CARRIE MUSKAT WRITES for MLB.com: “For the first time in 95 years, the Cubs won a postseason series. It just seems longer.”

Now, let’s all hope-N-pray for a Cubs-Red Sox World Series….

…has come and gone, alas, without a pennant, a division title, or even a lousy wild-card berth. And it’s all because of a half-dozen or so needless losses in August and September to teams we shoulda beat more often (Rangers, Orioles, Angels).

Now what? This might very well have been the final go-around for the current core M’s lineup. Edgar Martinez may very well be gone next year; so could Mike Cameron, Mark McLemore, Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and Joel Piniero. The ’04 Mariners could easily become a “rebuilding year” squad. The Supersonics have had seven rebuilding years in a row, so you know what that could mean.

On the other glove, the M’s just might acquire just the right just-before-their-peak young players and/or seasoned vets to finally get over the top. I hope for that, but expect otherwise.

THE HYDRO RACES went off flawlessly. Alas, so did the near-annual coronation of Miss Budweiser, the 5,000-lb. gorilla of the sport.

Still, it was a great afternoon of noise, sunburns, partying, and debauchery. And the power boats themselves still express the union of some eternal dichotomies: The sky and the sea, power and beauty, triumph and frustration.

WHILE WE ATTEMPT to get our lovely main digicam either fixed or replaced, we’ve got a backlog of dozens of cool pix taken on it. They’ll appear on this site at the usual erratic frequency.

Just after I finally got a replacement computer, my beloved digital still camera just got inadvertantly busted whilst I was shooting the hydroplane time trials on Friday. Anyone who wishes to help out the MISCmedia Camera Replacement Fund (non-tax-deductible) is greatly encouraged to donate at the link near the top right corner of this page.

THE GOOD NEWS: It’s bound to be a great day for the hydros Sunday. Remember: To a real Washingtonian such as myself, the boats are the real show and the Blue Angels are just a side act.

JUST BECAUSE I CAN, I’m slipping y’all some more pix from last Saturday’s Seafair Torchlight Parade; starting with these proud finishers of the preliminary “fun run.” (Someone, somewhere, must have defined the differences between running for “fun” and organized masochism. If you know where such a written differentiation exists, please tell me.)

Yeah, there were a couple of serious rowdy incidents among the 300,000 spectators, leading to three non-fatal injuries. But you won’t see the municipal bureaucracy trying to ban the whole event, like they did to the Pioneer Square Mardi Gras. Seafair’s too entrenched. And that’s good.

We need something at the heart of Seattle’s civic life that reminds us of the town’s rougher, louder, scruffier past; of the days before every damn thing in town had to be world-fucking-class.

That’s what Seafair is, and that’s why I like it.

…the eternal skeptics concerning bigtime sports megaprojects, such as the now-forthcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. His response: “At least Vancouver probably stands a better chance of getting its federal government to chip in than we would with ours. So, good on you, Vancouver, and better you than us.”

…but largely irrelevant news stories, it’s hard to find a better topic than a sports coach getting fired over a scandal that has little or nothing to do with his/her job performance.

Such was the case last month with ex-WSU football coach Mike Price, who was hired by Alabama then promptly fired after he spent a lost weekend with a Florida exotic dancer.

Such is also the case with now-ex-UW football coach Rick Neuheisel, canned this week after four years on the job. The UW didn’t dump him when word got out about recruiting irregularities at his former employer, Colorado. The UW didn’t dump him when he tried to get hired by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and didn’t bother telling his current employers. The UW initially didn’t dump him when somebody snitched that he’d been betting on (non-UW) college basketball games. But athletic director Barbara Hedges later changed her mind, presumably after consulting with some of the big-money boosters whose donations help keep the Huskies among the sport’s most prominent programs.

(The above link also includes a further link to a .pdf graphic showing all the UW football coaches since 1908!)

…game against the Philadelphia Phillies on Tuesday evening reminded me of the only Phillies player I ever personally knew, who was also the most famous person from my ol’ hometown of Marysville WA (whose latest get-on-the-map attempt, the big new Tulalip Casino, opens Thursday).

Larry Christenson graduated from the now-defunct Marysville High in my freshman year. He then pitched for the Phillies for 11 seasons, including their 1980 World Series championship. (In his only World Series start, he was pounded by Kansas City batters and lasted just one inning.) Among his teammates were such greats as Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, and Tug McGraw (the father and father-in-law of that country music couple who, names notwithstanding, never ran a major publishing company.) (The most recent Net reference to Christenson came when he went to visit the now-ailing McGraw Sr. in the hospital.)

The image at right, by the way, can be purchased from professional sports caricaturist Dick Perez.

No amount of biased referreeing could stop the Lucking Fakers from finally bowing out of the NBA playoffs.

LET THIS BE THE FIRST CORNER to express sympathy and support for Mike Price, the former Washington State football coach who scored the prestigious U of Alabama head-coaching gig, then got fired before his first game after he spent one orgiastic weekend in Pensacola FL with strippers and/or hookers.

That’s just the sort of behavior adored by the guyz on The Best Damn Sports Show Period (and by student-athletes themselves), but so heavily loathed by the powers-that-be in Bama. You know, the state that still flies a variant on the Confederate battle flag, and in which dildos are still illegal.

Far from being vilified for his victimless transgressions, Price should be lauded as a freedom fighter against conservative hypocrisy.

Charles Douglass, inventor of the TV laugh track; and Bernie Little, who owned the Miss Budweiser hydroplane team and unofficially (in later years officially) controlled the motor-boat racing circuit.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

The Seahawks predictably lost on Monday Night Football. As part of the show, ABC paid to have its logo painted onto the infield of an empty Safeco Field, a painful reminder of the Mariners’ failure to make the baseball postseason. That failure has prompted M’s manager Lou Piniella, catalyst of everything the team’s ever accomplished, to quit. And the team that snuck ahead of the M’s to win the AL Wild Card slot won the league penant, setting up an (ugh! double ugh!) all-California World Series.

…but there were plenty of opportunities to down one’s drink today in the drinking game described in the previous post below. The previously unbeaten Beavers succumbed to a prolonged Trojan thrust, leading to a 22-0 final score.

…one you can only play once a year. It involves the Oregon State-USC football game. There’s only one rule: Down your drink whenever an announcer says anything to the efffect of “the Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”