The Red Sox are trying to kill my father.

My dad grew up living and dying with the Red Sox, and even though he rooted for the Phillies when I was a kid and he roots for the Twins now, if you open him up and look at his heart, I'm convinced it's got that "B" on it. And every time they play the Yankees in a situation of any significance, he steels himself by telling me in advance how bad it's going to be. "The Red Sox will get killed by the Yankees," he says. Of course, he also likes, "The Twins will get killed by the Yankees." The Yankees loom large in his mind, the same way people who get thrown into lakes as children remain afraid of the bathtub.

In a way, it would have been merciful if they had just been swept. Four up, four down, forget it, and everybody gets to go home. Especially after they lost 19 to 8. NINETEEN TO EIGHT, people. Now that's just plain damn embarrassing. That series, at that point, could not end soon enough for me. Sometimes, it just hurts to look at it, you know?

I wasn't really surprised that they won a game when they were down 3-0, though. First of all, they're a better team than to get swept, and second of all, that's what the Red Sox do. They pump you up with a little hope, the better to rip out your liver with a melon baller. They always find, it seems, the most painful way to lose. The most agonizing way. The way that suggests that they may actually be trying to kill my father. I was a little surprised they won a second game. But that was the part that gave all the sports columnists the opportunity to say, "Don't be fooled -- they still don't have a chance."

I couldn't resist last night's game, even though I knew I shouldn't watch it. I am one of those people who hates the Yankees, for reasons that range from inherited (see: Dad, above) to visceral and mindless (I HATE the uniform, I HATE Derek Jeter, I HATE the fans, I HATE the word "Yankees," I HATE seeing them every goddamn year) to the relatively rational (those of us from small-market towns have every right to resent the way our measly payrolls are dwarfed in the stupidest financing system in sports) to the personally vengeful (see: Twins) to the philosophical (I really do believe having the rest of the American League effectively shut out of the World Series for almost ten years is bad for baseball, not that baseball doesn't shoot itself in the foot in a thousand other ways). I was pretty sure I would see the Yankees wrap up the series last night if I tuned in, because they really wouldn't want to let it go to a Game 7, and some part of my brain believes that the Yankees can do whatever they want to the Red Sox whenever they want to. It's inherited, like I said.

Curt Schilling logged more than eight seasons with my old team, the Phillies. He's 37 years old, and he's been in the major leagues since 1988. I'll put it this way: he's been doing it since I was in high school, and my 15-year reunion is this weekend. It's not OLD old, but . . . it's old. I always feel a sense of ownership with ex-Phillies and ex-Twins. It's not surprising that a guy who played all that time in Philadelphia wouldn't give a crap about his bleeding foot. I was just explaining to LTG last night that the Phillies are notoriously, always, unendingly a mess. Tobacco juice running down their shirts, sloppy hair, big guts . . . come to think of it, having been raised in that baseball environment is probably another reason I don't trust all those neat, perfect little clean-cut Yankees. But anyway, a guy with a bloody foot, with the pain and the oozing sock and everything would probably be the neatest and most put-together guy on the team. A guy coming out of dental surgery would still look better than John Kruk.

And damned if he didn't gut it out. Curt Schilling is a fucking stud. He pitched seven innings and gave up four hits. Yeah, one was a home run, but . . . whatever. The Red Sox didn't even have to think about pulling him until the eighth, and even then, the TV guys were bitching that it was too early.

It is fortunate that the umpires fixed the two calls that they got blatantly wrong. How would you like to have woken up this morning to find the Red Sox out of the series, having been denied the benefit of a home run they should have had? Or having been subjected to that cheap-ass bullshit Alex Rodriguez tried to pull? Dirty little cheater. I loved how he acted surprised in the paper -- not claiming he wasn't trying to slap the ball away, but surprised that he isn't allowed to slap the ball away. That was his argument. He didn't know you weren't allowed to grab at the ball and try to knock it out of the guy's glove. So that's who he is, I guess. Did Mientkiewicz (hi, Dougie! We still love you!) block the base path? I don't think he did on purpose; I think he was trying to cover the base if necessary, but he probably did get in the way. Had Rodriguez run for the bag and been called out because he didn't touch it or called out for being outside the base path, he might have a point. But that's got nothing to do with slapping at the ball, which is, and remains, bullshit.

So it's good they got that one right. And the home run call, which wasn't the Yankees' fault at all. And one other thing -- you know, TV guys, there are a lot of little kids who watch these games, even when they go late. Could you please not say there was nothing wrong with Rodriguez slapping at the ball, because otherwise, he would have been out? It's against the rules, y'all. It's not okay to violate a well-known rule and hope you don't get caught, just because it's your only way to avoid being out. Don't say it is. It isn't. It's described in the rules as "malicious" or "unsportsmanlike" to do that. Is A-Rod going to hell? Oh, of course not. Does everybody do that stuff? Hell, yes. But please don't specifically call out what a perfectly good decision that was on his part. Little League coaches are trying to teach little kids not to be cheater assholes. Please don't undermine the effort.

So now, Game 7. Which, in all likelihood, the Red Sox will lose. (See? Inherited.) There's every reason, based on history, to believe that the Red Sox will have once again found the most painful, most agonizing, most wrenching way to lose -- bringing their fans to the brink of a historic screwing of the team they hate the most, and then doing some ridiculous thing like . . . I don't even want to think about what. Fortunately, the pub quiz is tonight, and I will probably miss most of the game. It's just as well. And I think my father is busy tonight also. That's even better.

I enjoyed the Vikings game yesterday very much. And it's not every day you can honestly say you enjoyed a Vikings game. In fact, after their depressing loss against Philadelphia a week ago, I was beginning to think the entire season was going to look very, very ugly. And it still might. Especially since approximately 90 percent of everyone we have who doesn't suck is injured.

I'm still scratching my head over the Bears touchdown late in the game that, to me, involved the officials deciding on review that as long as your hand is still on top of the ball, you still have possession of the ball, even if you're not actually holding it anymore. I mean, in retrospect, it doesn't matter, but . . . that looked very weird to me. I was prepared for the call to be changed, because the announcer guy kept saying it looked like a touchdown to him, but to me, it looked like the ball, she was already lost.

At any rate, at least we didn't get crushed like bugs, which is a good thing. I have a feeling that we won't be piling up a lot of wins this year, so I'm happy to take anything I can get.

It's very interesting that there's a schoolyard metaphor at the end of this piece.

See, I'm very nostalgic about the issue of the so-called "Dream Team," which got its ass handed to it by Puerto Rico yesterday. As it happens, my life as a writer, in its current form, dates back to my observations about the 1992 "Dream Team."

I was between my junior and senior years in college, and one of my favorite things was the Bulletin Board column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I read it faithfully every day, and it was reliably funny and goofy and entertaining, and I sort of thought from time to time about submitting something to it, but I didn't get around to it until that summer, when I built up a head of steam about the Olympics. I sat down and dashed off a rant about how much I hated the flag-waving and the preening, and I called it in, and it was in the paper. There used to be a teaser on the front page of the section in the upper right hand corner that gave some hint of what the BB was talking about that day, and for years, I had the teaser that said "The bullies (and boneheads) of Barcelona" tacked to my wall. I think my parents had that column on their refrigerator for about eight years, until it turned yellow and fell apart.

I don't have a copy of it anymore, unfortunately, but I remember that I talked about how the whole thing reminded me of . . . I think it was a "sweaty, brooding, pimply tenth-grader going down to the playground to beat up a little kid with the sniffles." Something like that. So I was all over the high school metaphors, too.

Anyway, I sent stuff to Bulletin Board for years -- I even called from college to report certain things, including reflections on the 1992 presidential election coverage in which Dan Rather kept saying it was a "ding-dong race" and so on; wrote extensively about my life as an office temp, including my deep and abiding hatred of office music, which resulted in my very first mad clash with obsessive fandom in the form of a bunch of pissed-off Rod Stewart fans (no, really); suggested the all-infomercial channel in which food dehydrators could go head-to-head with juicers in battles to the death; and gave my favorite ten pieces of advice for kids, in response to that really obnoxious list that runs in various places from time to time that basically says, "Screw you, your life isn't important, get used to it."

Writing for Bulletin Board begat writing movie reviews that I sent by email to a bunch of my friends, one of whom put them on his web site, which begat a site that was first called Ms. Linda's Is-It-Worth-It Movie Reviews and later Popcorn Lobby, which begat writing obsessively about pop culture in general, which begat TWoP, which begat F&D, which brings you up to date.

So as you can see, Puerto Rico whipping the United States gives me lots of very warm feelings about how neat the last twelve years have been.

There is literally not one thing I could find on the sports page that would bother me more than this. I'm not joking. There is not one single thing.

Well, it's time for another week of Average Joe columnists, and I think this one may actually be my least favorite so far. The editors who made comments harped on his factual errors, but . . . the writing. Oh, the writing.

Oy. "Relent to a cap"? And an association is an "it," and I would capitalize "players association," and it's just an ugly-ass sentence. Furthermore, his entire argument that the size of the market has nothing to do with the income of the team seems absurd to me. I'm not necessarily pro-salary-cap, but you can't blow off the size of the market like that.

On the other hand, the association between payroll and performance isn't as powerful as they're calling it anyway. It's powerful, but it's not the entire story.

The good news is that that guy's opponent, Anna, actually did a pretty good job with her entry this week, aside from the fact that she's done a little bit too much of the "on the one hand; on the other hand" alternating. Her piece isn't well-organized, but she can write English without a lot of obvious errors (aside from the painful "it/they" confusion in the first paragraph noted by the editor). It's a little overwritten in places -- I think "money-stuffed bats" isn't quite right. It's not that the bats are stuffed with money; it's that the bats were purchased with money -- at least that's what she's trying to say.

Anyway, thanks to Anna, I'm not in agonizing pain this week to quite the extent I was last week. But the other guy? Yeah. Don't give up that day job.

Once again, we learn that the former MEotW is a fraud. If you're really freewheeling and silly and just being an asshole for entertainment, you're still funny and cocky when your team loses. Get a load of this bit of funereal whining. All things considered, it makes me tremendously amused.

I watched quite a bit of the finals, which is surprising, considered that I haven't ever taken a huge interest in the NBA in the past. The degree to which the Lakers came unraveled as soon as things didn't go entirely their way was absolutely stunning. They got flat-out beat, and the more beat they got, the more they whined and moaned and picked up technical fouls.

It wasn't easy for me to root for the Pistons, mind you -- Rasheed Wallace still makes me grind my teeth from the days when he was with UNC. I always hated him profoundly. Perhaps the only thing that softened the blow in that regard is that I go even farther back hating Rick Fox for the same reason. But I did root for the Pistons. Because of the Timberwolves, because of Shaq, because of Kobe Bryant, because of the whining, because of the complaining, because of Jack Nicholson, and because of Simers.

The final game was very satisfying. In the second half, the Lakers were already cooked, and they acted like it. The final score with its 13-point margin doesn't at all reflect the ass-kicking that went on, because the asses kicked were kicked good and hard. It was a good game if you enjoy watching guys who specialize in strutting and bragging change their tunes and spend an hour or so fuming and sweating and tossing up bricks. Which I do.

Y'all, T.J. Simers has lost his sense of humor all of a sudden! What happened to that fast-talking, wisecracking jerkweed who was the Mortal Enemy of the Week? What's wrong, T.J.? I'm worried about you.

And . . . are those signs of complaining about the officiating I see? Because as we both know, that's the world's clearest sign that you have nothing.

So we lost. As expected.

Boy, I'll tell you, you can't argue with the talent of the Lakers. You deal with the big guys, and they have scrawny little guys. You deal with the guys in the paint, and they come up with a perimeter guy. Can't argue with the talent.

That said, only in Los Angeles could a bunch of guys who are such fuckin' assholes still be able to walk out on the floor and be just as beloved as if they were actually, you know, NOT fuckin' assholes. I'll tell you this about the Timberwolves -- they showed up for every game. Even the hometown papers in L.A. knew that in both Game 2 and Game 5, the Lakers lost partly because they punked out. They played like lazy-ass millionaires who couldn't be bothered. And rather than showing any embarrassment or anything of that sort, they went in the paper and smirked about blaming it on the rain, or they blamed each other, or they basically admitted that yeah, come to think of it, next time they'd have to actually played like they cared.

Do the fans mind having their team totally punk out on them? Apparently not. Apparently, if you have such a surplus of talent that you sit on your ass and ride it just because you can, that's perfectly okay with them.

It's a bizarre phenomenon to me. Randy Moss plays half-assed for the Vikings from time to time, and I despise him for it, and he gets drubbed for it, as he should. For whatever reason, the Lakers aren't even remotely embarrassed, even when it's twice in six games, and even when it's pretty much the entire team. Nor are they embarrassed by Kobe Bryant -- who sure does have a lot to feel proud of his own self these days -- intentionally banking a free throw late in the game, just to see if he can show up a team of guys who almost beat his guys in spite of losing two of their best players to injuries for the entire series.

Is it sour grapes? Oh, hell, yes. But when I say I hate the Yankees, it's with a sort of tooth-grinding "I hate those guys" thing, like something out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where you hate them just because they're so good. I respect the Yankees. I hate them, but I respect them. Ditto most of the good basketball teams who beat Duke every year. But the Lakers, with the half-assed play, and the whining about whose fault it is, and the inability to accept a call against them gracefully without getting a technical? Yeah, I have zero respect for that.

It certainly isn't a parade I'd attend.

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A little talk about audio, basketball, and meals. And the fact that none of those things are related.

Not to turn this entire thing into TimberwolvesBlog, but I have a new complaint.

I need writers to stop telling me how bad the odds are of the T-Wolves pulling out the victory tonight in Game 6, based on how unusual it is to come back from 3-1, where we were the other night and no longer are. That statistic is now irrelevant.

We already won Game 5. We don't have to win it again, stupid ESPN. We don't have to win Game 5 again. We already won it.

The statistic that matters now is how many teams have come back from 3-2. Not 3-1, but 3-2. Those crappy odds about seven teams out of however many came back from 3-1 . . . I don't care. We have already beaten a portion of those odds, just by winning Game 5. As a matter of fact, 3-2 is as close as a series can possibly be after five games, in case nobody has noticed. Yes, we'll probably lose, but not because we got down 3-1. We're underdogs because we're going to be out of town, and the Lakers have a freakishly giant dude who's hard to defend, and two of our awesome guards are completely sidelined.

Stop telling me about the 3-1 odds, people. That era is over.

It's great how Simers, supposedly the King of Confrontational, has nothing to say the day after he's wrong again. So tired, this kind of thing. If he were as much of a hilarious in-your-face bad-ass as he thinks he is, he'd find a way to face it head-on, rather than ignoring the games his team doesn't win. He's worse than an asshole, in retrospect -- he's a big baby.

To anyone who read the ridiculous onslaught of attacking comments (sniffle) that took place following the previous Timberwolves entry, I just have one story for you.

The Lakers made ONE run last night. And would you like to know when they made it?

Oh, yeah. They made it when Pool Boy left his TV to go get himself a damn Jack and Coke. And will you be hearing about it from me for the next six months, or am I too mature for that?

I think we all know the answer.