Crikey

Later, chirrens, we'll discuss the President's sinister plan to pack the court with persons of Italian heritage later on. We have more important matters to attend first.

What an awful sports weekend for the Washington area. I mean, just abysmal. We started the flesh-ripping on Saturday afternoon, when My Beloved Alma Mater (the one from which I actually graduated, as opposed to the small liberal arts college where I could not finish my degree in personal pharmacology, or the community college known hereabouts as Harvard on the Pike) spent approximately 49 football minutes Getting My Hopes Up in a huge game against the Florida State Penitentiary at Tallahassee.

No amount of private genuflection and um-yah-yah-ery could make our 21-14 halftime lead hold up, though. We chipped away a couple of figgies, but the Felonholes blew away our lead, banging in 14 points in, like, 20 or 30 seconds. We had the ball with about four minutes left, trailing the Felonholes 35-27, but the drive stalled on the Felonholes' 35 or so with 52 seconds left, because the quarterback--who is the second-string quarterback--suddenly stopped believing in peanut butter, which belief is the only thing that could possibly have sustained him to the 21-point second quarter that made the game interesting and noteworthy.

Maryland has been a disappointment in many a fourth quarter this season. Klimpsun bushwhacked the Terps with moments left in the Real season opener (there had been a previous game against some other local school of no note), and the Hillbillies put up about a googajillion ground yards on us in the fourth quarter, to go with the googoogajoobajillion yards they had already put up (and yet, the game was, until the Terps went nappies with 15 minutes left, close).
The whole thing is compounded by a shoulder injury to our starting quarterback, who blossomed into Joe Freakin' Willie Namath in the offseason; there's another presumptively decent quarterback on the roster, dressing every Saturday and acting as The Clipboard and Radio Bitch, but as I learned Saturday, we're trying to redshirt him this season (give him a season off, so that he can prolong his eligibility, which only works if the lad doesn't play at all during the season). Mister Second String, who was the starting quarterback during last year's forgettable campaign, gits all tight in the vagina and can't complete tying his shoes, let alone completing important things like passes to guys in the same color jerseys he's wearing.

Oh, I forgot to mention the metaphysical importance of games against the Florida State Penitentiary at Tallahassee. Long ago and far away, in a galaxy where words rush at you very fast from your movie screen, this august institution was admitted to the Atlantic Coast Conference, the league in which My Beloved Terps compete. No, c'mon, technically that is the correct verb, mmkay?

It will stun you to learn that I am a reactionary on this matter. My ACC consists of seven schools that consider football a hobby (although for Klimpsun, it's also an additional safety valve for criminal intent). Longer ago and farther away, Georgia Tech was admitted to the conference in an effort to buff the league's football profile (and I will admit that, given the Cremins years, Tech earned their way into inclusion in my ACC worldview). This having failed spectacularly at the design purpose, the league then admitted the Florida State Penitentiary at Tallahassee, which had, by then, been ejected from whatever conference it then played in for conduct unbecoming a penitentiary.

Sneerers and ne'er-do-wells will by now be asking me when My Beloved Terps last Won Anything like a National Title. The correct answer is this: when you weren't even a gleam. But STFU, I'm storytelling.

Over their first 12 years in the league, the Felonholes lost precisely two league games. My Beloved Terps were not the winners of either of those games. They established a pattern of games not unlike Saturday's, except after hanging in for two or three quarters, they would proceed to get blown out in a ghastly fashion, rather than being within (possibly wishful) spitting distance at the game's end. This will, of course, engender some hatin'.

Last year, things changed. My Beloved Terps beat the Felonholes, catching them when they were down and waffle-stomping them with jackbooted feetsies. We cried in joy, we um-yah-yah'd, we set College Park on fire (I'm not kidding--get over it, it's what we do, for a given value of "we" that equals drunken fratpersons).

So it's a good thing to beat the Felonholes, as it will be a good thing to beat any of the carpetbagging Big East motherfuckers who have migrated into our fair league over the last two sports seasons. Did I have a point? Oh. Metaphysics. Hatin'. Bobby Cremins. Okay, we're done with all that.

So we can move on to the NFL. But only briefly. The Foreskins ran into a buzzsaw against the New Jersey Large Persons yesterday. It was surreal, a complete stomping, as will occasionally happen against another division team. My chief point about the game is this: it exposed Joe El Senor Jesucristo Supermayamaya Jefe Gibbs' football team for the fraud that it has, for the last six weeks, been. They are Houston with an O-line, the Niners with a defense. Every single human who has embraced, in the opening weeks of the NFL season, the notion that the Foreskins might make the playoffs should rush out right now to join Opus Dei and begin the self-flagellation. I mean it; scourge yourselves, Foreskins fans. It's the only way to get Joe El Senor Jesucristo Supermayamaya Jefe Gibbs to concede the obvious: that this football team sucks giant code words and should be disassembled and rebuilt around the team's young talent as soon as is possible, suffering, if necessary, a three-year jaunt through the wilderness of being the Titans or Niners or Browns.

Really.

And now we come to the MLS, or as my good friend Toots calls it, Pussyball. I declined BdR's kind invitation to accompany him and his family to yesterday's DC United-Chicago playoff game at Washington's...uhm...I guess we'll go with "venerable"...RFK Stadium. I declined partly because I had a lot of stuff to accomplish around The Cave, and also because I had sort of a bad feeling about the game.

Which turned out to be clever. Chicago scored 10 minutes into the game, then again 27 minutes later, and then again--on a spectacular goal--as stoppage time was about to expire on the first half. The second half consisted of desperation and grudge. It was as thorough a rout as a futbol game ever becomes. No threepeat for United this time.

Okay, it's over three hours since I started this rant (real life and the inadequacies of the Booger interface keep cutting in), and it's time for me to abandon the safe place and start blogging about SCOTUS. Ta for now.