Most Teams Christen A New Ballpark With A Playoff Run, Or At Least A Winning Season . . .

Then there’s the Mets, who instead languish in fourth place. Maybe you can explain why you’d execute a hit and run down by two runs with two runners on and no outs in the ninth inning:

The sight of the Phillies’ Pedro Martinez pitching against his former team was supposed to be the most unusual aspect of the game. But that notion was quickly proved wrong before the top of the first inning was over, only to be reinforced exactly three hours later when the game ended on an unassisted triple play with the potential tying runs in motion. It was the first unassisted triple play to end a game since 1927, and only the 15th in major league history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Leading Economic Indicators: If You Can’t Beat Craigslist, One-Up Them By Integrating Erotic Services Into Your Content

Many of New York’s weeklies have stopped printing sex ads but at least one is now embracing the content:

Many city magazines court singles and sex-related advertising. Time Out New York has decided to make it part of its editorial content.

The magazine, a weekly better known for its exhaustive cultural and restaurant listings, introduced a “Sex and Dating” section in early July. Along with articles on finding strippers and getting checked for sexually transmitted diseases, it features photos of local singles in the hunt, with e-mail contact information.

“I want sex and dating to be another brand for us, just like we cover theater, music, film and museums,” said Michael Freidson, who became editor in chief of the magazine in February 2008. “But I don”t want it to be the dominant category.”

Still, “[n]ot everyone who opens the magazine to find a movie to go to wants to find a photo of a veterinarian posing nude with his cats” . . .

1300 Women In Connecticut Can’t Be Wrong!

Buried in the reaction to Cintra Wilson’s gratuitously obnoxious Critical Shopper piece about J.C. Penney in today’s Public Editor column is this admission exposing the Thursday Styles section for the sleazy high-end advertising vehicle that it is:

Wilson told me she usually writes about “obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,” and she thinks of her audience as “1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.” She said it was “kind of provincial of me” not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. “It was dumb on my part not to see this coming,” she said.

But give bonus points to Wilson for ripping on Connecticut ladies in the process . . .

Link Of The Day

“The Senate coup that jammed up Albany for weeks, costing taxpayers millions and lowering voters’ already abysmal opinion of state government, was sparked by Democratic leaders’ decision to deny $2 million to Sen. Pedro Espada for two mysterious, newly established charities.”

If It’s Not Masturbating Cowboys, It’s Extremely Close Up Vulvas

You can’t win with these people:

It’s O.K. if P.S. 1 wants to show vulvas in extreme close-up. (I don’t believe in censorship.) What’s not O.K. is that the only warning to parents was a tiny sign at the entrance to the gallery. The wording was clear — “These galleries contain graphic imagery. Parent/adult discretion is advised” — but the size and style of the sign made it unlikely that any harried parent would even notice it.

P.S. 1 is hardly the only local museum that has let me down. A Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008 was a major draw for parents and kids. The first piece on display, a teaser in the museum’s lobby, was a playful sculpture of cartoonlike characters, which made my sons want to see more.

So it came as a shock when, entering the main exhibition space, we were greeted by a masturbating cowboy spinning a lasso of his semen.