Celebrate!

Some folks will be celebrating their country's independence by sitting on a sidewalk and watching various cars and people mosey past in some sort of formation. Some celebrate by blowing up a small piece of the land they love. Noisy thing go boom! Ooh, shiny.

Ordinarily I would spend my afternoon the usual way -- grilling small, desperate animals in a variety of tasty sauces, and washing them down with some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. But it's going to be 110º today, too hot even to barbecue. So, a pre-grilled chicken salad (yeah yeah, I know), and then an evening sodomizing my small but growing collection of Scooter Libby effigies, before packing them with M-80s and sending them to effigy hell.

Some patriots will spend their God-given time, and their freedom to contemplate His manifest bounties, to watch a bunch of losers gorge themselves on hot dogs. Oh no! The Michael Jordan (well, okay, the Bill Laimbeer) of "competitive eating" has the trencherman's equivalent of turf toe. Do they call it "turf tongue"?

For a month now, it's been clear that today's 92nd edition of the world's most-famous celebration of mastication would be one to remember.

We are, of course, talking about Nathan's Famous International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest at New York's Coney Island -- an Independence Day tradition that this year comes with heightened expectations.

You know, if you happen to have "heightened expectations", even jokingly, about a hot-dog-eating competition (something which, like Rosie O'Donnell in a Brazilian thong, is a thing that should not be), you've got a bundle o' misplaced priorities, podna. There's no reason to either remember nor look forward to such an event, unless one of these goons chokes. Then I'm watching.

Just when it seemed it couldn't get any more tense, the dream matchup took a dramatic turn 10 days ago when Kobayashi reported on his own blog that a jaw injury that left him unable to open his mouth more than the width of a fingernail may keep him out of this year's competition altogether.

Some accused Kobayashi of faking the injury in an attempt to gain a psychological edge over his opponent, an accusation strongly denied by the champion, who listed himself as "day-to-day" going into this afternoon's competition.

Ugh. I mean, I get it -- the hyperbolic "phoenix from the ashes" metaphors are supposed to be, like, funny. "Jaw-thritis", heh. Good one. Some genius stayed up all night coming up with that gem.

But, you know, it's not really funny. There's something wrong with these people, something that only mob psychology and a weirdly-niched pseudo-celebrity culture can even start to explain. Only in America could someone actually make money and become famous for eating.

If someone walked up to you on the street and asked you if you'd like to come watch some dorks eat hot dogs, you'd think he was out of his mind. But with 20,000 morons and an inexplicable media presence (how exactly does this, even as a joke, qualify as news, especially these days?), the exact same activity is somehow a "tradition". I think that explains a lot of things.

Happy Independence Day.