What a night at Fenway Park. Big rally. Walk off homer by Big Papi. Pumped-up crowd chanting M-V-P! M-V-P! Amazing stuff.

But that’s not the game I had tickets to. Nope, I had tickets to the game the night before. I saw Curt Schilling get lit up like a pinball machine.

Oh well. At least the weather was nice.

Our neighborhood rep emailed us this announcement by the mayor:

Mayor Menino Declares Heat Emergency with Temperatures Expected to Reach 100 Degrees

With temperatures expected to reach 100 degrees this week, Mayor Thomas M. Menino today declared a heat emergency in the city and will expand services during this dangerous stretch of hot weather.

“The heat that we are expecting in our city this week presents a dangerous situation to many of our residents,” Mayor Menino said. “We are preparing by adding additional resources to help assist residents keep cool and healthy. I am appealing to everyone in our city to check on your neighbors, especially those who are elderly or infirmed.”

Fortunately, I’m so cool heat hardly affects me.

In my dreams. In reality, I melt away at 90 degree weather with a touch of humidity. Triple digit heat just about makes me buckle over in pain.

Time to stock up on ice cream.

You’d expect a pompous blowhard like Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah to declare victory in Bint Jbail no matter what, but events over the past few days suggest that Hezbollah at a minimum fought the IDF to a draw in the Shiite militia stronghold. The IDF has mostly pulled out of the village after declaring the mission completed, leaving behind a small force said to be in control. Here’s how Jerusalem Post sums up the fierce fighting in Bint Jbail:

Infantrymen from the Golani and Paratroopers Brigades killed at least 50 Hizbullah gunmen and wounded hundreds more during fierce gunbattles in Bint Jbail over the weekend. Most of the wounded were from Hizbullah’s special forces and had come to reinforce the regular Hizbullah guerrillas in the village. Soldiers confiscated dozens of handguns and rifles, as well as ammunition, grenades, mines, and five anti-tank missiles there.

But in control is what the IDF claimed to be of Bint Jbail early last week, before a well-planned Hezbollah ambush killed eight soldiers from the Golani Brigade. More fighting took place in the town after that clash, costing the Israelis additional casualties. So I’m a little bit sceptical when the IDF says it now has control of the village. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

Which is not to say that the Israeli soldiers have turned into a bunch of clowns. Far from it. Here’s from the same article:

As Battalion 890 of the Paratroopers Brigade began to pull out of Bint Jbail, Military Intelligence personnel using an unmanned aerial vehicle spotted a group of Hizbullah terrorists on motorcycles on their way to set up an ambush for the withdrawing troops.

IDF troops deployed accordingly and engaged the enemy force, killing 26 guerrillas. Seven soldiers were wounded, including one seriously.

From that description it almost sounds as if IDF narrowly escaped another bloody set back: It’s not difficult to imagine a chain of events that would have allowed the Hezbollah to deploy their ambush unmolested. I wonder how far the Hezbollah fighters travelled before they were detected? The incident suggests that the Israeli’s have yet to discourage its enemy from moving company-sized units in southern Lebanon.

Keep in mind that wars often are affairs of attrition: Hezbollah could well put up a heck of a fight on the ground for two weeks and then collapse within 48 hours when it runs critically low on men, supplies, and equipment. That’s why it’s important that the IDF continues its offensive even it’s rough goings at this stage.

The other side of that coin is that at some point Nasrallah must decide whether he should pull his forces out of the contested area or expose them to further degradation. It will be interesting to see how the battle unfolds over the next seven days.

Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius.

Today we salute you, Mr. Self-Obsessed Immigrant From Sweden.

Some come to America for its freedoms, some come for its opportunities, but you came here to tell people that Sweden is the greatest country in the world.

(It’s really the best!)

It’s your mission to make sure that everybody knows that Ikea, Ingemar Bergman, ABBA, Volvo, Bjorn Borg, Absolut Vodka, Saab and Victoria Silvstedt - whoever she is - are all Swedish.

(And Tiger Woods’ wife, too!)

No fact about your native country is too trivial to withhold

(the Vikings had no horns on their helmets!)

and you would never for a second hesitate to tell people from Louisiana how they should cook their crawfish.

(all you need is dill!)

So today we crack open an ice cold Bud Light for you, Mr. Self-Obsessed Immigrant From Sweden, because after our in-laws, there’s nobody we’d rather hang out with!

Reactionary pundit and naturalized citizen John Derbyshire finally discovers it, through his son.

Well, maybe five.

Or maybe five months.

Instead, he could just do the right thing and join the immigration-restrictionist camp now.

We saw The Devil Wears Prada at AMC Fenway tonight. It’s a decent movie, definitely a good choice for married men who want earn some football-watching chits for the fall.

Some quick thoughts on the movie, with mild spoiler warnings.

1) The movie didn’t do a very good job establishing that Miranda woman as the devil. Driven? Sure. Bad mother? No doubt. Not a woman you’d want to marry? Clearly. But the devil? Hardly. Ari Gold in HBO’s masterpice bagatelle Entourage is a much more sadistic character, and he barely has any redeeming qualities at all. At least Miranda puts out an industry-leading magazine.

2) What was the Princess-girl character’s motivation for busting her ass for the devil? Stockholm Syndrome? Devotion to her job? Was she seduced by the lifestyle? I settle for seduced while wanting to prove that she was better (in both a moral and professional sense) than the fashionistas who surrounded her. Ultimately, I don’t think it really matters what her motivation was.

3) The Princess-girl character’s friends were poorly fleshed and except for Vinny Chase (he has a real name: Adrian Grenier) quite unnecessary. The movie should have spent the time it wasted on them on exploring Miranda’s wickedness.

4) I think one take-home message from the movie is that you can’t have it all, not even if you are a young American woman (call me a heretic!). Putting your career ahead of motherhood is not a decision that’s likely to bring about long-term happiness.

5) But I guess the movie sugar-coated it by having the Princess-girl character leave her job not for her boyfriend but for, for, I don’t know, self-empowerment and self-realization and self-validation or something equally nebulous. You go girl with your important job at New York Mirror (don’t newbie journalists have to write obituaries and police blotters nowadays?)!

6) Conservative journalist and movie critic Steve Sailer has made a good point about The Devil Wears Prada that’s worth repeating: Miranda’s open elitism is a lot easier to take than the faux-egalitarianism that many corporate tycoons favor.

7) In a similar vein, the cold hierarchialism of Miranda seems to me to come a lot easier to Americans than the notion of team work that is often praised but perhaps not quite as often an actual reality. I’m not entirely convinced that teamworkism is a philosophy that makes the best use of Americans’ cultural capital.

The idea that the devil wears Prada is ridiculous. As everybody knows, the devil wears pinstripes.

9) Very little actually happens in the movie. Is the book equally devoid of action?

Trailer comment: Saw a trailer for some movie with Alec Baldwin. Looks absolutely slit-your-wrists awful. Don’t see that movie, whatever it is.

[I originally referred to AMC Fenway as "GMC Fenway." AMC is correct.]

[Good grief. I have got to get better about proofing my posts. At one place in this post I referred to the movie as "Pravda". No doubt the Devil reads (or writes) Pravda, but that's not relevant here. I can't get over the fact that I wrote "The Devil Wears Pravda." It just goes to show you can take the boy out of the Cold War, but you can't take the Cold War out of the boy]

Israel’s Golani Brigade lost 8 dead and suffered 22 wounded in a several hours long battle in Hezbollah stronghold Bint Jabil in southern Lebanon. Considering the many reports about how Hezbollah has built many intricate bunkers over the last several years, I was surprised when the IDF declared the town conquered and safe yesterday. During both Chechnyan wars in the 1990’s, Chechen fighters used Cold War bunkers, tunnels, missile silos, and bomb shelters to elude Russian troops in between striking them hard. I would be very surprised if there aren’t Chechnyan War veterans in Bint Jabil.

But it must be said: It takes well trained and determined soldiers to hold their ground and fight back after taking heavy losses in an ambush and then after getting flanked again.

The United States Census Bureau will release data from the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS) on August 15. Inevitably it will result in hand-wringing stories about Massachusetts’ population loss. They will probably also hail the increase in non-white residents. I also forecast stories on the high cost of living in Massachusetts, slow job growth, and, for good measure, something timely and topical about rising crime in Boston and the deadly Big Dig debacle. Plus stories on the decline in number of married couples, the decrease in average household size and the growing number of grandparents who are caregivers.

It will all seem very fresh and original.

Swedish pundit Johan Norberg is lost:

While staying in a small motel outside Bennington, Mass., I am reached by the news that the WTO´s Doha Round collapsed yesterday.

I think he’s referring to the Massachusetts more commonly known as New Hampshire. Or maybe the Massachusetts more commonly known as Vermont. But probably not the Massachusetts commonly known as Massachusetts, unless Bennington is a suburb of Newstead-Montegrade.

He’s right about one thing, though: It’s highly unfortunate that the Doha Round collapsed.