JOSE CRUZ WEEPS:  Major League Baseball has confirmed that the Houston Astros will move to the American League West in 2013, joining the Texas Rangers there, and as early as next year (but no later than 2013) there will be a second wild-card team added to each league, with the two wild cards facing in a one-game playoff.

I'm actually fine with the latter, because I like the idea of creating incentives for winning one's division, but a pair of 15-team leagues? Ugh. Interleague play should be a rare midseason treat, not something which occurs every week of the year. From what I've been able to piece together, we're likely instead looking at 18 games against each divisional rival (total 72), 6x each for the other 10 teams in the league (60), and 30 interleague games -- basically, doubling the number of interleague games and inexorably leading us to the destruction of the American and National Leagues as distinct entities and the introduction of the designated hitter into all games. Boo!

LET THEM ENTERTAIN YOU: EW's already started polling for the "audience" choices for its Entertainer of the Year issue, so time for us to start some irresponsible speculation:

• Melissa McCarthy--Sure thing for the Top 10 with the Emmy win and turn in Bridesmaids, but no way she goes to #1, right?
• Daniel Radcliffe/Harry Potter--If he'd gotten a Tony nod, maybe, but they already honored Rowling when Deathly Hallows came out in book form.
• Adele--Another sure thing for the Top 10, but #1? Tough sell, even as inescapable as "Rolling In The Deep" and "Someone Like You" have been. A boatload of Grammy nominations will help her case, and they'll be news right around the time the issue comes out.
• Game of Thrones--Has both a successful TV series and top-selling books, but is it too geek? True Blood draws a bigger audience.
• Twilight--God, I hope not, but it sells magazines to stick them on the cover. (That said, they're doing a Breaking Dawn cover this week--would they do two that close together?)
• Emma Stone--Several big movies this summer, and "starlet of tomorrow."
• The cast of Modern Family--Swept the Emmys, big critical and commercial hit? Seems like a recipe for success.

Anything I'm missing that's blatantly obvious, or that should be there?

NOW, HE IS KNOWN ONLY AS ... THE FALCONER:  The Awl lists Thirteen Notable Traditions Found On UNESCO's List Of Intangible Cultural Heritage, In Order, but in truth the whole list is pretty neat. The United States doesn't participate in the process of adding "intangible heritage practices and expressions" to the list, but it's not hard to think about what we might suggest—the blues and square dancing, perhaps?

NAME ONE OTHER MASSIVE HIT SINGLE THAT DOESN'T HAVE A CHORUS BUT DOES HAVE A MANDOLIN:  I read about them in Time magazine—Jessica Winter annotates (and suggests replacements on) the R.E.M. forty-song retrospective, Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage 1982-2011.

SURE TO BE BETTER THAN THIS YEAR'S OTHER MOVIE ABOUT A ZOOKEEPER: Fox is pulling a surprising move with We Bought a Zoo--it's not blinking from a December 23 release date (which puts it up against Tintin, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and the wide release of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, with War Horse following two days later)--instead, it's going to sneak the movie for paying audiences next weekend to try and build up goodwill. This seems to me a silly decision--if the movie's ready, why not release it earlier (say, this weekend, when the other wide options are Happy Feet Two and Sparklevamps Finally Get It On, or any other weekend in December, where the mainstream adult options are pretty thin)?

OFFICER LOCKSTOCK IS ENFORCING THESE NEW RULES: Starbucks, in an effort to cut maintenance costs, is apparently reducing or eliminating public bathrooms at many of its Manhattan locations. It's a privilege to pee, my friends, a privilege to pee.

MAKING C&S FUN: Those of us who went to law school likely remember the glory days of cite and substance checking, which at least as of 2002, when I was running it, still involved sending 2L's off to scour random libraries to get copies of the hard copy material. Westlaw and Lexis were not OK, much less "well, I put it into Google." I paid many a trip not just to the main NYPL on 42nd Street, but the Science, Industry, and Business Library, and other random locales. However, it seems new students of journalism have never gained that skill, so a NYU professor of journalism has come up with a treasure hunt to force students to learn how to navigate a library and find things in those dusty stacks.