Why sometimes a good card game and a glass of whine is the appropriate response to the end of the world

Last night, I had the Red Sox game on the computer---I "watch" the games on the MLB website "gameday" as it throws up the stats in real time. It has a really cool animation for the pitches, showing their precise locations & velocities and stuff. It's a seamhead wet dream, and it's free.

Anyhoo, the Sox were getting blown out by the freakin' Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 8-1, after losing the night before 1-0. Tarnation. So, I did what any sane Sawx fan should do in such a situation: go upstairs, pour a glass of wine, and play a game of war with the 8 yr. old. It was his favorite deck of cards that I picked up in Dee Cee at Union Station, and has all sorts of personages from US history on it. We've come up with a whole elaborate set of nicknames for them (the three of spades is Peter Stuyvesant , known affectionately as "Peg Leg Pete"), and so we had a rousing game where Dolley Madison, the queen of spades, thoroughly kicked ass, before eventually being taken repeatedly by Chief Red Cloud, the King of Hearts. Whenever he won a trick, the boy had to cite some vaguely true historic fact about any card of mine that he took, so that was a lot of fun. By the time it was bedtime, the Sox were winning 15-8. Good times.

Yips! from Robbo: Oddly enough, I was watching the Nats get blown out by the Marlines 13-8 last evening. The Marlins got 21 hits. 21. And I have never seen such a collection of dinks, drubs and broken-bat bloops in all my life. Sheesh.

Unfortunately, everybody else was asleep, so I had no companionship with which to allay my woes. Instead I flipped over to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home on HBO (that's the one which puts the crew of the Enterprise in San Francisco in the mid 80's) and amused myself by jeering at all the outdated politics. Did you know that in the Trek world, there's still a city called Leningrad in the 24th Century?