Yes, yes, I know — none of you care a whit about the Red Sox, except that it was enormously entertaining to watch a exorbitantly paid baseball club melt down into utter ignominy.

It’s always fun to see multimillionaires fall flat on their smug, self-absorbed faces. It’s kind of like watching Mitt Romney campaigning.

(It’s not quite so much fun when it’s your multimillionaires falling flat on their smug, etc. Trust me on this one.)

And yes, I know, Gail Collins of the New York Times has already touched on the subject, sort of.

(Which I didn’t discover until Sunday night and most of this was already written. Shows you how much I read the Times.)

And besides, I’ve become accustomed to lagging behind Gail Collins by four or five days. I’d get a complex about it, but I’m not prone to complexes. (Or supine.) I’ll get an idea, then a couple days later I’ll read Collins and — Damn, she’s already written about it.

I mean, some months ago I thought it might be halfway cute that every time I said something about Mitt Romney, I’d somehow find a way to bring up his strapping the family dog to the top of the car while taking a family vacation. (Yeah, I know; it was many years ago, and he was just the son of the former governor of Michigan who once got famously brainwashed, which cost him the Republican presidential nomination.)

And damn — there’s that Gail Collins finding a way to slip the strapping-the-family-dog-to-the-top-of-the-family-car bit into almost every column.

Well, that does it, I say to myself. Can’t ever use the family dog, family car, strapping thingie. Too bad. It’s one of those images you can’t get out of your mind once you picture it.

(Can you?)

What is it, anyway, about famous Republican politicians and their vacations? Romney and the strapped-down dog, Rick Perry and the hunting getaway with the disgusting, offensive name.

Maybe famous Republican politicians should stop taking vacations.

Of course, some would say the minds of famous Republican politicians are always on vacation. And their mouths are working overtime (to steal a line from the great songwriter Mose Allison).

Exhibit A would be Michele Bachmann, who keeps flogging the dead horse that the HPV vaccine is dangerous. According to FactCheck, a pro-Bachmann ad contends that "doctors opposed [Rick] Perry’s order [to inject girls with HPV vaccine] for safety reasons."

The physician cited in the ad, put up by Keep Conservatives United, says that’s not what he believed at all. To quote FactCheck: "At the time, my position was that the vaccine was safe and effective," said Dr. Joseph A. Bocchini, the chairman of the Pediatrics Department at the LSU Health Sciences Center-Shreveport.

This view reflects what most health professionals believe about the HPV vaccine, as far as I can tell.

The ad, FactCheck tells us, is running on the Cedar Rapids Fox station. You ever notice that Cedar Rapids gets all the good acts?

It’s kind of like Gail Collins getting all the good ideas. (Not to compare Collins to Cedar Rapids, because I like Collins. Well, I like her writing; I don’t know her or anything. Which makes it all the harder to understand how she keeps getting my ideas, because I don’t believe in telepathy. I don’t believe in much that begins with "tele-" — telephones, television, teleportation.)

Speaking of teleportation, I wonder where the real Red Sox were teleported to in September. I mean, the real Red Sox were one of the two or three best teams in baseball from mid-April to Aug. 31.

Then Gail Collins took them somewhere.

That Gail Collins, I’ll tell you.