Red Sox's 'Play Like Complete Dog Shit in Attempt to Reach World Series' Experiment Yields Unsurprising Resul--Wait, WHAT?

The Boston Red Sox were apparently as hurt as I was by their being perceived as the sneering villains of this year's ALCS, but their solution to the problem--to perform so terribly against the upstart Tampa Bay Rays as to reposition themselves as the underdogs they were a scant four years ago and thereby win back the hearts and minds of the general public beyond New England before staging a comeback--has to this point seemed rather dangerous, even to me. By the top half of the seventh inning during Game 5 Thursday night, it seemed downright psychotic.

I was disappointed when the Sox came up short in the marathon Game 2 on Sunday, but no Boston fan could complain too much about gaining a split on the road against a no-joke opponent. When the Red Sox decided to lay down their bats and allow their 2008 postseason ace to get shelled in Game 3, however, I began to grow concerned: wouldn't the Game 4 start of Human Batting Tee Tim Wakefield have been a better opportunity to drop a game at home?

Turns out that it was a spectacular opportunity, as the Rays unloaded for a 13-4 rout on Tuesday. It was at this point that I began to suspect that some of these Red Sox losses weren't intentional. Frankenstein's monster had broken out of the laboratory was wandering the countryside, drowning small children.

Nonetheless, there was a part of me that couldn't help but admire the Boston club's commitment to regaining underdog status by allowing themselves to be put in a 3-1 series hole, just like they were against the Indians last year and against the Yankees three years before that, that would require them to sweep all three remaining games to win the pennant.

That admiration had dissipated into utter disgust long before the middle of the seventh inning on Thursday, when the Red Sox were getting their asses handed to them (yet again), 7-0. Given that I am a Red Sox fan from birth (who is older than 5), I'm no stranger to seeing my team fail miserably...but I could little recall a game or a series when every member of the team looked for all the world like they just didn't give a shit--like failure was inevitable. That's exactly what the Red Sox looked like after the top half of the seventh during the do-or-die Game 5, facing a deficit that had never before been overcome in the history of the American League Championship Series.

And then...

They scored four runs, scored another three in the eighth, and tacked on one more in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, 8-7, and send the series back to Tampa.

So that happened.

Whether or not the Boston Red Sox are able to achieve the still-very-daunting task of winning the pennant, it's nice to once again be rooting for a team that cares...at least for one more game.

Bush Administration Deems Scientists Unnecessary

Continuing its quest to turn their president into an actual cartoon character before he leaves office, on Monday the Bush administration ruled that when it comes to deciding if construction projects could endanger animal species, scientists--what with their fancy book learnin' and "knowledge"--will no longer have a say in the matter.

Who will be making those calls from now on? Why, the agencies working on the construction projects, of course. No possibility for conflicts of interest there.

Suck it, nature!

"America Can, Should, Must and Will Blow Up the Moon."

First they were shooting rockets at satellites; now they're literally just smashing spacecrafts into the moon.

Apparently, NASA has been overrun by socially maladjusted nine-year-olds.

I Don't Want to Miss a Thing

50 years after the inception of NASA, the United States is finally involved in a space war...by which I mean a war against space.

You're goin' down, space!

SLC Punk'd

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

"'Minutemen' is a nicely paced, simple comedy that, unlike other time-splitting stories, keeps the paradoxes of science at bay. Think of it as an undemanding version of 'Back to the Future'."

Can you imagine if you were the person who wrote Minutemen, and you'd spent like a year and a half extensively researching time travel theory--barbecuing your wee brain with books like The Nature of Space and Time, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat and The Fabric of Reality--in an attempt to imbue the story with as much scientific viability as possible, only to be told time and again to give up the ghost, the studio's position essentially being that "nobody cares about the science part"? Even further, can you imagine if you had been largely motivated to fight that ultimately futile battle by a reverence to Back to the Future, a movie that you loved above all others? Then Minutemen finally premieres...and you read that review (in the paper of the very city where the movie was filmed, no less)?

Personally, I would be upset.

Dolemite Would Like a Word With the Researchers at Rice University

...or at the very least with MSNBC.com, who ought not try to be so cutesy with their headlines.

God help them if they're as glib about whatever scientists might "create" the opposite extreme, because then they'll have Will Smith to contend with.

Like Most Sequels, 'Exxon Valdez 2' a Relative Disappointment

Disaster fans have been waiting 18 years since the Exxon Valdez spill for a nautical mishap that could harm the environment with like or perhaps even greater severity...and when the MS Nordkapp cruise ship ran aground in Antarctica on Tuesday [Ed. note: Did you notice that that link is from the future? Yeah, I can see into the future], some no doubt entertained the thought that their dream had become a reality. But alas, it was not to be.

While scientists at Spain's Antarctic base have detected the presence of trace amounts of hydrocarbons on the coastline where the accident occurred--thus confirming that fuel did spill from the ship and that the ecological system has been damaged--non-scientist spokespeople for the Hurtigruten Group, the company who owns the MS Nordkapp, are essentially saying they haven't seen any spilled oil and therefore there isn't any. Both solid arguments, but no matter who turns out to be right, it's clear by this point that the Nordkapp accident pales in every element--scope, drama, and oil-covered seals--to that of the Exxon Valdez.

Much like the world learned from Blues Brothers 2000 in 1998 (?), this incident further proves that the more time that passes in anticipation of a sequel, the harder it is for that sequel to reproduce the magic of its predecessor.