4,9,3,11

Barry Bonds will soon break Hank Aaron's record of 755 career homeruns. He currently stands at 744. The Golden State Warriors became the third 8th seeded team to defeat a first seed in the first round of the NBA Playoffs -- and the first to do it since the league initiated the seven game opening round format four years ago -- when they defeated the Dallas Mavericks 111-86 on May 3rd, 2007 to clinch the series 4 games to 2. The Boston Red Sox, after 86 years of what appeared to be perpetual heartbreaks (and the curse of some fat drunk bigot), finally, in 2004, again won the world series, their first since 1918. Tiger Woods became the youngest Masters winner (and the first winner of African or Asian descent), when in April, 1998, he won his first golf major by a record 12-stroke margin. Vince Carter wears a size 13 shoe and has a 2-inch long penis.

I could go on, but for your sake and mine, let's stop there. Truthfully, I'm dizzy after having just typed that opening paragraph, and I'm not even drunk (yet).

Numbers make my brain hurt. Not a dull pain, either -- they MAKE MY BRAIN EXCRETE BLOOD AND CAUSE MY BOWELS TO COIL (and vice-versa). To be perfectly honest, they scare me, too. Not in the same way manual labor and pregnancy tests do, but almost. If I'm ever found dead and lifeless* in an alley somewhere, blame Brand Nubian's One For All, track 11, and the Pythagorean theorem.

I realize that numbers play an important part in our lives, of course. After all, where would I be without Whodini's 5 Minutes of Funk, or the measurements of every Playboy Playmate since Jami Ferrel (36" - 22" - 35", by the way)? Nowhere, that's where.

But numbers in sports, to paraphrase Parrish Smith, are out of control. Fuck Elias. Fuck fantasy sports. They've turned us into nerds, man! Statistics in baseball are cool and all (they're a fun way to kill time between the 65 years it takes your average MLB hurler to throw a pitch), but I could really care less to learn that Eddie Griffin is the first 6-foot-10 forward to crash an SUV while masturbating to porn after posting a double-double the night prior, or that the Pistons' recent win over the Bulls is only the sixth time a team has beaten its opponent by more than 20 points in consecutive games to open a series. Who cares!? To paraphrase Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption, doesn't fuckin' matter what the score was, [the Bulls] are dead.

And it's not only on sports fans that new-millenial statistics mayhem has had an effect. Case in point: Andrei Kirilenko. If it weren't bad enough that the 6' 9" Russian chose his jersey number so that it, preceded by his initials, would reference an assault rifle, the motherfucker has made a (so-far disappointing) career out of trying to cram box scores and stat sheets full of impressive numbers that haven't helped his team in any meaningful way (look at his role on this year's resurgent Jazz and tell me I'm wrong). But perhaps the most blatant example of numbers infiltrating sports proficiency is the decades-long decline of the point guard, a holy -- perhaps the holiest -- position whose hallowed ranks these days, among active players, includes fewer men than I have appendages.

Do me a favor, Constant Retards: the next time you enter a room and a game is on, and you ask someone in the room what the score is, check yourself. Ask "Who's winning?" and we're cool; and if the score is close and your friend/spouse/parol officer answers something like "The Devils are up a goal with a minute to play," that's OK, too; but if it's early in the second quarter** and you hear "The Spurs are up 32-27. Duncan is 4-for-7 and Tony Parker just got hit with a technical -- his second in seven games against the Suns -- and there's 8:47 on the clock!" beat him to death with a lummi stick.

Pl3a5e, 5t0p th3 madn355.

(My heartfelt apology to my mother, the math teacher. Mom, I'm sorry if I disappointed you, but between you and me, any number after 3 can go to hell. One love.)


* Laugh with me if you got that nugget of redundancy. If you didn't, go do your taxes or something.

** I realize there's some leniency here for football, but only if it's a playoff game.