Shots in the Dark

In the Bangor Daily News, columnist Ron Brown writes about an issue that I think everyone agrees with but I haven’t seen much written about: The fact that the World Series games went so late, they were almost impossible to watch.

Seemed to me that the first pitch generally started around 8:40, and so the games pretty much went past midnight.

Because it was such a dull World Series, I didn’t stay up for any last outs, but there are a lot of people wandering around Boston this week who need to catch up on their sleep.

(Also, get a life, but that’s a separate issue.)

More important, these late games make it impossible for children to watch…so how will baseball cultivate its fans this way?

The game I’m writing about, the 1978 Yankee-Red Sox playoff, started at 2:30 PM. And the starting time was one reason why it became such a memorable event for so many people roughly my age—it marked a break in their schedule. Schools let out early, some kids watched in their school auditoriums….

But as Bucky Dent said to me when I interviewed him (take that, Sox fans), how different would it have been if that had been a night game?

If not day games, how about at least a 7:30 start time next year?

IvyGate’s “Worst Ivy League A Capella Tournament” rolls on; apparently there is no shortage of candidates.

Featured today are the Brown Jabberwocks, the Princeton Roaring 20, Cornell’s Absolute A Capella, and Yale’s Living Water. Listen as the Cornel group takes a classic Oasis song…and makes you never, ever want to hear it again!

(Plus, what are they doing with their bodies? It’s as if they all have some sort of contagious nervous tic syndrome.)

Even the names are excruciating….

Yale Dean Amerigo Fabbri has apologized for mistakenly calling the cops and breaking up a university-sanctioned party, the Pierson Inferno.

(Ah, yes, I remember it well….)

(Actually, I remember parts of it well…..)

“Had I known about the nature and occasion of the event, by no means, I assure you, would I have called the police!” Fabbri wrote.

That’s the spirit…..

The San Jose Mercury-News takes note of Caroline and Blair Hoxby’s arrival in California.

“I think that Stanford is on the top of its game as regards outreach,” said Hoxby, “and this means better recruiting, better faculty, and - in the end - greater success all around.”

A Windows user tries to make the case that Macs aren’t good computers.

The Macintosh computer is the emasculated plaything of the effete, limp-wristed parlor liberals who have too much money and too little sense. Hopefully, when reality hits, it will go the way of POG caps, Beanie Babies, and Pokémon. Sure, it’s cute. It is, after all, just a very expensive paperweight.

The author, Harvard sophomore Eugene Kim, argues that Macs are too expensive, insufficiently powerful, don’t have enough games made for them, and break easily. (Huh?)

Hmmmm. Try telling that to my friend whose couple-months-old Dell just died on her. She spent four hours on the phone with a guy in India. His advice—which, gasp, she followed—was to erase her hard drive and everything on it.

And she wasn’t even using Vista!

Now, Mr. Kim is comping the Crimson, so he must be forgiven a little hyperbole. But do we really need a little gay-baiting (“effete, limp-wristed…) in there?

And, oh, by the way, Mr. Kim—I just installed Leopard on both my Macs, and it’s running beautifully. How’s that Vista thing working for you? (Whichever version you shelled out for….)

Will Joe Torre and Don Mattingly coach together again in Los Angeles?

The Yankees hire Joe Girardi. (I think it’s the right choice.)

Will the Mets sign A-Rod? (Hilarious. Just what a jinxed organization needs—a jinxed player.)

Will the Yankees sign Mike Lowell? (I hope not. Too old, and he’ll never have a better season than he just did.)

Are the Red Sox the new Yankees?

Everyone blasts A-Rod and Scott Boras:

Murray Chass:

So goes the sincerity of a player whose personality at first blush is so engaging that he can dupe experienced reporters, as he did me 10 years ago. I have since learned that he is not what he appears to be on the surface, and whether he allows Boras to manipulate him or agrees with his strategy, he comes across as disingenuous.

I don’t mean to joke about this, because it’s actually kind of a touchy issue for me, but should a player whose number is 13 and who is said to bring bad luck to every team he plays for really be buying a jet?

IvyGate is having a competition to determine the worst a capella group in the Ivy League.

One is tempted to answer all of them….

Given that Harvard apparently has too many student groups, and that no one likes a capella groups except for the people who are in them…perhaps there’s a natural solution here?

Your latest Jeffrey Epstein news (it never seems to end):

Epstein - soon to cop a plea to soliciting sex from teen hookers at his Palm Beach estate - is being sued by a drug-addicted, transgender model who claims he/she was pressured into having sex with Epstein at the age of 16.

Sources say the former math teacher, who owns the lush, tropical island of Little St. James, off the coast of St. Thomas, regularly ferried boatloads of young women there.

Epstein’s spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, wouldn’t comment on whether Epstein has imported platoons of young babes.

You have now caught up to the Florida Marlins.