Well, they did it again, The Boston Red Sox won the World Series. When it happened three years ago I thought maybe that was some sort of anomaly and life would go on as before but now it's clear that's not the case. I started to suspect dire changes in the world several years ago when blue M&M's were introduced. Something just wasn't right. There are certain things you learn to rely on in this uncertain life, beacons of stability in a tumultous world. The Red Sox not winning the World Series was one of those things.
Oh, congratulatipons, I suppose, to the Red Sox and their fans, I'm not grudging anybody anything and the Sox won both their World Championships convincingly; A four game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2004 and now another sweep of the Colorado Rockies. Heck, the team I root for won 26 Word Series so I don't want to sound like one of those whining Yankee fans who think it's their birthright to win the Series every year. And I never did believe in that curse of the Bambino nonsense about them trading away Babe Ruth in 1918 and paying the price ever since. That's just voo-doo jive. That's just the way it is, the Boston Red Sox don't win championships. Or was, I should say.
The blue M&Ms should have thrown up a red flag, but I let that go, not for a second thinking they were a harbinger of life as we know it disappearing. Then that whole global warming deal hit and I'm getting uneasy. I never did like going to Florida all that much and now they're telling me Florida's going to come to me. Great. Now what? If I move north of the state where I live to get some decent seasonal weather changes I'm in Canada. No thanks, but I'll pass on that imitation U.S. north of our border. I'll know, I know, Canada's a foreign nation and all that, but I've been there, and it didn't feel foreign at all except that they say aboot instead of about. It's just like America only a lot duller. Sorry, Canada.
So anyway, there were a lot of changes in the wind this past decade. A presidential election had to be decided by the Supreme Court and they picked the dumb one. An obscure Arab attacked the United States and won a huge victory by devastating my hometown and the Pentagon and then ran and hid in caves and the dumb one decided that was unfair and so he gave up on that guy and attacked an innocent country that had no caves, figuring he's got to defeat somebody or he'll look like a fool. Why do fools always worry about that? This stuff really happened and it's not a Peter Sellers movie I have to keep reminding myself.
Then Law and Order became a franchise, not content with being one of the most successful TV shows ever. Of course none of the new ones were any good but they wound up having the same head District Attorney in all of them and now he's running for president. I'm guessing he's running on a law and order platform. Also a new and horrible infestation started on television: Reality Shows that are anything but real except for the fact that the non-actors that star in them are real annoying and completely talent-free, for some reason the selling point of these shows. And even more so than Law and Order they have proliferated so that not a night goes by that there's not another dumb show that viewers can participate in by voting for or against the biggest moron on the show. I'm not making this up, this stuff has really happened.
Luckily, the major networks continue to provide at least some semblance of stability by continuing to churn out year after year terrible situation comedies, completely unwatchable shows made by morons for morons, so that's at least one anchor to life as we know it upon which we can still depend. But something odd has happened to our news broadcasts. It seems every one of them now has as a feature reporter a Chinese-American guy and a light-skinned black woman, or a Chinese-American woman and a light-skinned black man and at least a Hispanic or two.
It's apparently a very enlightened policy since none of these people display any talent for journalism at all but win a lot of points for joking around with each other and smiling nonstop, even while they're talking. Maybe the networks figure they'll learn on the job.The anchor chairs, of course, are still manned by blonde Caucasian men and women with even less talent than their Rainbow Coalition tokens. Which is just as well, I suppose, since they report very little actual news anymore, concentrating instead on unimportant minutia. As far as the ever-grwing 24-7 cable news, that's just a wasteland of self-righteous right wing blowhard commentators praising the dumb one and his incompetent stooges.
So with all this stuff going on, the blue M&Ms, the politics of insanity, the global warming and bad television, there was always baseball to keep things anchored, that timeless game played out over a long season. There were good teams, bad teams, dynasties that would rise and fall, perennial losers who once in a wile grabbed the brass ring and win it all. And then there was the Red Sox, who were in their own special category, a good team who never won anything. Came close every few decades, but always lost in the championship round. So now I know life will never be the same. The Red Sox are winners and it's no fluke. Now if Canada starts acting like a foreign country we're in real trouble.