Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you champagne, more on-the-ground Egypt coverage, how to fix soap operas, Henry Aaron, and drugs in Mexico. Enjoy!

In his elegant and occasionally very funny book about Bollinger, the British writer Cyril Ray relates a story about how champagne became known as “the boy” in late-Victorian England. According to Ray, it began at a summer shooting party; the not-yet-corpulent Edward VII, Prince of Wales (at left), insisted on the presence of a lad with a wheelbarrow full of bubbly packed in ice. It was a hot day, and the thirsty prince hollered “boy!” so many times that the heavy swells in attendance—especially those who wanted it to be known that they’d been shooting with the heir to the throne—began to throw the epithet around. Some perverse toffs began to spell it “the bhoy.” It stuck for more than a half-century.

The rumors started flying around Twitter at 6:00PM: Mubarak planned to speak, Mubarak would step down, the army was taking over. I ran out of the apartment and toward Tahrir Square, about a half a mile away. When I arrived the news hadn’t quite reached the thousands of protesters gathered there. They were as adamant as ever. I decided to go home and monitor the situation from the Internet but on my way out ran into an Egyptian journalist who works for a wire service. “You want to miss the celebrations?” she asked me. I went back.

Soaps have been a lot of things to me over the years, but boring isn’t one of them. Not until now. Although there is just enough delicious drama to keep me dedicated to watching four of them every weekday on YouTube (NBC’s “Days of Our Lives” and ABC’s “General Hospital,” “All My Children” and “One Life to Live”), lately I find myself fast-forwarding through large chunks of action, praying for the madness to end.

Henry Aaron turned 77 on Saturday. Somehow it seemed appropriate that Aaron’s birthday, as might be expected, was overshadowed by the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Aaron’s birthday receiving almost no attention demonstrates how the he remains bewilderingly underrated in his retirement, just as he was during his career. Aaron retired as the all time leader in home runs and RBIs and among the top three in hits. His career numbers of .305/.374/.555 were good for a career OPS+ of 155 which, while not in the same ballpark as Babe Ruth or Ted Williams, are still very good. These numbers are even more impressive because Aaron accumulated them over 23 seasons and 13,940 plate appearances. This latter number is the third most ever, but was good enough for first at the time Aaron retired. However, Aaron, who was overshadowed by Willie Mays for most of his career, is still oddly underrated by most casual students of baseball’s past.

Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal launched a war of words between the US and Mexican governments on Monday, when he referred to Mexico’s drug cartels as an “insurgency.” His comments, made while speaking at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Center for Politics, implied the possibility of a US invasion of Mexico if the situation deteriorated further. Westphal quickly retracted his statements, as the Mexican government condemned them, and the US government sought to distance itself. However, earlier comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and information revealed by Wikileaks suggest that there is more to the situation in Mexico than official reports suggest.