More Riches for Dynastic Sports Paupers

The Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup last night, pulling off a city's exacta of being insufferable in every major sport.

Assuming you were once fond of Boston sports fans, watching them this last decade has felt a lot like watching episodes of The Simpsons after the eighth season. A few clunkers aside, they both delivered a reliable product — one angsty heartbreak, the other comedy. You grew up with both of their charms. Then at some point, there came an inexorable process of encrappening that eventually everyone had to admit would devour the greater body, the last human and appealing bits subsumed by dickheaded metastasis.

In both cases, smart people better able to see inevitability coming at them like a thunderhead convinced themselves that this wasn't happening, that everyone else had gone Chicken Little and lost perspective. Clever people rationalized The Simpsons' having covered every practical storyline and needing to move to extremes to seem novel. Boston apologists pointed to cases of other teams with bandwagons to marginalize the odium of deep-south Pats fans, held up The Evil Empire's payroll-lusty fans as evidence of the smaller and necessary evil of Boston's funds-fueled die-hards. Conversely, a drunk could have made a far more astute observation: "These guys are assholes."

Just like those two hilarious gags in even the worst Simpsons episodes, Boston apologists have plenty of rationalizing details to cling to. No matter how egregious the Sox become, it's absurd to think they'll approach the Yankees in gross revenue. Teams can't really control their bandwagons, or at least that's what (to take a wild "for instance") every Idaho-born Steelers fan has claimed when condemning bandwagon fans without a trace of irony. But there's still plenty of behavior for which they can be held accountable.

Genre Fiction, Rennie Airth and the Blitz

During some sleepless nights this holiday, I found myself too tense to read anything with big words. Improving books about North Korea or the American Revolution satisfied for a paragraph before my mind drifted off, and I wound up turning pages with no clue as to their contents. Eventually, I settled on a trilogy of detective stories from Rennie Airth. After speeding through them over two nights, I felt what seems like a unique reaction to a trilogy of novels: that the second was by far the best of all.

Now, if you know a Star Wars fan or are one yourself, this is not necessarily a radical idea regarding film, but it's not something I've heard stated often about books (at least in part because good books rarely have a sequel and almost never have two of them). The argument in favor of The Empire Strikes Back is that it offers the richest character study, broadens the moral and spiritual parameters of its universe and increases the stakes for everyone. What's interesting about the Airth books, though, is that despite all of them featuring the same characters going over virtually the same plot for the same stakes, the second book tries the least to convince you of how grave they are and, in that process, creates a richer story for those same characters.

Of course, immediately after thinking of writing this down, I thought about a response I'd received to another piece I'd written about historical detective fiction. Midway through last year, I got in an argument on a message board with a guy who's read this site off and on. I suggested that a book he liked didn't really count as "literature," to which he replied (I'm paraphrasing), "What the hell would you know about it? All you do is review mystery novels." Ouch.

Even More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

We here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? have but one aim every year: to pioneer new strategies and set new benchmarks in being awesome, by employing new rad dynamics. At the beginning of each year, we establish standards for our comportment and limits on the human body's ability to always be totally crushing it, and each year we surpass them.

In 2009, we smoked myrrh with Lil John and righted the centuries of wrongs created by grave-robbing by grave-donating. (The secret: little paper coffins handed out to trick-or-treaters, who then asked for coins. Thanks, kids!) In 2010, we reenacted Fox in Socks with a rescued and diseased animal, took Brittany Murphy's death virginity and created MILF day.

Indeed, if a shortcoming can be found in our ambitions for ourselves and for Mr. Destructo as a journalistic organ, it is that we may be running out of potential goals due to the shortcomings of the physical universe. May that time never come. May we press on today. May you join us or die. Can you do any less?

Even More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up:
I'm gonna tell everybody you drink Dr. Thunder.

I want to make all steampunk clothing accessories suddenly viable working machinery. I don't care how many people are scalded with burning oil and dropped to the ground by hundreds of pounds of metal.

I want to sneak into an elementary school and hide notes in every lunch bag that read, "Your father and I are getting divorced."