Baseball season has started, and the Seattle Mariners are 2 and 1, which means the weather is still fair for this fan. If I lean a bit from my desk, I can see the M’s Safeco Field out of Grist’s downtown-office window. I cannot wait until some large building is named after Tampax. Or Ex-Lax. Or Preparation H.

But that’s not at all what I came here to talk about today. I came to give props to San Francisco, which is wonderful in so many ways, including its recent ban of plastic bags and (finally, my point!) its plans to install up to 590 solar panels at the SF Giants’ AT&T Park. The panels will be installed in time for the All-Star game, to be held there in July. Not that that really matters, as the panels will not fuel the park itself, but feed into the city grid.

In other sporting news:

Regular readers of this column (hi, Mom and Dad) will have noticed that I am hitched to a chap who looooves English soccer football team Manchester United (despite Kaela’s best efforts to turn him to the dark side). It is to his delight that I bring the news that ManU manager Sir Alex Ferguson has been trained in the Al Gore slide show and is, no doubt, making CO2-emissions-graph memorization a must for all United’s players.

And here’s more on the upcoming Beijing Olympics from the WaPo.