FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

•So long, Curt.

The news that Curt Schilling will have shoulder surgery no doubt means Schilling’s days with the Red Sox are over, if not his career. He will be 43 years old in the fall, and wasn’t it three years ago that he was telling everyone that he was going to pitch only one more year?

But sing no sad songs for Big Schill.

He can be many things. He can be outspoken. He can be perceptive. He can be a blowhard. He can be all these things, sometimes all in the same sentence, but he was a big-game pitcher, no question about that. And no one can ever take away his bloody-sock performance in 2004, his immortality as a Red Sox pitcher.

•Memo to Johnny Miller: Talk about how people hit their 9-irons and you’ll stay out of the verbal rough.

•Memo to all you guys out there: I think The Sex And The City wave has already crested, so it’s probably safe to go back into the water.

•If they make a movie about the Lakers in the Finals, it would be called Tin Men.

•When did the NBA’s Western Conference turn into the National League?

•Tiger Woods is the preeminent athlete of his generation, his own brand in ways that no one has been since Jordan, and the sound you will hear is people changing channels on Sunday afternoons.

•Quiz of the Week: Which member of the Celtics once played against URI in Kingston? (Answer near the bottom of the column.)

•Line of the Week comes from Paul Pierce after the Celtics won the NBA title: “I’m going to enjoy this for the next four weeks straight. I don’t see no sleep in my future.”

•What’s the old line: No one’s property is truly safe when the General Assembly is in session.

•You know the bar’s been raised very high around here when there’s now pressure on the Pats to keep up.

•The worst college basketball team in the country plays the high pick-and-roll better than the Lakers did.

•If the Yankees didn’t have bad luck, they’d have no luck, what with now losing Chien-Ming Wang after already losing Philip Hughes.

•The stock of Joe Alexander, of West Virginia fame, is rising in the NBA Draft, while that of Georgetown’s Roy Hibbert is falling. The same Roy Hibbert the Celtics were thinking of taking with the fifth pick last year.

•The Pistons would have beaten the Lakers.

•Straight Pool, a new mystery novel by Providence writer J.J. Partridge, is well worth it, as his observations on life in Rhode Island are right on target.

•There are few things in sports better than speed, and Jacoby Ellsbury is the latest example.

•Former URI player Parfait Bitee will play for the Cameroon national team in the Olympic qualifying tournament, and both PC’s Jeff Xavier and former Bryant player Mario Correia will play on the Cape Verdean national team.

•You know Hollywood is tired at its core when all we seem to get now are sequels and remakes.

•Kobe Bryant as the next Michael Jordan? Sorry, Kobe.

•The Mets couldn’t have handled the firing of Willie Randolph with any less class.

•If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought that George Steinbrenner had moved to Queens.

•The fact that Britney Spears’ sister has had a baby is a lot more than I need to know.

•James Posey, Sam Cassell, P.J. Brown and Tony Allen all figure to be gone from the Celtics next year — Posey because he will no doubt get more money somewhere else.

•There’s no truth to the rumor that the Lakers played the sixth game as if they were auditioning for the sequel to Semi-Pro.

•Or that if times don’t get any better, the governor and the General Assembly get moved to Twin River and the State House becomes the new casino.

•Nicholas Dawidoff, who wrote the excellent The Catcher Was A Spy, is back with a wonderful memoir of growing up in New Haven with baseball and a mentally ill father called The Crowd Sounds Happy.

•You’ve seen a lot of games, Bunky, if you remember that Paul Pierce’s college career ended with an NCAA Tournament loss to URI in 1997.

•There’s no truth to the rumor that the reason plastic surgeons around here drive Mercedes-Benzes is Federal Hill on a Friday night.

•Phil Jackson seemed almost bored by the NBA Finals.

•Either that, or he thought he was too cool for them.

•Silly me, I thought the new movie The Love Guru was the Bruce Sundlun story.

•Quiz Answer: James Posey, when he played for Xavier.

•We have more and more information these days, yet we seem to know less and less. Go figure.

•Just in case the PC-URI rivalry needed some heating up, PC’s hiring of former URI assistant Pat Skerry might just do it.

•Or as Bob Terino, the self-described Godfather of URI basketball, says, “If they keep this up, they’re going to drag me back in.”

•It’s hard to believe that Manny has never hit a pinch-hit home run.

•Now that the General Assembly is almost out of session, Bunky, your wallet is real close

breynold@projo.com