[KentuckyBlue]

...but as a blue, you know I don't care if I'm ever popular. But first to the topic at hand.

A female in adult slow-pitch NSA co-ed had just slid into third base safely. I thought I saw her standing off the bag during the next pitch. She was down the line at me and I couldn't really tell if she wasn't heel-up against the bag for a pitch or two. But after the third pitch I was pretty sure she was off. I called time, went up the line and told her gently that she should be on the bag. (Kinder gentler me. Usually I just ring them up, but this league was mellower, less-skilled players, I wasn't totally sure about her violation, and the particular game was lopsidedly out of reach anyway -- all reasons arguing against a dramatic ring-up.)

So anyway, she inexplicably gets angry at me as she is finally batted home. When she crosses the plate she tosses back at me that she couldn't stand on the bag because she had injured her leg when she slid into third. I could just gape at the ignorance of such a crushingly illogical statement. So I let it go, then the next thing I know during the next batter the scorer tells me that she's flipping me the old table-for-one from the dugout. I kept myself from tossing her by reminding myself that I didn't see it. Served me right for not ringing her up when I had the chance.

I've never shied away from stopping the game and calling a base runner out for leaving too soon. It ALWAYS causes a crapstorm. And it often happens during a crucial moment of the game. And as our cousins in the basketball stripes will remind us, you have to call to the same standards at the crucial moment that you used with the game in its first minute. But if you've caught the runner and everyone knows it, you earn instant respect all through the rest of the game -- no one will pull anything on you after you make that call stick because they decide you're God's own eyeballs.

Okay, now for the unpopular opinion: I know all about vexilology and what it signifies. The American flag is bigger than the errors of those who display it badly, and the concept the flag stands for is far bigger than the flag itself. I think people who dither about little points of flag display or other aspects of patriotism are acting pretty tinhorn. This is grating on me right now because last week at the Kentucky football game I was near a man standing with his daughter, and he was still finishing up a cell phone conversation when the National Anthem started. Some beer-soaked touch-hole in the row behind him got all puffed up at him for failing to respect America, as he (blearily) saw it. Okay, cellphones are everywhere and obnoxious, and it wasn't the dad's finest moment. But if some Miller-time yahoo had embarrassed me like that in front of my daughter, he'd have spent the first quarter scrambling over that section of the bleachers hoping to reassemble his full set of teeth. (Or the 22 teeth of the average Kentucky football fan, anyway.) Two-bit Fox-network patriotic blather gives me the fantods. Jerks who think they're good Americans because their tricolor bumper sticker validates their racism are embarrassments to their country and the real patriots who fought and died for them. And Lee Greenwood is a no-talent hack who has ridden one treacly, embarrassing song to an undeserved career since the mid-1970s. Now I feel better. Have at me, Rush legions.