Shots in the Dark

Has winning taken all the fun out of rooting for the Red Sox? Are they a more boring team than they used to be? Wouldn’t it be better to go back to the old ways?

Brian McGrory asks these very important questions in today’s Globe.

The first order of business is to admit it to ourselves: 2004 was more meaningful. Back then, and in the 86 years that preceded it, we knew who we were. We were hapless, though never hopeless. We were the ones that always had something to overcome - a curse, a seemingly in surmountable deficit, a little-brother syndrome.

… what have we become?

And here’s the answer we know but dread: Another free-spending, big market team that buys its way into the postseason with every expectation that it will win.

Is it possible that the Yankees have become the likeable underdogs while the Sox have become the soulless machine?

It is!

Tim Marchman in the Sun thinks this World Series has all the makings of a baseball classic.

Meanwhile, two depressed Yankee fans I know think the Sox will sweep…. As one put it, Josh Beckett=two automatic wins, meaning that the Rockies would have to win four of five otherwise…..

The same depressed Yankee fans also think that the Sox might have the makings of a dynasty here……

arghargharghargharghargharghargh, etc.

Here is my favorite lede in recent memory (and don’t pretend it wasn’t on purpose, you crafty Crimson folks):

For billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein, charges of illicit sex practices just keep coming.

Let me go on record as saying that I’m now starting to feel sorry for Jeffrey Epstein. The guy clearly has a problem. But he never forced anyone to do anything, and the lawsuit that the Crimson article describes sounds like a complete crock to me. And Crimson, are you sure it wasn’t first reported in the New York Post, not by ABC News?

After all, the Post has been doing top-notch reporting on the Epstein case. Today, for example, it reports that …

The stunning model wannabe who says she was pressured into a hush- hush affair with billionaire Jeffrey Epstein when she was only 16 has an even bigger secret - she’s a man.

The young woman used to be a young boy, then went under the knife.

“I’m a spoiled bitch and really mean,” her MySpace page says.

Now, I’m just guessing, but given that it was Alan Dershowitz who dug up dirt on some of the other accusers by checking out their MySpace pages, could Professor Dershowitz have possibly fed this delicious little item to the Post?

Maximiliana (nee Maximilian) Cordero.

In the Globe, Cathy Young updates the discussion on women, science and gender.

THE DEBATE over women’s place in science, which proved to be the downfall of Harvard President Lawrence Summers after he suggested that male preeminence in the field could be due at least partly to biological traits and personal choices, remains a lightning rod for controversy. Earlier this month, the subject was tackled in two different symposiums - one at Harvard, the other at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based right-of-center think tank.

(Can we trust a writer who makes an egregious mistake in the very first sentence of her story?)

Young, who is a libertarian, is most concerned about government intervention in the debate.

The discussion of gender and science is not mere theory. It has to do with practical plans to remake the scientific establishment in a woman-friendly image. Many proposals are innocuous enough, and some are being implemented at many schools: extending the tenure clock for new parents and other measures to help combine scientific careers with family responsibilities. But there is also talk of programs to eradicate subtle and unconscious biases (which sounds like a prescription for politically correct witch hunts) and of invoking Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to bring down the wrath of the federal government on institutions that are purportedly too slow to correct inequalities in science.

Invoking Title IX? I haven’t heard of this, but I’ll take Young’s word for it. Nothing could be more damaging to women scientists, of course, than affirmative action not of socioeconomic status, but of the mind…..

…but can I just point out that Kenny Lofton was clearly safe?

So who has the advantage here, Boston or Colorado? And what will they do if it keeps snowing in Colorado?

Remember Richard Mellon Scaife, the conservative billionaire who’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars bankrolling moralistic conservative thinktanks and newspapers? The one who couldn’t spent enough money trying to prove that Bill Clinton was an adulterer?

Well, turns out he’s…an adulterer!

And not only that, but his choice of consort is, well, a former consort. Or, as the Washington Post puts it, Social Register material she is not.

The two usually met each other twice a week, for months, at the motel, says an employee of the motel. Scaife would show up in a chauffeured car, dressed in a suit, wearing cuff links, always bearing flowers. Vasco would be waiting in same room every time, Room 5 on the ground floor, facing the parking lot, said the employee. Mr. Dick, as he was known at the motel, would stay for two hours or so, then get back in the car, which had been waiting, and leave.

Now Scaife’s wife, Ritchie, is suing for divorce. And—ooops—they don’t have a pre-nup. Even before the case has been ruled on, she’s getting $725,000 a month from her husband by court order.

All of this, by the way, comes from documents which were supposed to be sealed, but a court clerk mistakenly posted to a public section of the court’s website. Whoops!

What will happen to the Heritage Foundation, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and others if Scaife loses half his money?

Four-year-old Yang Yang swims with a five-year-old beluga whale in a Qingdao aquarium.

Remember Socks, the Clinton’s cat? Well, at the end of the Clinton presidency, they gave Socks away to presidential assistant Betty Currie.

Now the Times of London reports that the Clintons’ treatment of Socks could hurt Hillary’s chances of winning the presidency.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president.

… Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

Hmm…..

Who are these “some” who believe that Sox could doom Hillary?

Well, other than an idiotic article by Caitlin Flanagan in the November Atlantic, nobody.

And how exactly does giving a cat to a friend who can presumably take better care of it mean that you “abandoned” your pet?

American University is changing its men’s and women’s bathrooms to gender-neutral bathrooms, so that transgender students won’t have to face “an anxiety-ridden decision,” according to the LA Times.

At least 17 schools, including Ohio State University and the University of Vermont, have pledged to include gender-neutral bathrooms in new buildings, said Stephanie Gordon, director of educational programs for NASPA, an association of student affairs administrators.

Who are the losers here? Well, Larry Craig, of course, because gender-neutral bathrooms are generally designed for one person.

More seriously, women—because we all know that men are slobs…..