This, ladies and gentlemen, is a beautiful, beautiful paragraph:

Boston, the AL East leader, took three in a row at Yankee Stadium and extended New York’s losing streak to a season-high four. Despite a record $183 million payroll, the listless Yankees left their booing fans to wonder when all those heralded All-Stars will start justifying their stratospheric salaries.

“A great weekend for baseball,” e-mails Scott Lucy, my New York co-worker and Red Sox buddy. Indeed.

So far this season, Boston is 6-1 against New York. GO SAWX!

The Red Sox are 5-1 this season against the Yankees, and they’re sitting pretty at the moment, a half-game ahead of the Orioles for first place in the AL East. The Yankees, meanwhile, are 3 1/2 games back, in third place.

The latest blow to the Bronx Bombers: a 3-2 Sox win in 12 innings Saturday, Boston’s second straight triumph in Da Bronx. (They won 11-2 on Friday.)

It’s very early in the season, of course. But it’s never too early to kick Yankee a**. WOOHOO!!!

Toby broke the cat-blog’s three-month-long silence this morning with a complaint about Robbie. But there are some signs of an interspecies thaw:

Here are more recent photos of our pets being cute.

The official death toll from Thursday’s train disaster in North Korea is 154 and likely to rise. Reuters has photos, and the Independent has a description of what happened:

Eyewitnesses describes the explosion as a fireball like a nuclear bomb, which sent up a black mushroom-shaped cloud, flattened dozens of buildings, scattered debris for miles around, and left a crater 50ft deep. A Red Cross worker said the railway station and immediate surroundings were “obliterated” and hundreds of buildings up to three miles away were destroyed.

And then there’s this:

In the small community of North Korean defectors in Seoul, a story is circulating that Kim Jong Il, the North’s leader, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by changing his schedule at the last moment. According to the rumours, residents of Ryongchon were not informed of his new schedule. Some 700 children were lined up on the platform to wave flags in greeting but were caught in a blast timed to kill him as his train went past.

Dude. It was a joke.