Horrible, hideous Hondo

Unless you live somewhere near New York City - and probably even if you do - you are likely unaware of the existence of NY Post "football handicapper" Hondo. Lucky you.

I grit my teeth and purchase a copy of that tawdry newspaper every Friday during the NFL season because I enjoy seeing what picks the paper's dozen or so writers come up with. If I've had a bad week it's invariably comforting to see that these professional sports journalists know as much about picking NFL winners as a deaf, blindfolded seahorse who lives in the ocean and is not even aware of the existence of football and besides, he prefers baseball when push comes to shove.

But Hondo is a special case. He's more dislikeable than a chilli-sauce-covered cocktail stick that has somehow punctured your eyeball. He gives you no clue how he arrives at his picks (though it appears most likely to be via the medium of a sophisticated 'Wrong-O-Tron' machine), which at least saves him the embarrassment of exposing his pitiful reasoning. Instead, almost every hopeless pick is accompanied by a brief attempt at a humourous comment or joke about current events or public figures. These range from hinting that Barney Frank is a Packers fan ("Fudge-packer", heh heh, geddit???) to calling a young woman embroiled in a public affair a "dog" because her looks don't match Hondo's expectations of what a bitch should look like. No doubt Hondo himself is an immaculate physical specimen - drooling dimwit guys who spend all day watching sports invariably are, yeah?

If any of Mr H's comments were even a little bit imaginative or funny then the whole schtick could actually be quite enjoyable; the kind of defiant, semi-ironically-macho, sexist, 'two-fingers-to-the-intellectuals' bit of fun that Hondo probably erroneously imagines it actually is. For all my political sympathy with Keith Olbermann, I can see what a great target he is for satire - but the best that Hondo can do (sadly I forget the exact words but trust me, I'm not selling Hondo short) is call Olbermann a poopy-pants. Hello Oscar fucking Wilde.

So, the only thing that's remotely enjoyable about reading the shower of shit that this idiot spews out is the schadenfraude of seeing him turn in heavy losing weeks with the regularity of a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted metronome. This week he stands at a losstastic 2-9-1 with the Monday night game left to play.

Keep it up Hondo, you make my heart sing by proving that absolute fuckwits don't always prosper.