WE GOTCHA SPORTS!!! ---- RIGHT HERE!!!!

IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED TO US THAT A GOOD WAY OF INCREASING OUR READERSHIP WOULD BE TO INCLUDE A "SPORTS COLUMN". Now while the title of this collection of - well, whatever - is titled "The Alexandria Daily Poop"; we rather doubt anyone takes a laptop into the crapper to read us. (We do not doubt that there are those who communicate electronically whilst relieving themselves, we have beheld a "Twitter" message consisting of the words : "still pooping"; and we are NOT making this up.)

ACTUALLY however we have an aversion to sports for several reasons. When we were 14 or so and in a game of sandlot football, we caught a pass interception. And promptly ran it into our own team's end zone. On our last visit to our hometown we ran into an old classmate and the first thing he mentioned was that long-ago mistake. Forty two years is a long time not to live something down. But our aversion to sports is not solely due to this embarrasssing incident.

NOR IS IT SOLELY DUE to the abysmal performance of the "local" football and baseball teams (the Washington Redskins and the Washington Nationals, respectively). A clue to our aversion, however, can be obtained by noticing the quote marks around "local" above.

THE WORDS TO THE "REDSKINS THEME SONG" include the words "Fight on 'til you have won Sons of Washington!". Yeah, right. The last "son of Washington" was (correct me if I am wrong) Sonny Juergenson; and he was (again correct me if I am wrong but with that accent...) a hick from the Maryland suburbs. That;s like calling us a "son of Alexandria" when in fact we were born in Indianapolis and grew up in Huber Heights, Ohio. Whatever these Redskins are, they are not sons of anywhere NEAR Washington DC (nor the vicinity). Moreover what they mostly are and have been for several years and a half dozen coaches (or more, we have stopped keeping track) a bunch of showboating primadonnas with one eye on the TV cameras when both eyes should be on the game.

SIMILARLY OUR "BASEBALL TEAM" the Washington Nationals is actually a team from the Northern Autonomous Territory (AKA "Canada") whose record was so abysmal that the team was renamed and the stats jettisoned. Or maybe "Expos" is exactly what a Washington pol wants to avoid. In any event, another bunch of out of towners posing as the home team. And not much there to root root root for, unless you want to root in the ground with your nose for their standings

BASKETBALL?? The old "Capitol Bullets" had their name changed to the "Washington Wizards" by folks who were concerned about the violence in the National Capital City. Well, the violence continues unnabated but the "Wizards" are becoming legendary for transforming success into failure. They ought to be re-renamed the "Reverse Merlins"

HOCKEY!!! Yeah, we got a pretty good hockey team. Bunch of goddamned Russians like some REAL AMERICANS MANAGED TO DEFEAT AT LAKE PLACID IN 1980 but at least they manage to win a few.

There is solace, however, in the fact that the teams which beat the pants off "our guys" are not really "their guys" either. Players criss-cross the Nation (and the globe!) either being "draft picks" or whoring themselves independently as "free agents' being bought and sold by representatives of consortiums or dumbasses like Redskins owner Danny Snyder.

WE DO NOT DOUBT THAT ATHLETIC ENDEAVORS ARE DEMANDING and that watching skilled competition is exciting. But for all any of it really means anymore, what with the "home team" being from everywhere but "home" and with the players being called "role models" except when they are staging dogfights, injecting steroids, shooting themselves acidentally in nightclubs etc; the teams might as well be called "Western District 1" or "Eastern District 4".

THEREFORE this is the first and the last time we will write of such twaddle on these Epages. Of all human endeavor, professional sports is perhaps the most over rated and least consequential, or at least so say we at the Alexandria Daily Poop.