Lions 7...

Hey Claudius, what do you say we wander down to the Coliseum and watch the christians have a go at the lions again? I'll take the felines minus 7. That's a sucker bet Brutus, you know the lions always win...

After 35 out of 35 football players autopsies showed significant brain injury in recent tests I have a hard time getting excited about America's own favorite blood sport, football. I claim no special scholarship in such matters but I am reasonably confident that the first team sport somehow involved a spear and a mastodon. I think that the game warms a special atavistic cockle in every modern homo sapien's heart. I know it's apostasy, like dissing apple pie or Kate Smith (for those of you under forty substitute Lee Greenwood) but I try to take the anthropologist looking at earth from the moon view of such things. And what exactly do I see?

Large alpha males, bred for combat, most out of minority neighborhoods, literally bashing their brains out to give a bunch of armchair Walter Mitty's a cathartic thrill while their overlarge posteriors cram snugly on their oversized barcaloungers at home. Have at it, America. The trouble with cognitive impairment of course, is that the victim can never quite get a handle on what he is missing, just that there is something dreadfully wrong and then unfortunately for some the next step is the self induced shot to the temple, a la Duerson or Junior.

Here's your ticket off the streets, kid. Live it up now, but as they said in ancient Rome, remember fame is fleeting and life is short.