Stay classy, Boston! -- I think Jonathan Papelbon speaks for us all when he dances around with a cigar and scuba goggles whilst pouring the finest Bud Lite over the American League Championship Series trophy. All that's missing is his victory jig...aha!

Baseball is unique in many ways. It's the only professional sport which requires you to wear a leather belt, openly allows you to use addictive carcinogens during play, and is sometimes so dull (or televised so goddamn late) it puts the most ardent fans to sleep. It's slow and unsexy and numerical, hard to love casually, which makes it practically un-American. Yet it takes so much stamina, pure talent, and blind optimism to play that it could only be American too. Plus, it features knuckleheads like this...what's not to love? GO SOX!!

UPDATE: The Sox did, indeed, go, and all the way, too! :) Here's my brief shining moment of regaling thousands along the victory parade route, as Queen of Red Sox Nation for a day! King Budbox, my consort, also enjoyed adulation...nothing makes professional ballplayers laugh and point like crafty costumes!

It Ain't No Library Thing -- So in the realm of nerdliness, I can doubtless hold my own. But as we are in the media-declared Season of the Nerd, I thought I'd take things up a notch. Enter my BIL, Jon, who annotated the LibraryThing Top 106 Books People Own But Have Not Read list on his LJ. I hear the Nerd Klaxon in the air, I must obey! :D The italics mean it's still sitting on my shelf, the bold names are the ones I have actually read. 42...yikes.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime And Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life Of Pi: A Novel -- read first chapter, gave up
The Name Of The Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride And Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale Of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies
War And Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations -- I'm hanging on to Bleak House instead.
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books
Memoirs Of A Geisha -- see Life of Pi, above.
Middlesex -- One of the best American novels ever written, IMHO.
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Love In The Time Of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once And Future King
The Grapes Of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel -- I've almost purchased this book about 5 times. Hmmm.
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses -- Read a few chapters in high schol, gave up.
Sense And Sensibility
The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
To The Lighthouse
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections -- An entertaining, juicy novel written by a complete ass.
The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound And The Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God Of Small Things
A People's History Of The United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy Of Dunces
A Short History Of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation
The Mists Of Avalon
Oryx And Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher In The Rye
On The Road -- Like so many other great things, turning 50 this year.
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame
Freakonomics -- So many people pressed this on me I now have Reverse Hype Refusal.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down -- See The Satanic Verses, above.
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit -- My secret shame!
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers