And so, let the not so dulcet tones of the Yankees Suck cheers ring in Fenway...

As famed New Englander (though a Californian by birth, I think we can call him a New Englander) and overrated archtool Robert Frost once wrote, two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Tonight, those roads are the respective seasons of the coiled, sleeping dragon Red Sox and the lumbering oaf on the verge of going over the cliff Yankees. The two teams meet in Fenway this weekend, and the Red Sox are poised to sweep.

Both teams have a 5-5 record, but the Red Sox are 5-5 because they're battling injuries. Beckett is going to get stronger with each passing start. Clay Buchholz is poised to have that breakout year we've been told by Red Sox Nation and its press cadre is all but overdue (even though he's a rookie and his inevitable late season heroics were derailed by a vague tiredness in his pitching arm). And Coco Crisp is hitting over .300 at the moment, so all signs point to the Yankees fading quickly and harshly.

After all, the Yankees are so desperate, they're forced to start their ace, Chien Ming Wang on normal rest. In any other club, and against any other team, this would be interpreted by any rational observer as business as usual. But this is the struggling .500 New York Yankees and they face the mighty .500 Boston Red Sox. Everyone who is anyone knows that the panic button is already pressed in the Bronx. Surely by this point tomorrow, the frantic phone calls to Scranton will begin in earnest.

The Red Sox, on the other hand, are so confident of victory in this series that they sent Mike Lowell to the 15 day DL this afternoon. The Sox didn't even make the move retroactive to speed his return. They don't need him in the lineup at the moment, given that Jason Varitek's batting .290 and has 2 homers. Given his recent track record, he probably does have two weeks of promise left before he remembers his bat was declared missing and presumed dead from the Red Sox lineup in late 2005. Rest assured, I will be updating this site frequently over the next three days or so to chronicle this spectacular instance of ships passing in the night in the offing.

For some unexplained reason, I signed up to receive the BU student newspaper at the alumni website one afternoon when I was killing time. I don't know what good I expected to come of it at the time, if any, but I never hoped for this. As those of you who read this blog have probably come to notice, I am a keen observer, almost to the point of paranoia, of the tools that walk among us. And today, thanks in part to the travesty of a student newspaper at Boston University, I have struck what just might be the Comstock Lode of tools of note. And in this instance, this picture is truly worth at least 1,000 words...



There is a movement afoot on American college campuses that must be revealed and ridiculed (gently, and without recourse to cyberbullying, of course, as this site condones neither real nor pretend violence) instantly. Tools of epic proportions across the nation are putting together an event called the Intercollegiate World Cup right under our noses. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised when I discovered that this event took place at Middlebury College in Vermont, a school notorious even in a state filled with tools for archtoolery of every imaginable sort.

And the principal archtool (which would make him a pope of tools, or at the very least a cardinal) is a person called Xander Manshel, which, if it isn't an alias, is surely a terrible crime against taste on the part of this tool's parents and one of the great self fulfilling prophecies of all time. With a name like that, how could the kid have turned out otherwise?

And when I googled Intercollegiate Quidditch, wouldn't you know that the very first site that phrase brought to my attention, led me to yet another archtool whol blogs under the banner A Paperback Writer. I simply didn't want to devote any more time to discover further tools involved in or inspired by this event, so I am giving up at this point. But by now, I think you probably see why I referred to this as the Comstock Lode of tools of note. In case you don't know and are too lazy to look it up, the Comstock Lode was one of the richest mineral strikes in world history, and it was exploited perhaps too quickly and too haphazardly.