Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader should just have called the past two Mondays “Smallholder Posting Days” and just saved any crap he planned on posting until Tuesday. Of course… The school year is nearly over. Tat means that the good Smallholder will retire to his farm for the season and Naked Villainy will return to being all Maximum Leader all the time…
Anyhoo…
Any of you minions who are Washington Nationals baseball fans might be thinking that a wild-card berth is in the Nats future. The Nats have won 7 of their past 10 games and 5 of 5 over the past few games. Allow your Maximum Leader (a Nats fan you know) to disabuse you of this notion. First off, they will return to RFK soon. And while they did well against the Dodgers last week at home, the Curse of Bobby Kennedy (a trademarked feature of the Llamabutchers) will likely strike them again.
Also, you’ve got to realize that the trade season is upon us in baseball. The Nats are sellers in a buyers market baby! Your Maximum Leader is sure that Soriano will be somewhere else come July. (He hopes in St. Louis and not in New York. Either New York team…) Frankly Livan Hernandez, if he keeps up his current streak, might also be dealt away. So might Jose Vidro. All these players are worth lots of minor leaguers and prospects. The new ownership of the Nats is dedicated to build the team through a strong scouting and farm system. The studs of now will be dealt to grow the studs of tomorrow. Let us (Nats fans at least) hope for the best.
UPDATE: Thomas Boswell and your Maxmium Leader. Same wavelength.
And in other sporting news… Your Maximum Leader is told that elsewhere in the world something called the World Cup will be starting on Friday. Your Maximum Leader might have missed this fact were it not for his minion Tilesey exhorting him to proudly support his Anglo heritage and root on jolly ole England.
As your Maximum Leader figures it, he could root for any of three national teams. The US of A, Scotland, or England. Since Scotland is out that narrows it down to two.
According to the World Cup area of ESPN, the US of A are playing in something called Group E. The other teams in Group E are Italy, Ghana, and the Czech Republic. Now… Knowing absolutely nothing about soccer, your Maximum Leader would guess that the serious competition in Group E for the US of A would be the Italian team and the team from Ghana. As much as he loves the Czechs as a people, they really ought to stick to hockey. That leaves Italy and Ghana. Your Maximum Leader seems to remember something about Italy’s team being embroiled in some sort of scandal back home. Something about bribing judges or sleeping with judges or calling judges funny names. So if the Italians are distracted by scandal, or more likely distracted by busty female fans exhorting them to come join them for antipasti; the Italians will not be much of a threat.
That leaves those pesky players from Ghana. They are one of the few teams from Africa. They likely are playing for pride. Pride in showing up all those “developed” nations by beating them on the soccer pitch. Sot it looks like Ghana will be the big threat to the US of A in this World Cup thingie…
Your Maximum Leader, as you can see from the above ramblings has no idea what he is blogging about on this subject. So, with no knowledge of soccer, he will have to resort to the second method for choosing who he should root for. Which team has the cooler jerseys. The US of A team jerseys look cooler than the English ones. Thus your Maximum Leader will couple his patriotic fervor with his keen fashion sense and root (root, root) for the US of A.
Carry on.
