Ten votes for ten candidates. That is the maximum number of votes a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) can cast on the 2014 ballot that contains players eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, the highest honor a player can receive from the sport. Each vote can be for one candidate only, up to a maximum of ten; a voter is not required to cast all ten votes; in fact, a voter does not have to vote for any candidate.

The problem is that this year's ballot, announced on November 26, 2013, contains 36 candidates—and half of those candidates qualify for the Hall of Fame, at least by my reckoning. The fact is that two issues have plagued Hall of Fame voting in recent years: a logjam of qualified candidates and a backlash concerning players who have used, or have been suspected of using, performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

This reached a head last year, when on a ballot of 37 candidates, not one player received the minimum 75 percent of votes required for election to the Hall. Not one. This includes a ballot that listed Jeff Bagwell (449 home runs, 1529 runs batted in), Craig Biggio (3060 hits, 668 doubles), Barry Bonds (all-time leader in home runs with 762), and Roger Clemens (354 wins, 4672 strikeouts) among the candidates. In fact, the only player inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013 was Deacon White, the catcher selected by Pre-Integration Era committee who last played a game in 1890, and good luck finding anyone who remembers that event first-hand.

Once again the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced its nominations for this year's class of inductees, fueling spirited speculation about which artists should or should not be voted into the Hall. As I did last year, I have profiled the sixteen nominees for the 2014 class and have indicated whether I think Hall voters will vote for the nominee, and whether I would vote for the nominee if I were a voting member of the Hall.

The sixteen nominees are the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Chic, Deep Purple, Peter Gabriel, Hall and Oates, Kiss, L.L. Cool J, the Meters, Nirvana, N.W.A., the Replacements, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, Link Wray, Yes, and the Zombies. Five of the nominees are returning from last year: the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Chic, Deep Purple, the Meters, and N.W.A..

Although we are not scraping the bottom of the 1950s science-fiction film barrel just yet, you can see patches of wood below as we dig through ten sci-fi flicks that have significant deficiencies from a creative or technical standpoint. In other words, now we are starting to get into what for many viewers epitomizes 1950s sci-fi flicks: cheap and cheesy.

These ten flicks are not quite lame and tawdry, but neither do they exhibit narratives or performances that could redeem a film in the way that they could for the last ten films we explored. However, we are now confronted with the reality of 1950s science-fiction cinema: A lot of films made in the genre were made quickly and cheaply to cash in on the demand, and they lack distinction, dubious or otherwise. As we look at these ten not-so-good films and certainly at the ten bad films in the next installment of the series, we will see that each film must have had some mark of notoriety to differentiate it from the mass of simply unremarkable—did someone say simply terrible?—films.

One film that probably belongs in this group but is not described below is When Worlds Collide, another technically splashy effort from producer George Pal released in 1951: As a star approaches Earth and promises imminent annihilation, efforts begin to construct ships to rescue a lucky few amidst growing panic and chaos. Among the cast are incipient 1960s sitcom mainstays Frank Cady (Sam Drucker from Petticoat Junction and Green Acres), Larry Keating (Roger Addison from Mister Ed), and Hayden Roarke (Doctor Bellows from I Dream of Jeannie). However, I did not include it below because it's been years since I've seen it, and I've been unable to get hold of a copy to view it again, so I don't feel that I can describe it adequately nor justify why it should be included.

My, how time flies! Here it is more than a year since my last "audit" of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, my foolhardy attempt to evaluate the artists the Hall has inducted since its inaugural class of 1986, and I had better post my assessments now so I don't have to add another year's worth of inductees once the honorees for 2014 are announced.