does anybody really care? (an exercise in irrelevance)

Barry Bonds is about to break the home run record. There's a tempest in a teapot about him not playing on the road, so he can break the record in San Francisco, where some people actually consider themselves Bonds' fans. Does anybody care whether or not he plays on the road? Does anybody outside San Francisco care if he breaks the record? That record has been so trivialized by his assholiness. Roger Maris is spinning in his grave and Hammerin' Hank Aaron has already booked a tee time in the Bahamas to recognize Bonds' chemically induced achievement. True, he's not the only player who used steroids. There are plenty of others. True, nobody has proven he did anything with steroids, but nobody proved O.J. is guilty either. Doesn't mean they're innocent. His apologists say America should care about him breaking the record, because it's a huge achievement, and it's only because of his personality that we don't. Well....DUH! I, and many like me, have this thing about assholes. We don't like them. We try not to associate with them. Their presence makes any situation less enjoyable than it could be with their absence. When they do things that may otherwise be spectacular, we tend to ignore them. There are other players who used steroids, but none is a bigger horse's patoot and none are this close to a record that used to mean something. You wanna be a jerk? That comes with the territory. Is that just me? I don't think it's just me.

The word is David Beckham might not play in his first game with the Los Angeles Galaxy. For those that don't know, Beckham plays soccer and the Galaxy is a soccer team. For those of you in the United States, soccer is a sport for the dexterily challenged from the waist up. For those in the rest of the world, it's what you call football. Back to Beckham, though...does anybody care? Soccer was supposed to take off in America when we hosted the World Cup. Then it was supposed to take off when the women's team won the World Cup and Mia Ham ran around and stripped down to her sports bra. So now it's going to take off in America because some team in L.A. paid David Beckham a ton of money to play for them. Anybody remember Pelé? Anybody care?

Then, there's his wife. Anybody care?

Peter King is making his preseason predictions for the NFL season. They, once again, are eerily similar to the standings at the end of last season. Again, this season won't play out like last season, and again, he'll be wrong. Does it matter? Does anybody care?