This is not about the Red Sox, by the way. (Or even by the weigh.)
You probably thought the Red Sox were a baseball team and yawned. But — ha-ha — the Sox turn out to be not a baseball team at all. Joke’s on you.
Actually, the bad joke that is the Red Sox is on all of us but mostly on the baseball geniuses (we’re talking about you, Lucky Lucchino) who thought that you could create a baseball team by sticking together all these shiny metallic pieces every-which-way on the basis that they all looked so shiny.
And so metallic. (Metallic is so masculine and cool, you know.)
(Me neither.)
Anyway, that’s called fantasy baseball. It’s being played out in a Fenway Park near you.
It’s kind of like Mitt Romney’s economic plan before he married Paul Ryan. And after.
Wait a minute, you say. Romney is against same-sex marriage.
Well, yes — now. Accent on now. But then?
But then (to use that phrase again), what else is new?
OK, the Mitt wasn’t exactly for same-sex marriage — as far as anyone can tell about what the Mitt is for or against — but in the past, he did seem a bit touchy-feely (we’re not suggesting anything here) about creeping up (again, no suggestions) to something approaching civil unions.
To be fair to the GOP presidential candidate (which is tough, given that he is not all that fair to those of us in the 99 percent), Romney (seemingly the product of a union between HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Species Analogy, and a Dodge minivan) is obviously afflicted with neurons that wear flip-flops.
His father, a successful (and rich, but who’s counting?) businessman, governor of Michigan, and unsuccessful candidate for the 1968 GOP presidential nomination, was apparently afflicted with the same neurons (see the Vietnam War).
Maybe those aren’t neurons. Maybe they’re old-rons.
But we were talking about the Boston Red Sox. Well, not really. And anyway, who wants to?
Not so much the Mitt, apparently. Not all that long ago (and we’re not talking geological time here, not that most of us have those kind of watches — they’re rather expensive, so you want to wait for your girlfriend to buy you one, which will happen sometime in the next epoch, dreamer), Romney praised the Red Sox for unforgettably winning the Super Bowl.
Yeah, that Super Bowl. Unforgettable.
Talk about being in touch with us common folk. (OK, I’m common, you’re unique. How does it feel? Just wondering.)
Do you suppose if there were more common folk, there’d be more common sense?
Yeah — me, neither.
Not that I’m calling them common, but the Tea Party folks in a Florida Congressional district spoke up recently.
They, according to several news reports, knocked off Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., in a GOP primary even though Stearns, a bona fide right-winger if there ever was one, was famous for trying to kill federal bucks for Planned Parenthood and investigated the Solyndra loans in an attempt to shiv the Obama administration.
Apparently, Tea Party voters, at least in Florida, won’t be satisfied until they get Attila the Hun as a candidate.
Well, you have to admit, Attila was not common.
Which brings us by commodious vicus of recirculation (to steal a line from the finest writer of the English language) to the very common, quite ordinary Red Sox. Who astonishingly enough, managed to beat the Yankees on Aug. 18.
In that game, they made a bit of history, according to AP: In the eighth inning, they had the first all-Yale battery (that would be the pitcher and catcher) in the big leagues since September 1883 — relief pitcher Craig Breslow (molecular biophysics and biochemistry major) and catcher Ryan Lavarnway (philosophy major).
“We didn’t need to put any signs down. We’re all on the same wavelength,” Breslow joked, according to AP.
That could be an analogy for the Romney campaign, except that first, scientists would have to discover that Romney actually has a brain and a wavelength and not just a dog strapped to the top of his head.