Cambodian Football Fans Riot, Burn Thai Embassy

ost-Super Bowl rioting continued in Cambodia, reaching its pinnacle with the torching of the Thai Embassy Wednesday. Several stores and businesses, predominately Thai-owned, were also vandalized and set afire by distraught Raiders fans.

Political pundits, whatever those are, speculate that the Cambodian people live in stressful times and frequently find their only release in American football, particularly the Oakland Raiders. For a people already hit on hard times, especially with escalating ill will between themselves and neighbors Thailand, the loss of the favored Raiders was the last straw.

Sports pundits, if any such people exist, could not be found because once we said it no one in the office could stop laughing long enough to find some.

Expert sports follower Ray "Sport" William, a sports follower for 34 years and frequenter of the bar across the street from the commune offices, could sympathize with the disgusted Cambodian citizens.

"It's a damn shame, a'course," said Sport. "What you have is a real awkward situation 'cause shoddy reporting and populist politics are preying upon a people who are struggling to join a world market.

"With elections coming up in July, the Hu Sen government is whipping up nationalist frenzy to keep attention off domestic problems, including a border treaty with Vietnam that's still not signed yet. What's the best way to get a population furiously patriotic? Give them an enemy, and in this case, Thailand makes a convenient target. Now anything and everything that comes out of Thailand can be misconstrued by journalists who jump on the bandwagon, like alleged comments by some Thai actress that the Angkor Wat national monument really belonged to Thailand."

Sport could not see any immediate relief for the frenzied football fans.

"There's no hope on the horizon, I'd say. At least not until the elections have come and gone and the government is either comfortably in place and can turn the focus away from Thailand, or Sam Rainsy campaigners succeed in turning the eye back on domestic issues and unseat the Hu Sen government."

Or, as Professor of Asiatic Politics at Columbia University Dom Jutney said, "There's always next year. You can't keep Oakland down. This year Tampa Bay wanted it more. Next year it's all Raiders, baby."

The Thai Embassy in America, while not currently in flames, could not be reached for comment. Which is a polite way of saying they hung up on us repeatedly, which was really pretty thoughtless considering we were calling long distance and they charge us for the first minute whether we speak for a minute or ten seconds. A second call to determine if they would pay the charges for the first call was not received any better, which leaves us with two unpaid long distance calls.

The Cambodian Embassy was more receptive, leading us to believe they can't be all bad.

"The riots are terrible. It is sad that a collection of outraged individuals are representing Cambodia to the world in their violence, especially in this time of potential war and political difficulties in other areas of the world. It weighs heavy on this country's heart. If only Jerry Rice had succeeded on those two-point conversions."

ooling a number of coaches, commentators and even full football teams since early September, the senile gang of Geritol-guzzlers known as the Oakland Raiders were finally unmasked and had their walkers pulled out from under them by a lightning-swift squad of relentless assassins that call themselves the Tampa Bay Buccaneers here Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVII.

The hapless Raiders turned off their hearing aids, took out their dentures, curled up and lay down together on the 50-yard line, happily playing Roman-era Christians to the Bucs' roaring lions. When the final gun sounded, the sky was rent, the sun became as sackcloth, and lo, the moon became as Al Davis' pompadoured head. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Raiders' fans, and much cheering and ritual spilling of virgin blood from the fans of the Buccaneers. The final score was 487 to 13, but it wasn't really as close as all that.

Quarterback Brad Johnson, 12 and-a-half-year-old leader of the Tampa Bay eleven, completed over 800 passes, while 9-year-old wunderkicker Martin Gramatica booted so many field goals that the officials simply lost count and awarded the team a collective 212 additional points in the fourth quarter.

Commented 96-year-old wide receiver Jerry Rice, "What did you say? Did I take my medicine today? My granddaughter brings that fool-ass boyfriend of hers—he steals my stuff out of the garage. Huh? Who are you, anyway?"

Rice, who scored the only Raider touchdown on a 48-yard pass in the third quarter, became the oldest man to ever score a touchdown in a football game, let alone a Super Bowl. He was able to get open when two Tampa Bay defensive backs were caught out of position while giving the business to three of the "really cute" cheerleaders in the parking lot outside Qualcomm Stadium. Rice said he would have joined the defensive backs if only he'd seen the cheerleaders as well, but "I didn't have my distance glasses with me today. Besides, at my age, I need to tie a popsicle stick to it to get it to work anyway. Wait—who are you again?"

Wide receiver Tim Brown, a comparative youngster at age 88, and only slightly more lucid, added, "You know, we play them one game at a time. It's all right, we'll win next week." Reminded that the Super Bowl marks the end of football season, Brown responded, "The what? No, no, we play the Baltimore Colts next week, I'm sure of it. That Unitas fella, he's a tough bird. Did I take my medicine today?"

Ninety-three-year-old quarterback Rich Gannon: "We got jobbed by the refs on the coin toss. Did you see it? Everybody hates the Raiders, son. Everybody. Anyway, aren't we playing Sid Gillman's squad next week? We got to start planning for that game soon." Gannon set a record by having 37 passes intercepted and run back for touchdowns, 26 in the first half alone, and 16 other passes intercepted and mailed directly to various Tampa players' homes to be auctioned off for top dollar on eBay sometime in the next month.

"Huh? Maybe I'll bid on one of those," said Gannon, before he walked off the field aimlessly and was finally picked up in a bad neighborhood in Chula Vista, where he had been asking residents if they had seen his pajamas and whether or not he had taken his medicine that morning.

Defensive lineman Warren Sapp, a grizzled Buccaneer veteran at 16, had an amazing 73 sacks, 326 tackles and two hurries. He is known to his Tampa Bay teammates as "that raging fucking lunatic, watch out he doesn't get too close to you, he'll break both your legs and shatter a kneecap just as soon as look at you." When asked for a post-game comment, he began screaming gutturally and waving his helmet around him in a wide circle for close to twenty minutes, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head the whole time.

"Agga-ragga-wompona-wooo-hooo-haaa!! Whooo-ooo-eeeee sumbitch mothafuckin' sheeee-it bitch and a bastard god-DAYUM fuckin' ay!" he finally concluded. Asked for his assessment of the defensive plan, Sapp just muttered, "Fuck that, man, I'm dizzy," then said something completely unintelligible and threw up on NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tassled loafers.

Teammate Ronde Barber, a defensive back who will turn 14 next month, just shook his head at Sapp's antics and murmured, "At least he ain't got the rattlesnakes in his hands and his mouth this time. That's when he's really scary."

Asked if he could sum up the Bucs' strategy going into the game, Barber concurred with 11-year-old linebacker Derrick Brooks and head coach Jon Gruden, 20, that "The main thing was knees in the nuts from the word go, man, then slappin' them on they liver spots and talkin' shit about they grandchildren."

If your e-mail last week was slower in arriving than Delta Burke squeezing through the eye of a needle, you may have read the reason why. Unless you get your news from the Internet, in which case you're probably still waiting for the page to load. But then, how in the hell are you reading the commune? Looks like I've caught you in your little ruse.

But that still doesn't explain the Internet slow down. The papers (or news monitors) like to confuse the big fat lazy audience (yourselves) with talk of "viruses" and "Internet worms" and all of that nonsense, but those of you who have any experience with the Internet know two things: Always spell the Internet with a capital "I," and always seek alternative sources of news in this corporate-dominated world.

It pays to get a second opinion. In this case, the talk of computer worms and vicious Internet programs is merely to confound you while they find a way to exterminate the real nuisance: Phone line fleas.

That's right, fleas. Why do fleas live on dogs' asses? It's not for the premiere location, let me tell you. Everyone knows fleas seek thick, luscious hair to live in; like my own. But washing your hair even once a week (when it's possible, we don't all have a lot of free time) can keep your hair free of fleas. And there must be more people out there doing this than me, since dogs have become flea havens rather than human heads. But even dogs get baths, which leaves the life of a flea a lot like the life of a hobo—as one cartoon from my youth excellently depicted.

The solution? If you're a flea and seeking relatively safe, unwashed hairy places your options are extremely limited, with France being so far across the ocean. But fortunately, the United States is refurbishing its phone lines with a brand new product called fiber optics. That's right—fiber optics. As in hairy phone lines. A flea's dream.

Scientists who study the behavior of fleas, and surely there must be some kind of creature like that out there, would quickly realize fleas have been taking to the phone lines in the past four years as they've become flea-friendly places to reside. The dogs are happy about it, I'm sure—I see tails wagging; but what about us Internet-using humans? It's left us with crowded fiber optic lines to contend with, and even the expanded bandwith capabilities can only handle so many fleas and baud-per-minute or whatever the nerds say.

My first encounter with fleas occupying the phone lines occurred back when I maintained my site, www.poopoftheday.com. I experienced countless hours of downtime and even my AOL ISP support couldn't explain the problem. My website host tech support stayed on the phone with me for hours, even after several attempts to convince me he had other things to do. He tried to sell me on the idea of viruses, worms, being severely incompetent and not knowing what was going on, which was all just a lame attempt to get me off the phone. Then he admitted the line was occupied by fleas, explained the fiber optic thing, and said he was looking into finding a way to destroy them—then the phone cut off. Apparently the fleas had gotten into even the voice lines. I tried calling back, to no avail.

Is there any answer to this unanswered problem? No, I just said there wasn't. I'm sure leading service providers are seeking Internet-safe flea-repellent cable lines, and they're probably working with the Hartz people on it, but until then, we're just going to have to deal with the slow-downs. Unless you want to start giving your phone lines baths, and I'm not about to do that.

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