After a month in which the Giants played .500 baseball, then lost 8 of their last 13 — cancelling out the 8-game win streak that gave me a reason to suspend this feature–it’s time once more to play A Giant Sucking Sound, featuring your San Francisco Giants.

Let’s start where we left off, with closer Armando Benitez. How enormous was last night’s monumental choke job, in which he walked the Mets’ best runner to lead off the 12th, balked him to 2nd, balked him home to tie the game, then gave up a game-winning home run?

The New York Times asked Mets players if they’d ever seen anything like it before:

“Never,” José Reyes said.

“Wow,” Joe Smith said.

“Nope,” David Wright said. “And I don’t think you’ll ever see a game like this again.”

Benitez’s meltdown nullified another stupendous appearance by rookie starter Tim Lincecum, who allowed only three hits over seven innings. This morning on the Giants’ flagship station, KNBR-AM 680, both presenters and phone-callers were apoplectic. Even Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow called Benitez’s failure “high school level” play.

Now let’s go to Stanford, where Aliza Kim, the woman who faked her way through almost an entire freshman year even though she had never been accepted to the university, was also a fake ROTC cadet. She “excelled” as a fake cadet, which raises a lot of questions. If any high school graduate can “excel” at it, then why is it a college program at all?

And finally, you remember Laura Albert, the San Francisco writer and former phone sex operator behind the “J.T. LeRoy” literary hoax? She was interviewed last week by lit blog Galleycat as she posed for a photo shoot. Continuing her shameless denial of responsibility for exploiting people’s sympathy for transexual gay youth with AIDS, her latest rationalization is this: “I was doing it the only way I could. My childhood was hell. I went through a minefield, and I put on camouflage in order to tell the truth.”

Funny how the biggest liars are always the ones talking about “truth.”