It's getting so that a person can't take a look at the world around him or her without feeling a strong sense of disgust at the brotherhood of human beings. Every once in a while, it will work out that the event that triggers said disgust is also uproariously funny. An example can be found in the famous episode from last month where one Red Sox fan channeled his displeasure at another fan who questioned his taste in haute cuisine into a small ball of rage and hurled a slab of pizza off the offender's dome.

Tonight, another event must be discussed which shows the breakdown of common decency in a very amusing fashion. One moron went to the symphony and would not shut his big yapper, to borrow a phrase from the late, lamented Chris Farley. Another patron requested that the chatty man keep his peace. And somewhere between there and comic immortality, a donnybrook erupted in the balcony at Symphony Hall in what once passed for the Athens of America before Music City (Nashville) built a replica of the Parthenon and stole the title away from Boston. And that brings us to tonight's tool of note segment.

What manner of man gets into a fistfight at a Boston Pops concert? Maybe if it were the big show on the Fourth of July outdoors on the Esplanade, I could see it. But at Symphony Hall? I know no man likes to get shushed (I imagine no woman cares for it either, but I try not to speak for my female readers), but this is simply not the way adults ought to behave. But have we really sunk so low as a society that unfinished business must be settled amid the dulcet tones of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony?

Lost in all this fanfare is a better question: why was Ben Folds performing with the Boston Pops? I understand that his work will be regarded by subsequent generations as the acme of technical precision and heart-felt passion in popular music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but does he really belong on stage in Boston Symphony Hall? Hell, who even knew he was still alive before all this happened?

I suppose I shouldn't lament the decline and fall of American civilization. After all, if it weren't for people acting like tools and other tools recording the scene for posterity (and our enjoyment), where would I find my material for these tool of note segments that so delight you. That's the nature of a catch 22. The world is falling apart around us, and all you can do sometimes is laugh.

It's just sad to see that once was the Cradle of American Liberty has descended into a morass of license. In case you wonder, the difference between liberty and license is simple. Liberty implies that you have the freedom to do what you want and the common sense to employ common courtesy. License means you settle your differences by throwing punches or pieces of pizza or worse as the opportunities present themselves with no regard for decorum.

Just so you know, there will be no links tonight because I'm feeling particularly lazy. But I have somethings to say. It's just another post with an ESPN theme. Obviously they spent a lot of time on the Daytona 500, today and the breaking story was the bizarre episode of All My Morons that has been the 2006 San Diego Chargers. There was the linebacker shot by an off-duty cop. There was the safety arrested by Federal authorities for allegedly selling codeine. Then there was the waiting until the offensive and defensive coordinators accepted head coaching positions with other teams. Now they hire Norv Turner, who was once chased from a blackjack table in Las Vegas by Bill Simmons and one of his super-cool friends.

But there was a substantial amount of coverage dedicated to the All Star Weekend. First, on Mike and Mike in the Morning, Greenie made the pronouncement that no one puts on a show like David Stern. Meanwhile, he admitted later that he gained a renewed appreciation for Bono as he watched Mary J. Blige flounder her way through the classic U2 song "One."

And then there was Wayne Newton. It took me 2 days to come to terms with his presence. He was terrible. Actually, he was far, far, far, far worse than terrible. First, as Mike Wilbon would say on PTI, he looked like he'd escaped from the wax museum. Whatever they did to lift his face and Botox away his wrinkles made him look like a 2 week old sandwich in Saran Wrap. And there was his "tan." I don't know how to describe it, save to say that it made him look like one of those oranges that have those rough brown patches that the growers call wind scars.

Then there was his hair. It looked like his hair had been dyed with the black paint they use to rustproof metal benches and chairs. I don't know that it can be fairly called hair, but it sits on his head and it's not a hat, so we'll call it hair. It looked to me as though some drunken hair restoration technician had sewn the hair on somewhat imperfectly.

And there was his singing. I don't know much about octaves and that sort of thing, but I know he was nowhere near the high notes that made up the falsetto that made the song unique in the first place. His version of Viva Las Vegas was an insult even to people who aren't Elvis fans (I, however am an Elvis fan). Basically he looked and sounded like a bad impersonator. I get the feeling that Englebert Humperdink sat up somewhere in Branson, Missouri or wherever old lounge singers go to die and called his agent wondering why he couldn't get a gig with the NBA.

Then there was the triumphant return of Around the Horn. Because the show had been bumped all last week for NASCAR Now, they hadn't had a chance to excoriate Tim Hardaway. Everybody's conscience, Jay Mariotti, was in top form. He commended David Stern for the swift and fair response in banishing the homophobe from All Star Weekend. The voice of the voiceless went on to lament that certain other commissioners (Bud Selig, by name) do not act with such probity.

It was truly inspired, or at least it was, before I translated it from Mariotti-speak into English. Basically, Jackass Jay said: "Whah, Whah! Big Bad Ozzie Guillen was mean to me, please fight my battles for me, Mr. Commissioner." I've had enough of Mariotti. He's a total tool. And of the off chance that one of his minions monitors my site, feel free to tell him this. Jay Mariotti is a middle aged guy just coming off an angioplasty. The actuarial tables are in my favor on this one. He's going to die before I do, and I'm going to find his grave and take a leak on it. A little harsh, and totally lacking in my customary good humor, but I am so sick of phony tough and crazy brave reporters.

Speaking of people monitoring my site, I've been setting traffic records lately. It got me thinking. For those of you who are new to this site, Catch 22 is one of my favorite books. In the novel, the protagonist was forced to censor letters written by enlisted prisoners while he stayed in the officer's ward at the military hospital. Since it was boring duty, he got creative and started censoring all the modifiers, then all the romance words, then everything but the salutation while he rewrote the letter's body and finally he censored the envelopes. When he censored the letters, he signed Washington Irving's name.

Once he censored the envelopes, the military bureaucracy sprang into action. The Army sent a man from the the Criminal Investigations Division to the hospital to catch Washington Irving. This triggered an entire series of misadventures which ended up with the first CID man getting sick. The Army then sent a second CID man. Eventually, the two CID men spent all their time investigating each other.

I went through that long aside to say something, believe it or not. The other day, I joked with one of my friends that my spike in traffic was due to a number of people monitoring me for Mariotti, the CHB, the Red Sox, the Pats, NASCAR, Ainge and the other targets of this blog. After keeping an eye in this site for a while, I imagined that they would eventually use this site as a means to monitor one another. It seemed like a funny image.

Can you picture it? Across the country, recent college graduates who always wanted to be athletes, but lacked the size, speed, strength, talent or any/all of them to make it became jock sniffs and gave up their dreams to enter the world of sports journalism. Now they sit in their cubicles, dividing their time between monitoring my site and mooning over the hot receptionist who is hopelessly out of their collective league. And I bet they're questioning their career choice as they try to remember whether Mr. Mariotti takes his coffee with cream and sugar and wonder if Jay will release his pent up aggressions on the lowly intern after Ozzie or Hawk Harrelson disses him again.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the most wonderful time of the year is upon us again. And it's not the Super Bowl, even though it is the world's biggest sporting event. Of far more importance is the Winter X Games. These last ten years have been the best in recorded human history because snowboarders and extreme skiers have joined skateboarders and BMX bikers as our greatest athletes. For too long, football players and baseball players and basketball players have been celebrated at the expense of our true sports heroes.

After all, what courage does it require to go deep over the middle or carry the ball into the middle of the defensive line? It is far more impressive to ride a street luge or take on a half pipe. And for my money, once you throw sno and ice into the mix you truly have an appropriate test of one's mettle. After all, for those of you young enough to be in Gen X, think back to your high school days. Outside of the roving gang of lacrosse players, who was tougher than the skater posse. Hell any group of four of them could throw one amazing beating on the average band geek. Just because they weren't very impressive one on one didn't mean they weren't tough.

The best thing about this Winter X games is that the favorites didn't sweep the awards. As some ESPN commentator whose name wasn't worth noting as I've never seen him before just told us, it's time to turn off our brainwashers, because Shawn White isn't as dominant as we'd been led to believe. And like that, my world view shattered.

How right said commentator was, for the wrong reasons. The Flying Tomato is a tool. The energy drink consuming, teen angst music devouring perpetual teenager who makes up the core constituency for snowboarding/skateboaring events is not a cultural arbiter. Mr. White is only a cultural icon because our nation of sports fans have the attention span of goldfish and were swept away by the novelty of these insipid events in the recent Winter Olympics. In about ten years, the NFL will still be king, and the X games will have peaked. I look forward to their demise.

From time to time, when my frustration with the developments in the sports world pushes me, I like to dig up some quote from one of my favoirte authors to amplify my point. Tonight, I go to Joseph Heller, who said this in Catch 22: "Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies all they signified was the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else." To me that sums up the X games, winter and summer, perfectly.

It is not my intention to start an epistemological argument that will finally prove or disprove the inherent value of any sport, or sport in general. But football, baseball, basketball and hockey all have defined objectives, specific purposes that are achieved for all to see by the players on the field. Yes, there is replay in a number of sports to see whether a particular play should stand or be overturned. But there isn't some judge sitting somewhere watching and scoring to see whether or not a trick deserves what points to what decimal degree.

But Heller's words ring true, nonetheless. Thomas Jones running the Power O behind Ruben Brown might not end man's inhumanity to man, but it has a comforting feeling of tradition. But there is a certain desperate effort to find a new attention grabbing pastime inherent in hoping the Flying Tomato or the Archtool or Aquaman lands the frontside fakie 1080 cleanly in the super pipe. When we watch baseball we know a base hit is a base hit, when we watch basketball we know a dunk is a dunk, but at what point does air transcend its mortal self and become big air?

Thankfully, I do not know the answer to that question. The sentence about the fakie 1080 is entirely too close to the lingua franca of the snowboarder for my taste. I wouldn't exactly say I missed the WInter X games this year. Betwen channel surfing, features on Sportscenter and the crippling lack of programming to fill the void left by the NFL's bye week I caught about 20 minutes of snowboarding and extreme skiing and commentary. I think I am the worse for it. I wish it would go away. But tools seem to like it, and programers and sponsors seem to like tools. To update the old saying, the tool and his money are, apparently, soon parted.

But back to Heller, Roger Federer won yet another tennis tournament. I guess I should point out that it was not just another tournament, but the Australian Open. But anyway, Federer can win the next 20 Grand Slams (or every one until the Sun burns out, for that matter). It won't change the fact that men's tennis is a dead genre. There really hasn't been a compelling personality since McEnroe walked the Earth. Women's tennis will be with us always, because so many of us (myself included) are shallow, pathetic, emotionally stunted shildren masquerading as grown men. We like to see tall, leggy, athletic young women in tastefully short garments play a game of grace mixed with power. But men's tennis is beat.