The Bell Curve:

While skimming the news media that I didn’t read over the holidays, here are some of the items that stopped and compelled me to read them.

Bill Mulligan died. I had the good fortune to be teaching in the UC Irvine English department while Mulligan was coaching the basketball team, and he took us for a terrific ride.

In their bandbox gymnasium before overflow crowds, UCI won some memorable battles against the University of Nevada Las Vegas in years when UNLV was ranked with the best college teams in the country.

Mulligan never failed to entertain us. He broke 100 points a number of times, led the nation one year in scoring, with an average of 86 points a game, and once finished first in the nation in field goal percentage. He was an ebullient man who instilled that quality in his players and in all of us who watched them. It was his fine record that gave impetus, late in his career, to the building of the Bren Center.

In his last years, he was often a sole observer in the high reaches of the center, watching what was once his team struggle before a relative handful of students in a campus of many thousands.

I have a season ticket to UCI basketball and go to games every year in the hope, I suppose, of seeing the reincarnation of the sheer joy of a Bill Mulligan team. If there is an afterlife, I’m certain that Mulligan is pursuing the same goal — at the rate of 100 points a game, and having a hell of a time.

Two minor crises in the sports world were up for resolution during the first week of the new year. First, a statistical question: Should the Alabama victory in the national college championship football game be qualified by an asterisk noting that the Texas quarterback was injured on the first play of the game and never got back into action?

He was replaced by a freshman understudy who was unable to get the Texas offense in gear. But from my perspective there is no case for an asterisk. There was no foul on the injury, just a rotten break of the game for which Alabama should not be punished by watering down its triumph.

The second crisis is financial: Should I renew my one-eighth of a season ticket in light of a turgid economy and some key players the Angels have allowed to go elsewhere and others they have failed to sign? The Angel front office has an unbeatable system — for them — in loading this question.

If the team has a statistical chance late in the season of making the playoffs, season ticket holders are required to buy tickets through the World Series if they want to see any postseason games. Thus if the Angels don’t make the playoffs or are eliminated early, the club has a pile of money that isn’t rebated until January — and then only with a strong urge to use whatever remains as a down payment on next season tickets.

So my daughter and I — true to the rock the women in my life bought for me that says “ever faithful” — are signed up for the new season. I think my one-eighth of a pair of seats behind home plate on the top deck cost me an additional $1,300, but I’m not sure. All I know for sure is that spring training is only a month away.

I regularly read Judge Jim Gray’s Sunday column to find out what the Libertarians are up to, and I especially enjoyed the recent byplay between Gray and his good friend Judge Andrew Guilford and their civilized dealing with disagreement — which was the way it used to be in the U.S. before we broke off into two angry parts.

In that civilized spirit I’d like to question Guilford’s conclusion that “Jim probably agrees with me that the worst answers to a question are ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care.’” That was tossed off as if it were a given, and I’d like to know if Gray really feels this way.

I don’t. In 20 years of teaching nonfiction writing at UCI and twice as long writing for national magazines, I’ve found that these two responses when offered in answer to a question are usually simple truths.

We may and often do deplore the lack of substance in such answers, but not routinely their honesty. The alternatives range from an effulgence of words to flat out lies, offered for a multitude of reasons. By far the most common mistake of my early students, nurtured in high school creative writing classes, was overwriting. They would go to great lengths to avoid “I don’t know.”

Seems to me that, if true, “I don’t know” should be healthy in a courtroom, too. If not true, doesn’t it then become the business of the court to expose the lie?

We got a foretaste recently from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of what problems we can expect to be addressed when and if the Republicans ever get back in control (“Rep. grateful for asteroid help,” Jan. 14). Even got a math lesson, too. It seems there is a massive asteroid tumbling our way in space that Russian scientists fear might hit Earth with a blast the equivalent of 880 megatons of TNT. This would take place, we are told, April 13, 2036 (they didn’t give the time). And how likely is it that this will happen? Ah, there’s the rub. Scientists estimate a 1 in 250,000 chance that the collision will take place — odds that even Las Vegas wouldn’t touch.

Rohrabacher has sent a letter to the head of the Russian Space Agency, suggesting they join the U.S. in a partnership to divert the asteroid.

He apparently feels the threat is greater from the asteroid than it is from global warming, which he has loudly denounced even though the odds of it taking place are somewhat less than 1 to 250,000.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.