Sadly Egon has been suffering with the dreaded lurgy this week so we only feature a report from several a/k/a Random .

Last week marked a curious American ritual - the end of the baseball season co-incided this year with the turning back the clock from Daylight Savings to Standard Time. It seems that, back in WWII, the government, in its infinite wisdom, set the clocks forward an hour in April and back an hour in October, some artificial construct to 'add' an hour of daylight. So what this actually means is that I'm in some weird time loop and I have no clue whether I'm seven or eight hours behind GMT¹, besides the fact I'm sending this over the Internet on Monday for Thursday's Hallowe'en Edition of the Post.

So let us go forward and back in time, shall we? (And hand me another Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, yes, thank you.)

The Florida Marlins won the World Series Saturday night, defeating the Noo Yawk Yankers 2-0 in taking the series four games to two, behind the shutout pitching of 23-year-old Josh Beckett. The M's became the first team to come from 10 games under .500 in May to win the World Series with a remarkable resurgence under venerable (age 72) Jack McKeon, who took over the managerial reins in early May, stopped the dismal start and got a young and talented team to PLAY as a team.

In this age of instantaneous communications via the 'Net, the transformation of 25 individuals, each making hundreds of thou$and$ of dollars, into a Team that played its best baseball when it was just them against the Bad Guys, the Evil money-swallowing Empire Noo Yawk Yankers and their storied history², was a symbol of time changing.

Instantaneous world-wide coverage of the Series, for those with the right equipment, via satellites and the 'Net, coupled with time-changing on the week before All Hallow's Eve when ghosts and goblins, witches and warlocks, ogres and trolls raise existential issues of time/space/reality... that would be best addressed somewhere else on H2G2. I should stick to sports.

As we thereby mentally click away from baseball, we find the American version of football - or Amfoot - in midseason form, one unbeaten team remaining in the American Conference (the Kansas City Chiefs) and the National Conference boasting two one-loss teams (Minnesota Vikings and Carolina Panthers) in the race for the playoffs and the Super Bowl.

Random numbers played a large part of my 'winning' $50 last week on a $2 pool, so I'm ahead for the season and don't forget, only wager for amusement purposes.

Sunday's matchups feature the 6-1 Indianapolis Colts at the 4-2 Miami Dolphins, 3-4 Washington Redskins at 4-2 Dallas Cowboys, 4-2 St Louis Rams at 3-5 San Francisco 49ers, plus the Green Bay Packers (3-4) at the 6-1 Minnesota Vikings on national teeveee. Also national is Monday's 6-2 New England Patriots at 5-3 Denver Broncos. I could do a time warp on each of the Sunday games, they are all good rivalries over the history of the franchises.

But let's just explore the first - the Colts-Dolphins game. Back in the 50s there was the National Football League with the Baltimore Colts. In the 60s, television money helped found the American Football League and the Miami Dolphins. A potential salary war was averted by merging the two separate leagues into the NFL, National and American Conferences and the first Super Bowls. As a gesture of evening out the conferences, three National teams, the Colts, the beloved Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers, moved to the Americans to ease the massive passing of the Almighty Dollar.

So the Colts hired themselves a young coach named Don Shula and he led them to the Super Bowl, but then Shula and the Colts parted ways - and the Miami Dolphins greedily hired him. Shula led the only unbeaten Super Bowl champions, the Dolphins, to titles in the 80s and into the 90s before retiring as one of the winningest coaches in the sport's history. Meanwhile, that pile of money Baltimore got for switching league/conferences dwindled, and the franchise was packed up and moved, virtually overnight, to the midwest for, yes, another pile of money. Indy is 6-1 and many of the Colts' records include the name of Don Shula as coach, as do the 4-2 Dolphins.

See what I'm talking about? Time-tripping, via the Internet, and costuming, along with Halloween in the search for More Money, More Candy, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This is several, a/k/a random, fighting the urge to drive to Hershey, PA to jump in a vat of chocolate (I'll settle for another Gargle Blaster, thank you again!) over and outta here...

The Federal Drug Administration in the US declared Tuesday that the new designer supplement/steroid THG is illegal, a steroid that could potentially enhance athletes' performances. Britain's Dwain Chambers, the 100-meter European champion, has admitted to using the nutritional supplement/steroid, according to the Associated Press, and some 40 American professional and international sports stars have been asked to testify in front of a Grand Jury, set to convene in December.

Chambers says, according to a BBC Report that it wasn't 'a wilful or calculated attempt on his behalf to deceive the authorities'. Many other sports will now be affected by this new THG ruling. The governing body of swimming, FINA, have already declared that they will be undertaking retrospective testing of samples taken at the recent World Championships for traces of the steroid.

Sporting With Egon Archive

Egon

with Several a.k.a. Random 

30.10.03 Front Page

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¹Actually, we have 'Daytime Saving' in Europe also and put our clocks back an hour at the weekend - so things remain the same!... ed .²There is now a very comprehensive History of Baseball on h2g2 which we highly recommend you read.