The feud between Red Sox ownership and Hank "Spaulding Smails" Steinbrenner is escalating. After Hank moaned, "Red Sox Nation? What a bunch of [expletive] that is.", John Henry responded by sending Hank an honorary RSN membership card. While we've taken our shots at the bloated "Red Sox Nation" phenomenon before - it's jumped the shark the way "Sweet Caroline" did, and Gino is in the process of doing - we recognize the need to circle......

It was about a week ago when we noted that the Bruins were in 6th place in the Prince of Wales Eastern Conference, which was a decent place to be, thus drawing the winner of the weak-sister Southeast Division. In that week, the B's have solidified the 6th spot, but are now officially in spittin' distance of bigger and better things. They've won blowouts this week, they've won shootouts, they've won at home, they've won......

Music Atlas Sound, featuring Bradford Cox going solo during Deerhunter's hiatus, hits the Middle East tonight, riding a wave of praise for his new project. Cox's hometown weekly, Atlanta's Creative Loafing, raves, "Let the Blind contains Cox's most haunting and sad songs to date. It throbs with delirious depression, and is bursting with powerful, barely contained emotions." For those of you who can handle strong emotions in the bleak winter, Cox is your fella.......

In a sense, it's comforting. The Celtics went to battle against one of the other good Eastern teams without Kevin Garnett, and almost beat 'em. On the day of the C's' long-awaited return to national afternoon TV, the script ran eerily similar to the first game in Orlando; the Magic jumped out to a big lead, the Celtics clawed their way back, but ran out of gas at the end. Orlando's the only team to......

The Red Sox won their last seven games. The Celtics have a six-game winning streak. The Patriots haven't lost in - well, we can barely remember. Even the Bruins stopped Atlanta yesterday. So every local team finished 2007 on an up note (yes, Revs, we know, and we're sorry). The B's were headed for another stinkeroo for a while, but they finally found their offense, and pelted the surprised Thrashers. Dennis Wideman and P.J. Axelsson......

Boston came in at number 10 in a recent list of America's most literate cities. What's surprising is that it didn't come in higher given the quality of the authors who come in to read, the top-notch bookstores, and the fact that good books help get us through the cold weather. Central Connecticut State University just released these figures and draws its findings based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources,......

Authorial Intent is Bostonist's wrap-up of local readings. All events are free unless otherwise noted. Wednesday, November 28 Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and the Lyric Form, Sacker Museum (via Harvard Book Store), 6:00 pm. More info. Vendler, the closest reader of all close readers, so says the New York Times, shines her spotlight on William Butler Yeats. Thursday, November 29 David Hosp, Innocence, 7:30 pm, Charlestown Branch Library Hosp will be reading from......

While you, and we, have been fixated on the Red Sox and the Patriots and the Celtics, the Revolution have quietly made their way back to the MLS Cup. And it's time attention is paid. The Revs are in the Finals for the third straight year, and fourth since 2002. They got there by outlasting Chicago 1-0, with Taylor Twellman scoring his second goal of the playoffs. Which was also the team's second goal of......

Long live the Slutter! There was much to celebrate in Red Sox circles last night, but at the top of the list, we have Jonathan Papelbon's brand (spanking) new pitch. The Slutter - a name that will leave mothers gasping as they cover the ears beneath their children's tot-sized hats and the cast of characters at the Cask'n Flagon cracking up. The Red Sox vernacular has expanded by leaps and bounds this season. We learned......

--Early this morning, two people were shot to death in Roxbury. Another person was shot in the fray and somehow managed to get himself to a police station. He is in critical condition. WBZ says sixteen rounds were fired. --Citizens may have an outlet for keeping an eye on the BPD. Mayor Menino put together a three-member panel that will start looking at complaints from city residents against the BPD. However, the panel doesn't have......

Perhaps the blue shirts calling the shots at Fenway Park on Friday night were just bitter that they couldn't hang out in Harvard/Hogwart's Square with several thousands of their closest Harry Potter fans. Maybe they were concerned that J.D. Drew would further aggravate his hamstring by running all the way around the bases. We'd even like to think that they were just curious about whether Terry Francona would get himself thrown out of a game......

And the lead is down to seven. The Red Sox have completely stopped getting any value out of the back end of the rotation. Wakefield got slapped around Tuesday, and last night, Julian Tavarez was pitching well until he ran into the Fifth Inning of Doom en route to a 6-5 loss to the lowly-unless-they're-playing-us KC Royals. Tavarez hasn't won in a month, and the SchillingWatch is on overdrive. The rejuvenated Manny homered, and Varitek......

A night after Sox pitcher Kason Gabbard completed a Cinderella-esque nine innings at Fenway Park, the spotlight fell on a different belle of the ball for a fairy tale turn on the mound. The story didn't play out the way we would have written it - it was Leo Nunez, not Tim Wakefield, who was able to celebrate on Tuesday night. Nunez bounced back from a Fenway disaster two years ago to lead Kansas City......

The bewhiskered gent at right is General William Tecumseh Sherman, who split the South in two during the Civil War with his famous march through Georgia. Last night may not have been as deeply psychologically scarring for residents of the Peach State, but it was a pretty good whuppin' just the same. The Red Sox pounded the Braves 11-0, behind a slew of home runs and another great outing by the astounding Julian Tavarez. J.D.......

We'll get into the Red Sox victory over Atlanta in just a moment, but Curt Schilling just wrapped up his weekly phone call with WEEI, and Bostonist was struck by the decidedly different tone of voice we heard over the airwaves. Schilling's not sure about what's going on with his arm, and we're not sure about what's going on with our No. 1 starter - which means we're in the midst of an odd Wednesday......

Curt Schilling got a hit! After bunting into a strikeout in the second, Schill hit a bleeder in the fourth that rolled right past second base into center field for a single. Maybe we should focus on that, since Curt's pitching was...well...bad. Two starts after his Flirt with Destiny, Schilling got rocked again, by Atlanta's bats, giving up six runs on ten hits in less than five innings. His fastball doesn't seem to be fast......

Was it really just a few days ago that the sky was falling, the panic buttons were being hauled out of the closet, the kids were being reminded of their disaster-preparedness drills? Well, everyone can breathe easy for the moment, as the Sox dispatched the Giants for the third straight game, with a 9-5 win keyed by a rare Manny home run and a satisfying performance by Tim Wakefield. And the moment every Sox fan......

We've now entered the portion of the 2007 Red Sox season where, frankly, it's not that big a deal if the starters struggle. How long this portion will last, we don't know, but we saw the Sox' offense rescue a queasy Daisuke on Friday, and they bailed out a shaky Wakefield Saturday to club the Rangers 7-4. Wake struggled in the fifth, giving up a two-run double to Gerald Laird as the lowlight of a......

No games last night of local interest. So let's take a spin around the country to see what's going on in the rest of the sporting world. We'll start in Arlington, Texas, where the Red Sox are about to begin a three-game set with the Rangers. Daisuke Matsuzaka goes tonight against Brandon McCarthy. Big D is still buzzing about this week's announcement that the Cowboys and their new stadium will host Super Bowl XLV in......

The fate of nations will be determined this evening in the meadowlands of New Jersey, and we don't mean the upcoming Tony Soprano/Phil Leotardo showdown. The NBA Lottery is tonight, and we'll know if the Celtics are about to take another chance on another unproven youngster, or land one of the two sure-thing prizes in this summer's draft. The C's have a 19.9% chance of landing the #1 pick (Greg Oden, and don't let anyone......

Even though the Devern Hansack experiment went horribly wrong Saturday night, the Sox had no choice but to go to the Pawtucket well again Sunday. So they brought up lefty Kason Gabbard to start Sunday's rain-delayed tilt with the Braves. And it went as well as we possibly could have hoped. Gabbard cooled off the Atlanta bats, which were still steaming from Saturday's 14-run nightcap, to the tune of five innings pitched, six hits, two......

The happiest Red Sox fans around have to be the ones who stopped watching baseball around 7:30 last night. They would have seen Game 1 of the doubleheader, a 13-3 Sox rout/Home Run Derby. They would have seen the Yankees' nightmarish loss to the Mets. But most importantly, they would have been spared Game 2, in which Atlanta demolished the Sox 14-0. A wild day all around. Game One was a laugher thanks in part......

It seems that Mother Nature didn't think the Red Sox's doubleheader sweep of the Tigers on Thursday was impressive enough - the first games after that two-fer will be tidily bundled in another dual-game gameday. The Sox called Friday's scheduled game against their Interleague Play Atlanta visitors pretty early, deciding instead to go the route of a 1 p.m./7:35 p.m. Saturday schedule. The pitching breakdown: Dice-K vs. Braves pitcher Anthony Lerew in the afternoon game,......

There shouldn't be much to like about "Parade," the Robert Uhry/Jason Robert Brown musical now making its Boston professional premiere at SpeakEasy Stage. The work is one full of stereotypes - religious, cultural, professional - that reflect the worst aspects of human interaction, and it sets that ugliness to song. There is murder onstage and off. And to top it all off, an audience that sits down for the two and a half hours of......

With a miserable rain forcing the postponement of last night's Sox-Tigers game, our thoughts turn to geography. Yes, they really do. Specifically, to a subject we've been noticing a lot lately: the fact that the Red Sox seem to attract a large number of players whose last names are also the names of towns in our fair Commonwealth. So let's hit the road and take a tour of Massachusetts, Red Sox-style. Close to Boston, we......

The complete game is a dying art in the States. In the age of relief specialists, managers tied to pitch counts, and Papelbon, there aren't a lot of occasions when a manager wants to leave his starter in any longer than necessary. And last night, in fact, Papelbon was warming up when the Sox blew the game open in the 8th, taking a 7-1 lead and giving Terry Francona an excuse to leave Daisuke in......

Go ahead, admit it. We will. Going into this season, we were counting on Schill, Daisuke, and Josh to guarantee us a .600 winning percentage, and we'd take our chances with the other guys. Not so fast. That guy with the 1.35 ERA, that guy who had the Blue Jays flapping their wings ineffectively all night? That old guy? That's Old Reliable Tim Wakefield, who improved to 2-1 with another bloodlessly effective outing. "He can......

For most people, airport toilets are not a nice place to be, whether you're at Logan or somewhere else. But now it seems that airport bathrooms are the new hookup hotspot, at least according to local news outlets. The Herald is all hot and bothered. Laurel Sweet went above and beyond the call of duty with bathroom sex euphemisms such as "a last-minute souvenir of their trip to Boston" and "this sea-level variation on the......

While monitoring the outcome of yesterday's baseball game, we couldn't help but think of a line from Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "Water, water, everywhere – and not a drop to drink!" Well, if you count three measly plate-passes as a drop, then maybe the Mariners did in fact have a little to drink, but the Red Sox dominated the home opener at Fenway, 14 to 3. It was jaw-dropping and astonishing. The other tremendous......

It's the day we've all been waiting for, particularly if you're among the 38,805 blessed souls holding tickets to the Sox home opener against Seattle. The Mariners have been snowbound in Cleveland since Thursday; hopefully, they'll be rusty from a long weekend of playing tiddlywinks and touring and retouring the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Josh Beckett goes against Jeff Weaver. The Globe has a photo essay of the preparations for Opening Day. Some......