Before we get to "work," lets get some bullets in

-World Series is over! Now I don't feel any pressure to try and write about baseball anymore! Hurrah. Let's kill this baseball season with some final thoughts.

-Papelbon: The new Rivera. He's got essentially one pitch, you can't hit it, and when he's in, the game is over. Over. Whenever the game had less than 6 outs to go, there was no doubt. His personality puts him one up on Rivera: he's got my favorite on-field demeanor of any pitcher; normally, Fox cutting away from the sign and location of the upcoming pitch to do close-ups of the pitcher being pensive drives me insane, but that look in Papelbon's eye as he gets ready to fire is the coolest thing ever. And when he's not on the field, he's a total lunatic. Perfect.

-Dialogue from Marks Tower, room 804, as the game ended:

Friend #1: "Baseball coaches don't do anything."
Friend #2: "They change the entire dynamic of the team! They have to decide what kind of team it is and manage accordingly!"
Friend#1: "They're not like football coaches."
Friend #2: "Football coaches aren't all that important. They have coordinators to call the plays for them."
Me: "Dude, look at the Rams, or the Chargers after they got Norm. Football coaches matter."
Friend #1: "Exactly. When the Rams had Vermeil, they were great. Then they got Martz, and they were all offense. Now they just suck."
Me: "World Series is over."
Friend #1: "Oh."

Yep, enthralling World Series all around. At least the Red Sox have something interesting going for them.

-Movies I rented from the film major down the hall from me #1: Momento. Great movie. Ingenious premise, perfectly executed, great twists and turns, everything done right. 4 stars.

-USC is officially out of the national championship race. Sanchez screwing up means that there's no real reason to start Booty again, because we're not winning this year and might as well give the kid the reps now. Of course, he'll end up starting again anyways because of the bizzare nature of college football.

-Watched the Patriots play for the first time today. Holy Crap. Not much left to say; they really do look like Madden.

-Boykins is available. Worth a flyer, because we could always use more guards, but I think I've mentioned that Boobie is essentially a better version of him in his G-State years, so I'm not killing myself over it. Juwan Howard is available too; at this point in his career, he's a decent scorer who can't guard anybody. Pass.

-Ben Affleck is going to be Hollywood's Al Gore: Rise, backlash, redemption. On the flip side, George W. Bush is Washington's Pauly Shore: Career enabled by who his parents were, always disliked by intellectuals, extreme initial skepticism, brief run of success due to devoted and surprisingly large group of followers, eventual extreme backlash and implosion.

-Well, time to get to "work," by which I mean I'm going to write a column on basketball while I'm putting off doing 3 geology labs.