Am I Missing Something?

A few head-scratching stories from this week’s print edition of
The Obvious Observer…

Shocking news rang out across the sports world yesterday when overwhelming Belmont Stakes favorite – largely because his trainer said he would win – Big Brown failed to win the race and subsequently this year’s Triple Crown.

The shock hit Big Brown’s trainer the hardest as he did all he could to aid the horse’s chances leading up to the race, including making risky, karma-defying comments like, “I don’t see how he can lose” and “We’ll be in the winner’s circle when the other horses are coming around the first turn.”

Entering yesterday’s contest, the horse seemed to have everything working in its favor: weeks before the race, he suffered a cracked hoof, which kept him from properly training for the event; he did not receive his latest regular monthly steroid injection; he was facing a 1.5 mile run, the longest of the three Triple Crown races and a typically difficult one for hard-charging, short-distance runners to overcome; and history was definitely on Big Brown’s side – no horse had captured the Triple Crown in the last 29 years, including numerous contenders in the last dozen years who managed to win the first two races of the elusive milestone.

When asked for reasons why the super stud could have failed so miserably, every “racing expert” working for ESPN and all the outside “experts” that the network interviewed had the same response: “Big Brown’s performance in the Belmont is absolutely inexplicable.”

Indeed.


In other puzzling news…

Gas prices continue to rise despite growing worldwide demand, spurred by years of rural-population growth and consumers buying gas-guzzling automobiles. Also adding to the perplexity of high gas prices is the ever-increasing cost of crude oil and the record quarterly earnings of petroleum companies everywhere.

When asked if they will ever cease following this backwards business model, a spokesman for the petroleum companies said, “Absolutely. Taking home piles and piles of money every pay period just isn’t working for us anymore. Plus, we can’t risk it anymore now that all those e-mails are circulating that ask readers to participate in bizarre and impractical methods to lower gas prices, like refusing to buy gas between 7-8 a.m. on the third Thursday of every other month. If one more of those e-mails goes out, it could mean the death of our industry.”


In perfectly reasonable celebrity news…

Former drug addict, death-threat maker, and prostitute aficionado Charlie Sheen had no trouble recently landing a new wife. Brooke Mueller is Sheen’s third and, quite possibly, most ignorant mate.

When asked how she felt about Sheen’s past, which includes hard-core drug abuse, connections to Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss and threats made to his former wife, Denise Richards, while she was pregnant with their second child, Mueller responded: “I know, isn’t Charlie adorable? And he has his own show!”

O.J. Simpson’s current girlfriend and Mike Tyson’s most recent ex-wife could not be reached for comment.


Finally, Clay Aiken will soon be a dad. Oddly enough, the Barry Manilow-wannabe bypassed the natural form of conception by artificially inseminating the mother, Jaymes Foster.

As a side note, the favorite crooner of female octogenarians everywhere has been willfully appearing in public looking like this.

Aiken’s sexual preference continues to remain a mystery.