregon in a consolation game. The team’s on-field results, however, will pale in comparison to what it achieved just by making it to Williamsport.

Baseball, long popular in the Americas and East Asia, was a late arrival in Africa. There are no specific participation numbers for the continent’s youth, but six countries have joined the African Baseball League and others have teams in the developmental stages. The game has also been used to help bring awareness to the public health fights that consume swaths of the continent. South Africa and other countries have pushed baseball as a way to fight and prevent AIDS and other health epidemics, attracting young players to the game to “Strike Out AIDS.” In Ugandan schools, baseball is fast encroaching on soccer’s popularity as students flock to the game.

Despite that growth, the challenges facing baseball in Uganda and other African countries are immense. Many children use balls made of paper and improvised bats. Gloves are rare, and games are often played barefoot on dusty fields with little or no grass. Even the Ugandan schools where baseball is popular struggle to find places to play.

Charities and other organizations, however, are working to fix that. Right To Play, a humanitarian organization, raised $100,000 to fund a game between Uganda and Canada earlier this year; some of the money will also go to building a new stadium in the country. Uganda’s appearance in Williamsport will undoubtedly raise the sport’s profile in Africa, and, hopefully, it will bring even more money in to help kids play.

The Ugandan team may not have won the Little League World Series, but just by making it to Williamsport, they made history and progress for their country and their sport. And as one of the players told Al Jazeera English, their dreams don’t stop in Williamsport. “My dream will be to play baseball,” he said. “Major League Baseball, in America.”

The big comics news of the day is that DC Comics, having annulled Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane when it hit the reset button on the franchise with the New 52 have decided that the Man of Steel is going to start knocking aerial boots with Wonder Woman herself. I’ll have to wait and see how the story works out to decide how I feel about it, but the cover image released to promote the team-up is a reminder for all that comics can draw the female body in exaggeratedly sexual ways, they can be depressingly awful at making actual sexual contact between adult superheroes look remotely appealing. Take a look:

The fact that Superman is tied up in Wonder Woman’s lasso is a nice little nod to her fetish pin-up origins, and a way of playing with the power dynamic between them that lends the image a nice little frisson. Or it would if Superman and Wonder Woman’s actual bodies are posed so it looks like someone is smushing a Barbie and a Ken Doll together. These don’t look like humans who are attracted to each other and in the process of making actual sexual contact.

It’s not quite as bad as DC’s Batman-and-Catwoman-bang-on-a-roof panel, in which Batman’s abs look less like human’s than a stack of chicken cutlets and Catwoman’s expression is more slack-jawed than erotically intent. If you can leach the sex appeal out of Catwoman, you’re doing something wrong:

The same is true of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror. Everything about that comic is ugly, from its vicious Islamophobia to its illustrations, but its attempts at sexytimes are particularly inept:

This sort of rampant incompetence is part of what makes something like the current characterization of Namor as a stud who will hook up with anyone, irrespective of species, fun. Even if the panels themselves aren’t always alluring, the strips have an actual grown-up sense of humor about sex that doesn’t require me to risk headache via eye-roll:

The slam that comics are the provenance of slobbering teenaged boys is an irritating one, given the sophistication of the ideas superhero stories can explore when they’re at their best. But it would definitely help if comics artists started drawing superheroines like people instead of figurines, and superhero sexuality in a way that suggested some familiarity with intimacy and the functioning of the human body.

I haven’t read Joe Posnanski’s entire biography of Joe Paterno yet, but I was really struck by this section of the excerpt published in GQ:

On Monday, the family tried to persuade Paterno to read the presentment. He objected that he already knew what was in there, but they told him there was no room left for illusion. D’Elia would remember telling him, “You realize that the people out there think you knew about this? They think you had to know because you know about everything.”

“That’s their opinion!” Paterno shouted. “I’m not omniscient!”

“They think you are!” D’Elia roared back.

Later, D’Elia described watching Paterno read the presentment: “What did he know about perverted things like that? When he asked Scott, ‘What is sodomy, anyway?’ I thought my heart was going to break.”

One of the consensuses around Penn State seems to have been that, Sandusky or no Sandusky, Paterno stayed on as head coach longer than he should have. That quotation alone is a reminder that, for all that we praise old-fashioned values, there can be willful ignorance or dangerous squeamishness that goes along with being old school. If you want to lead, especially on a college campus, and maybe especially if you’re running an athletic program, you really can’t afford to be delicate about sex. The world changes, and you can’t hold it back or close your eyes to it.

The bridge is yours.

-These superhero posters are incredibly beautiful.

-RPatz. Not RPat.

-Mothers and daughters solving crimes together!

-Will customers start buying cheaper cell phones and more sophisticated tablets?

-This is legitimately terrifying:

A great deal of discussion about television’s breakout period has focused on the extent to which television has equaled, or even replaced the novel in the best shows’ sprawling explorations of huge groups of characters, social issues, and the idiosyncrasies of American life. But last season, and I think in this upcoming season of television, we have a number of shows with different ambition that are struggling within their forms: they want to be movies or miniseries, and are trying to figure out how how to stretch their plots over 22 episodes, much less multiple seasons. The prime existing example of that kind of show is Revenge, the story of a woman coming back to have her way with the people who framed her father for complicity with terrorism, a decision that lead to his death. The show initially started with its protagonist, Emily Thorne (Emily Van Camp) doing in an enemy per week, but given how short her enemies’ list really was, the show lost momentum after she got rid of the easy marks and had to stretch out her stalking of the Big Bads. It’s a setup that might have worked brilliantly and nastily as a six-episode miniseries, but got ponderous towards the end, and is hard to imagine working all the way through a second season unless her battle escalates to full-on trench warfare in the Hamptons:

This fall television season features a number of new shows, all of which I like, but none of which seem sustainable over the long term. On ABC’s Last Resort, the crew of a nuclear submarine refuse their orders and take over a small tropical island which they declare independent. The idea of taking Gotham hostage with a nuclear weapon barely seemed plausible over a period of nine months in The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s hard for me to see how a viable stalemate would persist for years or the conspiracy around the orders the crew got to nuke Pakistan can stay undetected and unbusted for that long either. Nashville, also on that network, features a rivalry between two country singers played by Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere, but it’s hard to believe they can remain in a perpetual state of animosity—tours last only so long—or what the show plans to do after playing out its B story, about the Nashville mayoral election. Fox’s midseason show The Following, about a serial killer who develops a following during his imprisonment, has an even more limited premise: there can only be so many people willing to sign up to commit mass murder or to stab themselves in the eye to mess with the FBI. The case can’t go on forever unless the show wants to abandon its core dynamic, a rivalry between Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy. That show, at least, is beginning with a 15-episode season because that’s the number per year Bacon was willing to commit to.

To an extent, it seems like Revenge was written with the expectation that it couldn’t possibly get a full-season order, and the same may be the case with Last Resort, which is excellent, but high-concept and will air in an extremely difficult 8 PM Thursday timeslot. But it’s really too bad that networks don’t have some quarterly or mini-series sized time slots that they could use for concepts that are fascinating, but don’t fit neatly into the 22 episode season. The season length is essentially arbitrary, and in so much as it has a rationale, it’s a commercial rather than an artistic one, a way to get to the syndication threshhold of 100 episodes as quickly as possible without burning out actors or writers. But miniseries or shorter runs could be a way to make truly must-see TV again, as appeared to be the case with Kevin Costner’s run on Hatfields & McCoys earlier this summer. I understand the difficulties of sinking resources into one-time productions for a business model that’s based on monetizing the same content multiple times.

But when I think about it, I still think one of the shows I enjoyed last season was ABC’s The River, a horror story about a group of Amazonian explorers who go looking for their long-lost leader. The show had its flaws, including some casting problems. But when it was cancelled after the short run of its first season, it went out with a genuinely terrifying image, of the river shifting to trap the crew forever. That, more than a clear resolution or explanation, or wringing everything out of the characters that could possibly be obtained with them, was some thrilling television. There wasn’t a repetitive episode, a moment that made me feel like the show was in a rut, just a scary economy to the show’s forward progress. I’d rather have less of a good concept executed well than one wrung painfully dry, as CBS is doing to How I Met Your Mother right now. And I’d love for networks to find their way to building some flexibility into the schedule to give stories the amount of space they actually need. It’s not only in my interests. If the broadcast networks are going to complain that cable’s beating them in awards nominations because those networks only need to produce eight to fifteen episodes of a show, the broadcast networks might consider whether it would behoove them to play the game, at least sometimes, by the new rules.

It’s the beginning of the end of an era at NBC. We’ve known for months now that this season of 30 Rock will be that venerable sitcom’s last. Yesterday, showrunner Greg Daniels announced that The Office will wrap up this season as well. Community‘s changed showrunner hands as well, after the firing of Dan Harmon, and it’s hard to know if that shift will produce a show that will earn a fifth season. Parks and Recreation may be the last show on the network’s Thursday night comedy with a serious chance of continuing beyond the spring of 2013.

But while it will be difficult to say goodbye to all of these sitcoms, which have significantly defined my adult television watching, with departure comes opportunity. There’s an enormous amount of talent tied up in these comparatively low-rated shows, and I’m excited to see what everyone involved with them is going to do next. Some of them, like The Office’s Steve Carrell and Mindy Kaling have already departed for movie careers or new projects. Here are seven ideas for what other people who have given us so much fun on Thursday nights could do once their shows end.

1. Mike Schur should make a show about a television news station: The Parks and Recreation creator, who just signed a new deal with Universal Television, ran the Weekend Update segment during his stint on Saturday Night Live. On Parks and Rec, local talk show host Joan Callamezzo and anchor Perd Hapley are among the funniest supporting characters anywhere on television. TV needs a fantastic, cutting satire of news that isn’t created by Aaron Sorkin. Schur’s the guy to give it to us.

2. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey should play best friends who are mothers to young children: Poehler already gave cinematic birth to Fay’s daughter in Baby Mama. They’re hilarious whenever they’re in the same frame together. And given that television is obsessed with the novel idea of men raising their own young right now, in shows from ABC Family’s Baby Daddy to NBC’s upcoming shows The New Normal and Guys With Kids. Maybe now that we’ve gotten used to the idea that men have to give up things to raise children and that those adjustments take time, American audiences are ready to be sympathetic to mothers, who have always been in that position.

3. Put Aisha Muharrar, Megan Ganz, Katie Dippold, Kay Cannon, and Annie Mebane in a room and produce whatever they come up with: I’m not sure NBC gets enough credit for this, but its Thursday night comedies employ a mind-blowing number of smart young female writers. I would watch anything any of these women, or any combination of these women, put together in a heartbeat.

4. Keith Powell and Alison Brie should have an arc on a show where they date: If I have one complaint about 30 Rock over the years, it’s been the waste of the show’s incredibly strong supporting cast. As Toofer, Powell’s been very funny as the fussy, high class Harvard graduate who’s sometimes driven nuts by his fellow writers. I’d love to see him play off Brie, who’s been perfect as the precise Annie Edison over three years on Community, and deserves a chance to play the kind of sexy adult she plays on AMC and in movies on a broadcast show. Maybe in a program where Alec Baldwin plays Brie’s boss. If I can’t get that, I’ll take a spinoff web series about Grizz and Dot Comm in compensation.

5. Develop a show around Retta as a stand-up comedian: Her performance as Donna has been incredible on Parks and Rec, and while cable networks are falling all over themselves to give show deals to white male comedians, Retta seems like she could crush it on network. Showbiz shows haven’t worked particularly well on NBC of late—Up All Night is cutting its talk show to focus more on the characters at home. But whether Retta did something about doing stand-up, or based in her routines, I’d love to see her sidle in from the corner of the frame to claim center stage.

6. Craig Robinson. Judah Friedlander. Road trip: Two big guys, one good at projecting surprising empathy and precision, the other with a particular talent for reveling in mess, perversion, relationships with Susan Sarandon, and dressing up in women’s clothes and teaching self-defense lessons. I may not have been lured by The Hangover or other buddies-behaving-badly movies, but these guys would get me in the seats.

7. Adam Scott, Danny Pudi, Ellie Kemper as neighbors, and possibly roommates: Ben deserves a break from April and Andy. Have Scott, Kemper, and Pudi occupy the three apartments around the end of the hall. Put Kemper in the middle one and you’ve got the physical and actorly set up for a very nerdy, adorably enthusiastic love triangle.

Following our discussion yesterday about how liberal Hollywood-produced programming actually is, I wanted to call folks’ attention to this fascinating chart from Nielsen that, though based on data from two seasons ago, breaks out by age group how much of the television we consume is inclusive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters:

It’s encouraging that, between the ages of 12 and 35, about a third of the scripted and reality television Americans are watching take place in worlds where gay people are thoroughly integrated as significant characters, though that number decreases as people get older. It’s one of the core ideas of the gay rights movement that it becomes much more difficult to discriminate against gay people once you know them, and good television, even if it’s not a replacement for actual humans, creates the sense that you know the characters and care for their well-being.

But in the release where Nielsen put out that graph, there are some disconcerting facts that point to regional and class gaps between where that programming is penetrating:

Within the 25-49 age demographic, LGBT-inclusive programs (and its advertisers) were most likely to reach:

College-educated white females
Small white collar households
Budding families (those with 3 or fewer members)
Non-white, professional Millennials without children also tended to watch LGBT-inclusive shows more frequently than primetime in general.

LGBT-Inclusive characters were incorporated into shows that skewed towards Eastern and Pacific viewers and were less watched by Midwesterners. This differential was most pronounced among 18-24 year olds in the Midwest, especially when compared to 18-24 year olds in other regions of the U.S.

It makes sense that people who were already liberal in their views on gay rights issues and dedicated to making socially conscious media consumption decisions would be attracted to programming that reinforced their views. But it would also be interesting to see if that programming accelerated or intensified the commitment of those viewers’ to gay rights or their sense that gay families were normal, and if the slower penetration of LGBT-inclusive programming in other kinds of households and other regions had any impact on how quickly perception of gay people changed in those areas.