"Shaking off the really, really awful Red Sox defeat last night, I turned first to booze and then to Slate, where I found a characteristically excellent Bryan Curtis mini-profile of Bill Simmons, Sox fan extraordinaire and America's greatest living sports and pop culture writer. If you're a) a sports fan or b) under the age of forty and in possession of a cable subscription, and you aren't reading Simmons, like, all the time, you're out of your mind. Literally. You're probably in a padded cell right now, in fact, devouring insects and waiting for Dracula to show up and bust you out . . . but I digress...-Ross Douthat, praising Sports Guy on The American Scene, a blog that I feel deserves to be read, like, all the time as well. Posted by Stephen Silver at October 6, 2005 03:17 PMThe genius of Bill Simmons is that whether he's talking about Jerry Maguire or the most recent NFL weekend, you read what he writes and then you think to yourself, yes, that's exactly what I was about to say. When he's on, which is almost all the time, you don't feel like you're reading a sportwriter - you feel like you're sitting around drunkenly shooting the shit with a really great friend at 3 in the morning. Which is a rare talent indeed."