Flame her but good for me, Dana. May it be cleansing and liberating for you....

That does seem like a legitimate flame war to have, Dana.

Err... my boss is listening to her voice mail messages on speaker phone. I can hear everything.

I have a friend who loved to do that in her cube (!!), so our other friend always started her messages out dirty, to make her pick up.

I need to start cutting down the number of shows I'm trying to watch right quick. Half the time, it's like I'm just trying to get through it, even shows I like. So lame.

any thoughts on WAT last night? Poor HDT is not so H when all distressified and spazzy.

I just forwarded someone a stupid question, that had I even though about what the person was asking, I would have realized it was stupid. But I didn't. So now I look stupid.

Hate when that happens.

I totally did that with a professor the other day. Way to make sure he identifies my name with total lack of reading comprehension.

Poor post-traumatic HDT, is all I can say.

Dana? Kick her ass.

This is not what was explained on the radio -- public radio! Must be September, if they're covering obscure baseball rules! -- this morning. In the event of a three-way tie, there would be two one-game playoffs. Cleveland shouldn't get in by default, playing one less game than either of its competitors.

Heh. The rule is so obscure that MLB changed it two years ago and didn't bother to tell anyone. The scenario listed is correct:

BOS @ NYY Mon.
If BOS wins: NYY @ CLE Tue.
If NYY wins: CLE @ BOS Tue.

Interesting thing is that because of the rule that says the wild card can't play the best team in the division, the AL playoffs can't start until all the tie-breakers are completed, since CLE winning the WC would mean they wouldn't go to Chicago but BOS/NYY winning the WC would mean the playoffs start in Chicago.

How up-in-the-air is everything with the AL playoffs? The Indians could lose all their remaining games and still get a tie-breaker with BOS. The Yankees could be swept and still have the Wild Card. In fact, the only thing we can say for sure is that there will be at least one playoff game in Anaheim and Chicago.

Evil for sale.

Be sure to read the description.

You mean the piece on NPR this morning? It couldn't have been more condescending and insulting if she used an electric insult machine on National Condescend to Fans Day.

To be fair, there are VAST numbers of tone-deaf singers in Fenway Park any given night, and she was sitting next to one of them.

Still and all, it would have been a better essay if she'd acknowledged up front that the Globe had already done her research for her, or if she'd scared up a couple other worthwhile details about Fenway lore. (For example, the "wrong" story somebody tells her, about a daughter named Caroline, did happen, but it happened this year, well after the song was entrenched in Fenway tradition. One of the players had a kid, they named her Caroline, and the birth announcement was put up on the board during that song.)

The funniest aspect of the "Sweet Caroline" singing is that the song is quite a bit longer than an in-between innings stretch, so it is never finished before play begins, and they just fade it out. So everybody is still screaming "So good! So good! So good!" in the middle of the first pitch.

This article is so interesting and HI-larious: [link]

Mr. Carroll is an object of national fascination in part because of his apparently pathological criminality, and in part because he represents a kind of Briton known as a chav. Chavs, whether rich or poor, tend to favor gaudy jewelry and expensive-but-tacky clothes with big logos and to behave in a way that others find coarse or obnoxious.

Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a "council house facelift," from the term for public housing.

Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material. Among British women, Coleen McLoughlin, the girlfriend of the soccer star Wayne Rooney, is seen as a celebrity chav.

Others in the greater chav universe are David and Victoria Beckham, who would hate to be considered chavs but who nonetheless wore matching purple outfits and sat on matching thrones at their wedding; and Jordan, a former topless model who recently traveled to her own wedding in a Cinderella-style carriage shaped like a pumpkin and pulled by six white horses.