Empyreal Environs

Instead of being able to regale you with my penetrating analysis of the impending Coco Crisp trade, my limited number of neurons have been engaged in a far more mundane task: struggling with the nemesis of web designers near and far.

Yes, Microsoft Internet Explorer, versions 6.0 and 7.0 beta, have mangled my CSS. Every other browser, including Mozilla on Windows, correctly renders my site. But not MSIE, which, with the addition of just a few letters, becomes “misery.” I converted my entry-driven pages (the main page as well as the category pages like Dave’s Diegeses and date archives such as the memorable month of May 2005) to PHP so that those nifty “Recent Posts” and “Recent Comments” don’t change with every context switch as they used to, aptly demonstrating a Movable Type limitation.

But now these PHP pages have the incorrect font size in MSIE, which is so very odd because they otherwise have the correct styling. And, despite what my hosting company and every Movable Type resource is telling me, my CSS is not broken because it still is fine on my HTML pages such as “Meta” or “News.”

If anyone can give shed some light on this issue, please drop me a comment or e-mail.

As for the Covelli Loyce Crisp (as if the nickname weren’t enough, his given name also rolls insouciantly off the tongue) trade, waiting this long to get a center fielder may have weakened the Red Sox’s leverage, but sometimes even an organization with a commitment to the future must make such a swap in the face of an exigent situation. Not that I am in any way comparing Crisp with Pedro Martinez, but Boston traded Carl Pavano to get a proven major league player. Even though Andy Marte was the poster boy for potential star of the future and gave all the farm fans someone to swoon over after Hanley Ramirez was traded, the club needed a player manning the triangle this season. They could have done much worse then come up with Crisp.