Too much time on your hands? Write some limericks

Today we are going to celebrate Too-Much-Time-On Your-Hands Tuesday, a new event I just invented and which will not be celebrated again until you people pile a another batch of Too-MuchTime-etc., questions. And since many of you seem to have too much time on your hands this is a good time to remind you tomorrow is the last day for entering the Valley 101 Hot Weather Limerick contest.

You may send your three entries to clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com and, what the heck, try to make them about hot weather, OK?

Now, since we seem to have time, let us begin:

While watching a high-scoring Diamondbacks game I was wondering about the most common final score in modern Major League Baseball. A classic TMTOYH question. According to retrosheet.org, in 213,370 games from 1871 to 2016, the most common final MLB score was 3-2, marked in 11,775 games. Next was 4-3, the score in 11,369 games, and third was 2-1 in 9,565 games.

I am old, but I do not remember having to deal with the periodic table in school. Is it something fairly new?

Umm, well, no, the periodic table is not fairly new, at least not in the sense that most of us measure time.

The periodic table as we know it today was developed in 1869 Russian chemist named Dimitri Mendeleev. He arranged chemical elements by atomic mass and left room for elements yet to be discovered.

Of course, most of us go through life without much needing to check the periodic table, but I don’t know how you got through school without at least hearing about it.