No, that’s not a Mets logo…at least not exactly.  The old New York Giants used it first, and it was resurrected for the Mets after the Giants had been sold to San Francisco.  I’ve modeled Doc Barry after a doctor friend of mine who is a die-hard Mets fan and never without his trusty baseball cap.  It just didn’t feel right to have Doc Barry running around without a hat.

As for the conversation at the bar, this episode reminds me of two things. First, in the Aeneid, Rumor (a goddess) disseminates information that inspires discord (by telling King Iarbas of Dido’s marriage to Aeneas). Second, there’s a line in some versions of song The Rising Of The Moon which goes “rumors ran along the valley like the banshee’s lonesome croon” (in many versions it’s “murmurs ran”).

Here (and at the barber shop) we can see how a story “grows legs” and takes on a direction of its own.