Consolation of Philosophy

No worries, friends, this uptight medieval text--and no, I haven't been reading it; I'm not that upset--predicted your sorrow 1500 years ago: note the toga's color on the recently tossed chick. But! All the pretty flowers ornamenting the lower right quadrant, they too are red. Hmmm. Fancy premodern thinking . . .

Also, while the Red Sox have let you down, make no mistake: despite losing yesterday in the Madrid semifinals to Gilles "You don't know me but I'm now ranked #9" Simon, Rafael Nadal will finish 2008 ranked #1, the first Spaniard in history to clinch the year-end ATP race. Even if he withdraws from Paris next week, loses every round robin at Shanghai, self-destructs in the Davis Cup finals (where only his epic nads but no ranking points are at stake), and transforms into some kind of bourgeois insect a la Gregor Samsa, he will still finish the year as the greatest player in tennis, a feat far more important than some dirty-socked Sox winning or losing a series to, hack, Tampa Bay. And he feels your pain, he does:
Finally, Bottom-at-the-bottom's play by play was so fantastically funny and poignant--poor Tom and not so poor Jean-Paul included--that I found I cared about the game's outcome only because he did, and while my fine aristocratic disdain of all things Floridian may lend itself to the odd pro-Boston moment, without the lovely, doomed yearnings of you real fans baseball would remain a confused morass of ugly uniforms and very long rituals of spitting and tap-tapping at the cleats. Thank you, Dan, for calling the game and making it interesting, and, through your superliterary exegesis, making one game on one night mean something to someone who can read baseball only through the haughty palimpsest of other things that he already really likes, e.g. Romantic suicides and French fratricides.

And does anyone know where I can get a viscacha? They sleep in the sun all day, somewhere down in Patagonia, but I won't go that far to fetch one:
Or a mara?
Mara? "The name sounds Jewish to me, possibly derived from the waters of Marah in the Bible." Anybody? Come on! You . . . weissmen.

So, good game, better commentary. Bottom, your heroic drinking and frantic glossing have not been in vain.