I Have To Say It

8:47pm EDT:

They'll probably break it. However: as I write this, going into the top of the ninth with a new game tied 4-4 at Fenway, the Red Sox are winning my heart.

God bless 'em. If they go down, they will have done it like men.

9:16pm Ps. -- Okay: Arroyo just iced A-Rod and Sheffield in the top of the tenth. The Rodriguez strikeout was nearly heroic, and he blew Sheffield away like it was nothin'.

What a game.

One Hour Later -- David Ortiz (four career stolen bases) tries to steal second with one out in the twelfth -- something so shocking that Posada nearly threw the ball into centerfield -- and I think he was in there, but the ump called him out. This bloody thing is going to the thirteenth inning, and I think we've just about seen everything at this point.

10:45pm -- The damned blimp had to go home. Out of gas. Bottom of the fourteenth.

11:00pm -- David Ortiz hits a little flappy single to centerfield, scores the hapless Johnny Damon, and wins the game in the bottom of the 14th inning. He enters the pantheon of Boston's gods, where he will never have to buy a drink for the rest of his life.

Wotta game, ladies & gents. That was a jammin' baseball game.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell: The Primitive

"If we find proof that an Irish coracle carrying a monk or two on the white martyrdom washed ashore in N. A., does that make them Native Americans?"

"Yup. That's the way the reasoning works."

Who's Who And What's What

"One day Henry Luce called me up and asked me to come to supper.

There were three of us. The second guest was a nimble, witty European whom I shall call Smetana. At supper, most of the talk was between Luce and Smetana. I was rather a silent guest. I was fresh from the shadows; bright conversation hurt my mind. In fact, I had left behind the world of Time and those who lived within it. It was only the friendliest of fictions that I still belonged to it.

No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off Time. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. 'By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave,' he said, 'the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?'

'You don't understand the class structure of American society,' said Smetana 'or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.' "

(Whittaker Chambers -- "Witness", 1952, p. 616)

"Sincerely, etc., etc."

Dear Guardianistas,

For all my life, I have been inviolably dedicated to principled non-voting.

However, I would sign up and vote for George W. Bush with all the frequency of a Cook County dead man, if it would crash your Common Dreams, you rat-fuck commies.

Piss off.

(link: QandO)

Compassionate Head-Tilts

Tim Blair presents a gallery of morons.

"Noting his ancestry, young Peter checks for the presence of testicles."

The poor kid.

Otherwise -- during the recent island excursion, I happened to spend a few minutes in the atrium of Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport. (Oh wait... it's now "Hartsfield-Race-Grifter-Maynard-Jackson International Airport". I almost forgot.) Sitting there, I observed a line of troops in desert camo, standing two-abreast in the outlet of a corridor into the atrium space. On a signal, they took up their gear and began to move out, in column. They made their way through the atrium, and the whole place -- perhaps three hundred people (it was early) -- stood up as one, rendering a thunderous ovation for the whole time that the troops were in sight.

Lamed by the spectacle, I couldn't move to get out my camera. I wish I had, though. It was terrific.