Shots in the Dark

Yes, yes, all right. As some of you have pointed out, the Yanks got me all excited by moving into a tie for first with the Sox, then proceeded to get swept by the Angels, promptly falling three back as the Sox swept the hapless Royals. So it’s Boston by three at the All Star break.

Can the Red Sox keep it up? I doubt it. Seems unlikely that they’re going to win another 54 games. So what do they have to fear? Drug tests. Well, I don’t know if Tim Wakefield and Josh Beckett can continue to pitch as well as they have to date. Injuries. Drug tests. Slumps. (Is Jason Bay really going to have a 40-homer season?)

But all told, the Sox have to be pretty pleased with their first-half, and while they might not win 54 the second half, a 100-win season looks very doable. The Yanks’ record is more mixed. 51 wins is pretty good, but it should have been a few more. On the plus side, Derek Jeter is having a great year, Mark Texeira is fantastic, A.J. Burnett is pitching well, Phil Hughes is a pleasant surprise. But Joba Chamberlain and C.C. Sabathia are underperforming, Robinson Cano never met a double play ball he didn’t want to hit into, Chien Ming-Wang is an unmitigated disaster struggling to save his career, A-Rod is below par (for him), Brian Bruney hasn’t recovered his pre-injury form, and most important, it would be nice if they beat the Red Sox at some point.

Sox fans may disagree, but I think their team is playing up to its potential, while the Yankees have some room for improvement. I predict a tie.

Another reef shark off Grand Cayman.

Here’s the thing I like about this picture, which I’ve shown to a few friends. A couple of them have said, Didn’t it make you nervous to be so close to that shark?

The answer was no, and it’s not because I’m particularly courageous. I’m not. It’s because reef sharks, like the vast majority of sharks, don’t bother humans.

Humans, of course, bother sharks immensely, slaughtering them by the millions every year. Which, in a small way, this photo suggests. Look closely at the right corner of the shark’s mouth. Recognize that?

It’s a fishing hook….

“You’re not going to score dressed like that!”

—Daniel Radcliffe, in Entertainment Weekly, on trying to get some while you’re wearing a Harry Potter schoolboy outfit.

I was watching CNN from my exercise machine at the gym yesterday, and a story came on that was so appallingly bad that I cried a little remembering what CNN used to be. (People thought I was sweating, so no harm done to my tough-guy image.)

It was chyroned “Michael Jackson’s Secret Humanitarian Side,” and it consisted of Wolf Blitzer interviewing Gotham Chopra (yeah, Deepak’s son), who was a friend of Jackson’s, about something Chopra had written on the Huffington Post.

If you were to combine any four things in the world likely to make me jump off a rocky cliff, you couldn’t do much better than Wolf Blitzer, Michael Jackson death coverage, anything Chopra-esque, and the Huffington Post.

So Gotham Chopra had written that Jackson called him one night because he was concerned about the two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, taken prisoner by North Korea. Jackson thought that he might have some influence with Kim Jong-Il.

“Do you think,” he said hesitantly, “that the leader of North Korea could be a fan of mine?”

Why did Jackson think the two men had a bond?

Because they both liked to wear military jackets.

No, really.

Apparently it didn’t occur to Jackson that he wore military jackets as a fashion statement while Kim Jong-Il wears them because he is a dictator.

But Wolf Blitzer nodded his overstuffed head in awe as Gotham Chopra explained that, at Jackson’s request, he began “research” into whether Kim Jong-Il might be a Michael Jackson fan.

What that consisted of, Chopra didn’t say, but in any case the point soon became moot.

And that, for CNN, was enough to declare that Michael Jackson had a “secret humanitarian side.”

(The normally-sensible Campbell Brown also interviewed Chopra on the same subject.)

I wish that I could find the segment online to show you, but the closet thing on CNN’s website is the story, “Psychics See Magic in Michael Jackson’s Life.”

I wish I were making that up.

I was thinking about Devo recently, so I dug up this old video of their classic “Jerkin Back and Forth.”

What can you say, really, except that they were sort of weird and brilliant?

The Boston Globe has a list.

So anyone with half a brain who cares about newspapers has known for months that the New York Times will have to start charging for its website. Because after all, how many people really—especially young people—are going to pay $700 a year for something they can get for free?

And we all know you’re not making much money off those online ads.

So the Times is apparently doing a survey to see how many people would pay $5 a month for access to its website.

$5 a month?

I guess the Times doesn’t value itself very highly. I’ve been saying for ages now (just ask my bored friends) that the Times should charge $20 a month for its site, which is in some ways better than the physical paper…and that that figure might even drive some people back to the print edition, because if the financial gap isn’t huge, there are people who would prefer print.

But more to the point…it took them this long to get to the point where they’re doing a survey?

Harvard Magazine takes note of Nina Munk’s Vanity Fair story on its website.

The article was generating buzz even before it hit newsstands in Harvard Square…..

When I posted about this article before, most of you folks hadn’t had the chance to read it, so the discussion, while lively, wasn’t about the article per se.

If you’ve read it now, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Yankees beat Minnesota, the Sox lost to KC, and it’s tied!

Worth noting, by the way that, if the Sox and the Yanks keep up this pace, they’ll each have won 102 games, which is pretty impressive…

Any predictions on the second half?