If you were to ask me which two words in the entirety of English were least applicable to my own life, gay and softball would be near the top. Placed next to each other, the resulting phrase basically has no meaning for 99.99999 percent of the population. It is like a postcard from a discredited universe. Oh, gather round, city—here is a tale for you: It is 4,000 words long, it is written with maudlin self-importance, and it explores every sensitive nook and cranny in the saga of a homosexual softball team being stripped of its second-place trophy in an event titled the Gay Softball World Series, then literally making a federal case of it. Who is the author of this enormous cream puff? Who better to bore readers half to death about an inconsequential subject than ELI SANDERS?

Mr. Sanders's meandering essay is a too-gay tempest in a too-gay teacup. Bafflingly, the situation that besets the homosexual softballers is that a few of the players are not gay enough, which is now legally actionable in Obama's America. But is there a deeper indolence here? One shudders with the realization that not even Mr. Sanders could be bothered to rouse himself to care this time around, even though, as I have discovered, Mr. Sanders holds a leadership role in an extracurricular amateur gay soccer team. The only thing softball and soccer have in common is unseriousness: They are both favored by incompetents, children, and women!

As a further demonstration of Mr. Sanders's refusal to be lucid, he holds forth in this week's news section with a perplexing article about whether the state will be home to a primary or not in 2012. After dragging my eyes through the piece twice, I still do not see what the point of it is, nor have I learned whether we are going to have a primary in 2012. In some alternate universe, the major goal of journalism is to obfuscate the truth. In that universe, Mr. Sanders no doubt is the proud owner of several Pulitzer Prizes. On our planet, he is an unmitigated failure.

THEATER: Mr. Kiley deigns to drop his stultifying drug coverage long enough to scribble out a state-of-the-union piece on the shuttering of Intiman Theatre—um, a little late? The good news is this: Another arts welfare recipient down... CHOW: Miss Seling goes on a pie--eating binge and then frantically tries to self-justify by writing about it... FILM: The books editor fixes his pea brain on a blockbuster film based on the works of Ayn Rand, which he clearly cannot comprehend. I was about to ask where Mr. Constant gained such a feeble grasp on economic theory, and then I visited BOOKS, where Charles Mudede tries to justify being up to his wine-soaked eyeballs in debt by claiming this is a direct result of capitalism. SPORTS BLOTTER: Oh look! Another attempt at sports coverage. Discussed within: testicles, "faggot," religion-bashing, and Viagra. I wish I could feign surprise.