Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Something Feels Different Today...

"Stay tuned for my Drabble retrospective!"

—Orel, January 19, 2007


Something feels different today. The feeling started when I woke up naturally instead of having my warm cocoon of sleep shattered by the alarm clock. As I got up, I noticed the sky wasn't as bright as it could be. And my coffee tasted a little more bitter than usual.

Then I remembered: The Dodgers' 2007 season is sinking into the abyss.

But that didn't account entirely for the change. After all, the Dodgers still have a mathematical chance (in hell, but still). More importantly, the future is bright, with a full year of Matt Kemp, Chad Billingsley and James Loney—we love James Loney!—on tap.

No, there was something more to this change. And when I opened the newspaper and inadvertently—inadvertently, I tells ya!—chuckled at today's "Drabble" strip, I knew why the world would never be the same:

"Drabble" was actually kind of funny today.

This, my friends, is news. Hard news. Anyone with a passing familiarity with comic strips knows that "Drabble" is a bedrock of unfunniness. Makes "Rex Morgan, M.D." look like a laugh riot. You get Norman being turned down by Wendy—again!—or Wally the wiener dog running in place making SKATTLE SKATTLE SKATTLE sounds—the unfunniest onomatopoeia in the world.

The unfunniness of "Drabble" gets to the point where you go, Why am I reading this? It's like panning for gold in the Sahara. But it's too late. You realize reading "Drabble" (and "For Better or For Worse," for that matter) has become an unbreakable habit. And the cycle of destruction continues.

But "men plan and the gods laugh"...and sure enough the unthinkable happens:

"Drabble" was actually kind of funny today.

Maybe we shouldn't count the Dodgers out just yet.

2 comments:

Roger said...

Yes, still alive but barely. I always go to the Berkeley RIOT page to find the 'magic' numbers. The interesting thing about their numbers is that they take into consideration all the schedules. Kind of hard to have two teams above you lose all their games if they play each other.

Are there any other stat sites that do this type of calculation?

Steve Sax said...

MLB.com itself carries the elimination number, though to be fair it may not consider upcoming schedules as this site claims to do. Thanks for the feed even if it's a Berkeley one (ha!).

Cool Airstream, btw. Those are sweet.