It’s Hockey not Baseball and we’re in D.C. NOT Baltimore

Dear Retarded Assholes sitting behind me in Sections 412 and 413 at the Verizon Center during last night’s Washington Capitals game against the Carolina Hurricanes,

First off, let me thank you for the effort you put in hauling yourself to your feet when the nice lady who’d won the ESPN Zone Star Spangled Sing-Off started in on her not-too-bad rendition of our country’s National Anthem. This shows you have at least some of the basic motor skills necessary to maintain rudimentary control over the lower functions of your barely evolved primate-like bodies.

Personally, I generally don’t sing along with whoever is chosen to perform the Star Spangled Banner, but will sometimes do so in the absolute privacy of my own home when I’m sure there’s no one around. This is mainly because it is a tough song to sing, and my singing has been known to cause birds to drop dead and fall from the sky and young children to run screaming for their mothers.

I don’t like to subject the general public to this kind of abuse, so I refrain.

You retarded assholes, on the other hand, did join in, which is fine since you obviously don’t care about what others think of your singing voices. But, if you’re going to sing it, sing the whole song not just the single syllable you think makes you cool and allows you to giggle like a tweener touching herself for the first time.

I’ll start this off simply so your cretinous, pre-anthropoid walnut-sized brains can absorb it without bursting into flame and turning into a teaspoon of ash.

No matter what you’ve been told by the people you believe are your natural, biological parents as you’ve grown up, it is never, ever OK or cute or supportive of the team or whatever to shout out the “O!” in the line “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave” of the national anthem.

I can even spell that out for you if you’re having trouble with the concept: N-E-V-E-R. NEVER.

And here’s why you warthog-faced buffoons:

1. First and foremost it’s disrespectful. We’ll leave aside for a moment the person singing it for real won the ESPN Zone Star Spangled Sing-Off, but she sang it well, so that’s a push. Most people can barely deal with the actual singers mangling the song; do not aid and abet these singers in their crimes.

2. We were at a friggin’ hockey game, not a mid-summer contest at Camden Yards fercrissakes. Yes, yes, I know you were deprived of local baseball growing up and were forced to root for the Orioles and I’m truly very, very sorry for that (and for your having to live with a jackass of an owner like Peter Angelos). Trust me, I know about sorry, I grew up a Pirate fan.

But guess what? Good news. In case you haven’t heard, we (my hands are circling around in an inclusive motion) have a local team now, the Nationals, who are getting ready to start their second season in their lovely, if somewhat horrendously overpriced park in Southeast. Even better news: You can trade in all of that ugly black and orange Orioles’ gear at least, for Godsakes, on hockey nights. (I’d never ask someone to switch team allegiances just because a pro team moved to your city.)

3. Take a look at this map from the good folks at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (they’re pretty smart). Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you to catch up.

See that yellow rectangle with a little something dangling off it in the bottom left corner of the map? That’s Washington, D.C. Extra bonus information: The D.C. stands for District of Columbia. Now you can impress all your friends and win bets at your local watering hole.

Now, up there in the top right corner of the map? That yellow Nevada-looking polygon? (I won’t even try to define that, just trust me) that’s Baltimore, Maryland. I’ll say that again sloooowly: Bal-ti-more, Mary-land.

Quick quiz: Where were you when you shouted out the “O!” in the Star Spangled Banner? Correct! Slow, but correct nonetheless. You were at a HOCKEY GAME in WASHINGTON, D.C.!! Not a baseball game in Baltimore, Maryland.

Shouting out the “O!” at a sporting event in Baltimore, let alone Washington, isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. All it does is make you look and sound even more like the retarded assholes you actually are.

Thanks so much for your time, you can now return to your daily drooling. (Of course, the drooling thing only applies to the actual retarded assholes who do this, everyone else, thanks for reading.)

The Foggy Dew

(And don’t think I don’t have my eye on you Atlanta fans who, for years, have been singing the last word of the first verse as “Braves” rather than “brave.” That’s even worse than the jackasses this post is directed toward.)

Monday Six-Pack

Growing up in Pittsburgh our pastor was able to get us in-and-out of Sunday Mass in 42 minutes flat. He, like everyone else in the congregation, needed to get home, get breakfast out of the way (for the congregants, a big Sunday breakfast for their massive Catholic families) and then settle in for the day’s Steelers game. No one could give a more meaningless, but most importantly, quick, homily than Father Rogers.

So today, Super Bowl Monday*, I’d just like to offer my congratulations to my Steelers on their breathtaking victory over the Arizona Cardinals and sixth Super Bowl championship. I am the kind of fan who believes in “any given Sunday,” and the Cards almost pulled it off last night. They gave the Steelers all they could handle, but in the end I think the deciding factor came down to the Chris Collingsworth “Kiss of Death Pick.” Throughout the playoffs, every team the NBC broadcaster has picked has gone down in flames.

So I’d just like to thanks Collingsworth for picking the Cards. Keep up the good work Chris.

Sex Sells
There was a lot of sex in the Super Bowl ads last night. We expect that, of course (seriously, where do you think the Budweiser Clydesdale was taking that circus horse? He was going to sow his wild oats), but one of my favorite ads is one many people hate. The ad in question, the Career Builder ad that kept repeating itself – the woman screaming in her car and the guy crying at the bus stop and so on and so forth – added a new phrase to what I thought was, until that very moment, a thoroughly closed lexicon.

Let me present to you for your consideration, the newest euphemism for masturbation. Adding to the glory that is whacking off, spanking the monkey and pounding the pud, I offer this: Punching the koala, a phrase I feel works equally as well for men and women alike.

So next time you find yourself heading off for a little “Me Time,” instead of using one of those tired old euphemisms, try this: “Well, time to go punch the koala.” Your friends and family will thank you and, more important, you’ll feel better about yourself.

Jackass of the Weekend Award No. 1
Dear Jackass in my building,

Next time, when in your haste to finish up your 113 loads of dirty baby clothes you decide to pull two of my three loads of laundry out of the dryer and then toss my expensive and not-yet-quite-dry work shirts on the table, don’t get annoyed at me when I passive-aggressively take my own sweet Goddamn time hanging them up so they don’t wrinkle any more while you’re waiting for me to empty that last dryer.

I set a kitchen timer so I don’t keep you and our other neighbors waiting, and I traditionally set it for 5 minutes less than the running time of our “Fires of Hell” dryers. So I know you pulled my still-slightly-damp shirts and jeans out and put your stuff in before the time I’d paid for expired.

Fuck you very much.

Jackass of the Weekend Award No. 2
This award goes to the not-bad-looking-chick in the Harris Teeter parking lot in Ballston on Saturday who, despite her great ass, is still a Jackass.

Would it really have been that much of an inconvenience for you to have walked that cart back up to the lobby of the store instead of pushing it into one of the very last empty parking spaces? Seriously, you only had to walk about 100 feet and your husband/boyfriend/incestuous brother-lover could have followed you in his BMW and picked you up at the door.

You didn’t seem to be suffering from any physical ailments or handicaps. In fact, it was your long and shapely legs attached to your ass that drew my attention as you loped gracefully across the lot with an embarrassed smile on your face while you selfishly made everyone else’s life just a bit harder.

I hereby place the special Irish Shopping Cart Magnet curse upon you and your husband/boyfriend/incestuous brother-lover’s shiny blue Beemer until you mend your ways. But you won’t, so you’ll just go on pissing people off with your thoroughly thoughtless actions and your car will continue to attract our four-wheeled agents of revenge.

Change we can believe in
Why am I at work today, the Monday morning after one of the most exciting Super Bowls in all of recorded history (at least since The Super Bowl in 1966)?

Now I don’t expect the government to bail us out on this one, since its powers are and should be limited, but I can’t understand why the NFL refuses to play its signature game on Saturdays. If this were the case, instead of being at work I could be at home watching the looped post-game coverage again and again with drool running from the corners of my mouth as I subconsciously contemplate which of your sponsors’ products I want to buy.

Get with the program. It’s February, you’re not competing with college football for air time or visibility. So move the game to Saturday (or the Sunday before President’s Day as an option) and let us sleep in as we bask in the reflected glow of our teams’ victories.

Six down, 994 to go
The whole time I was driving home Friday I was telling myself I was going to bail on my run and, instead, do it the next morning.

But then I found myself at home and realized if I let myself slide this early in the game it’d be the start of a bad pattern. I had no reason to skip the run I realized, and I found myself striping down and pulling on my running clothes.

I did my same 2-mile loop, counter-clockwise this time, and ran farther on the first burst (so to speak, since “burst” will never be a term anyone would apply to my speed) than the last two times. In fact, since goals are important, I ran the whole first mile at a decent pace, and then walked only in short stretches the rest of the way home.

My calves were still tight, but they’re coming around as they get stronger. I’m hoping this won’t be a problem by this time next week. The one concession I am making, since I felt a bit of a twinge in my knee yesterday, is instead of running Monday-Wednesday-Friday this week, I’m giving myself an extra day of rest and going out Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. The big reason for this is, despite my total inability to complete the loop, I’d like to run on the Mall this coming weekend.

*Hey, if there’s an Easter Monday, there can damn well be a Super Bowl Monday for our country’s most important secular holiday.