NEW YORK.  The New York Board of Rabbis today agreed to reschedule two Jewish holidays to accommodate the National Football League, which assigned back-to-back home games to the New York Jets on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this fall.

"I'd feel differently if we weren't talking about the Patriots."

"I think we 'get it'," said Rabbi Gershom Kohler, bowing to pressure from the most successful sports league in America.  "We're constantly being accused of controlling the banks and the media, and I don't want to be accused of controlling the AFC East Division race."

"A brocht su dir!"

Judaism was founded around 2,000 B.C. and currently has approximately 13.2 million members.  The National Football League was formed in 1920 and currently consists of only 32 teams, but it has the most lucrative television contract of any major religion.

 

"It's up-and it's good!"

Judaism has spun off two other major world religions, Christianity and Islam, while the National Football League's only attempt at proselytization, NFL Europa, ended in failure in 2007.  American football crusaders abandoned their quest to conquer the Holy Land when soccer hooligans routed the Hamburg Sea Devils in the Battle of the HSH Norbank Arena.

"Oy-we're missing the kickoff!"

Under the revised schedule, Rosh Hashanah would be scheduled during the Jets' "bye week" when the team will be idle, and Yom Kippur will be moved to the Sunday after the Super Bowl, the date when the league's all-star game, the Pro Bowl, was formerly played. 

Hamburg Sea Devils:  Throwback jerseys still available.

"Moving the Pro Bowl was the right thing to do," said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.  "Most advertisers blow all their money on the Super Bowl, so there's not a lot of revenue left by then."

Celine Dion has emerged as a potential bidder for the Montreal Canadians.  Yahoo News

 

"Le zone trap de neutral!  Grab et clutch!  Maintenant!"

Dear Diary:

Today, my lifelong secrete has become, how you say, une knowledge de la publique--I want to own Les Canadiens du Montreal!

"Mais officer, it's just like Celine's!"

Pour une very long time I have dreamed of calling le shots for the team that has more nicknames than six, which is how many teams the NHL had to begin with in the first place!  Les Canadiens, Le Bleu-Blanc-et-Rouge, La Sainte-Flanelle, Le Tricolore, Les Glorieux, Nos Glorieux, Les Habitants and Le Grand Club.  Take that you big slobby Boston Bruins fans!

"Should I pull le goalie?  Ou non?"

All I need for my dream to come true is to outbid ten other potential suitors--just 10!  Do they not know I have my own theatre in Las Vegas in which many times ten people can be seated--at the same time!  Ha!

"You call that a kick save?  This is a kick save!"

It is only right and fair that I should own Les Canadiens.  They are the most successful sports franchise in history, I am the most successful singer and multi-talented, all-purpose entertainer in history.  I am including Sammy Davis, Jr., who was both black, Jewish and Willy Wonka.

Sammy Davis, Jr.

Okay--so maybe he tap dances better.  But he has not les pipes that I have.  And now I will have les pipes of the greatest hockey team ever to pull their goalie out from between them when they are down 4-3 with less than a minute to play!

 Entre les pipes

There are many benefits to my ownership of Les Canadiens.  We would save on national anthem singers, which can be quite costly.  You have to sing two--My Country Tis of Thee and O Canada--every game.  I can sing them both in my patented vocal Franglais which interviewers around the world take such joyeux in.

Right now, much of theez francs are going to little kids who do not have my vocal range.  Listen, you little enfants--you're cute, but you always merdre out at "the land of the free" part.

Second, we would bring une image nouveau to the Coolest Sport on Earth, which as you know is associated with bleu collar types now.  My trademark sheen of glamour will now grace the rinks and the dashers, from bleu line to bleu line. 

 

"Don't forget mon curling iron!"

Third, attendance will go up because I would bring my entourage to every game.  This melange consists of many sophisticated hair dressers, stylists, colorists, manicurists, pedicurists, eye-linerists, mascaramouches, bladda bladda.

I know zee boys will let me sit on the bench for a shift or two, no? Thees ees my fondest wish, to change on the fly with them, just as I do when I hold an audience spell-bound avec my lightning-fast costume changes during my latest review "Spreading Love to All Her Fans Around the World!"

So tonight, when I go to sleep in my 100% cotton Canadiens thermal pajamas (which come with both tops and bottoms!) if I snore, it is the log-sawing of happiness you will hear.

Goodnight, my little paper ami,

Celine

The Boston Red Sox have three psychologists on their staff--Boston Herald.

Dr. Donald Kalkstein rubbed his eyes and looked up at the ceiling as J.D. Drew lay on the couch and rambled on about his mother. The frequently "injured" outfielder's fifty minutes was almost up when he said something that caused the Director of Performance Enhancement for the Boston Red Sox to snap to attention.

"I think my momma liked my brothers more than me," he said in a pained tone of voice.

"Why was that?" Kalkstein asked. We're finally getting somewhere, he thought.

"I don't know-I liked to play in the mud, which is good, because I have to use pine tar now that I am a man."

Hm-thought Kalkstein. "How old were they when they were potty-trained?" the Red Sox shrink asked.

"Oh, they picked it up right away," Drew replied.

"And you?" The Red Sock on the couch couldn't see the doctor above him, but the psychoanalyst's eyebrow arched upward as he asked this question.

"Uh-not so good. I had an accident one time in kindergarten."

"I see. Well, that will be all for today. We shall begin again at the same place next week."

"Thanks doc," Drew said. "I think I'm on the verge of a breakthrough."

"Wonderful," Kalkstein said.

"Which way's the restroom?"

"Out by the elevators on your left."

"Okay-see you next week."

The two men shook hands and after the ballplayer left, Kalkstein looked out his window at the people below, scurrying this way and that, ever striving, impelled by their baser animal instincts to hit away when told to bunt. He heard a knock on his door.

"Come in," he said. It was Bob Tewksbury, the team's Sports Psychology Coach.

"What's up, doc?" Tewksbury said with a smile.

"You wascally Wilhelm Reich acolyte you-sit down."

Wilhelm Reich

Tewksbury headed for the couch. "Not there, you dingbat," Kalkstein snapped. "That's expensive equipment for a Freudian analyst."

"Jeez-sorry. What's eating you?"

Kalkstein realized he had sublimated suppressed Oedipal rage against his father towards Tewksbury, who at 6' 4" towered over him.

"Nothing."

"C'mon-'nothing' means something."

"It's that damned T.J. Norris."

"What's he up to now?"

"He's messing with Big Papi's swing."

"Hm-bad stuff."

Just then T.J. Norris entered the room brusquely and without knocking, as he was wont to do. The noted behaviorist used a system of tangible rewards and punishments to cure people of anxieties that the other two psychologists diddled with for years while they paid the rent with "talking cures" and orgone-energy accessories.

"Either of you two mesmerists want to grab lunch and watch the game with me?" Norris asked.

"Why must you always be so damned insolent, Norris?" Kalkstein asked.

B.F. Skinner

"I like to pick on intellectual cripples," Norris replied.

It was Tewksbury's turn to ask a question. "If you think so little of us, why do you seek our company?"

"Why do people throw peanuts at elephants?" Norris replied. "Listening to you phrenologists babble on is more fun than watching a lab rat beg while I eat a grilled cheese sandwich."

The three men headed down the hall to the lounge, where a wide-screen TV was flanked by tomes with the names of psychology's immortals on their spines-Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Dr. Ruth.

The eminent Dr. Ruth

"I've solved Big Papi's problem," Norris said arrogantly.

"Most hitters would gladly take his problems if they could have his homers," Kalkstein said.

"That's the problem with you Freudians. You're willing to settle for 'ordinary unhappiness'. 'Civilization and its Discontents', yadda, yadda," Norris said with disdain. "If B.F. Skinner could teach pigeons how to play ping-pong, I can get Ortiz to hit to the opposite field when the shift's on."

"I think the problem's sexual," Tewksbury said.

"You think everything's sexual," Norris said as he grabbed the remote and turned the television to the Red Sox game.

Dustin Pedroia walked to load the bases and David Ortiz--"Big Papi"--stepped to the plate. The infielders moved to the right side of the infield in a mass migration like a captive people fleeing from bondage.  As the pitcher looked in for the sign, Papi settled into his stance. The hurler went into the stretch, looked to first, and threw.

Ortiz cocked his bat and swung, driving the ball to left, where it hit high off of Fenway Park's "Green Monster" near a gold circle.

"That's new," said Kalkstein, as three runs scored and Ortiz made it to second on the throw to the plate.

"Yes," Norris said smugly. "Take a closer look on the replay."

As the film rolled in slow motion, Tewksbury saw some text next to the new symbol.

"What does it say?" he asked.

"Hit the ring--win some bling," Norris said with satisfaction. "With the right system of rewards, you can teach anybody anything."

INDIANAPOLIS.  Marty Trowbridge is Chief Operating Officer of WidgeTek, a manufacturer with locations throughout the midwest.  "Our business is crucial to customers who buy our stuff," he says, "whatever it may be."

Trowbridge:  "There's somebody dicking around with a bracket sheet right now!"

But over the past week, productivity has stalled at the manufacturer of fly-wheel hasps, then slipped behind schedule as the NCAA's Division I men's basketball tournament began yesterday.

"We generally see a drop-off of twenty-five to thirty percent in non-farm productivity once 'March Madness' starts," said Edward Hutchins of the U.S. Department of Labor.  "All of sudden people who don't give a rat's patootie about Gonzaga are checking scores on-line when they should be filing paper in manila folders or doing important stuff like that."

 

"Your secretary beat you too?"

In the past, business groups have held their fire under the assumption that office betting pools helped boost employee morale and ultimately made for a more productive work force--but no more.  Yesterday, the US Chamber of Commerce, the country's large business group, filed suit against the NCAA in federal court here, alleging that the annual hoops extravaganza hurts American businesses.

 "I picked North Carolina because . . . I like their colors."

A poll by Fortune Magazine indicates that the change of heart comes after years of losses by CEOs to their secretaries, who use non-traditional handicapping techniques to make their picks, ignoring more sophisticated measures such as strength of schedule, margin of victory and total compensation paid to players.

"I have found that the most reliable predictor of success in the tournament is uniform colors," says Ilene Grealey, executive secretary to Marvin Kramm of International Auger and Boring Machines.  "A lot of 'gals' swear by mascots as the most relevant yardstick, but you never know who's inside those big furry outfits."

2009 All-Mascot 1st Team 

The Chamber is seeking a court order that would limit the number of bracket sheets a secretary could fill out, at least for companies with fewer than 40 employees.  "In a mom-and-pop company, you can't have somebody doing three different sheets based on who's got the cutest coach, where their mother went to college and an old sweatshirt their boyfriend gave them in high school," says Kramm.  "It gives your secretary too many ways to win."

"There's the wind-up--and the pitch!"

An NCAA spokesman said it would try to reach an out-of-court settlement with the powerful trade organization, but was not optimistic.  "Your average businessman is about as flexible as Bobby Knight on a bad day," Allen Barkley noted.  "They don't negotiate--they throw stuff."

CHICAGO.  As the newly-installed President of the Society of American Structural Engineers, Armand Tuttle says he's realized a childhood dream.  "When I was a little boy, I was already thinking about it," he recalls wistfully.  "I'd sit and play with my Erector Set-which is a toy, not a body part-and imagine what it would be like to gavel a meeting of fellow engineering geeks to order."

Erector Set

But Tuttle's dream has turned into a nightmare, he says, as he found upon taking office that he faced a challenge nearly as imposing as the troubled economy inherited by President Obama; the looming problem created by the offspring of 7'1" basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, who claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women before he died in 1999.

Wilt Chamberlain

"You now have four generations of these giant mutant offspring out their breeding," he notes with alarm.  "If each one produces just 20,000 offspring before he or she dies, you're talking 400 million seven-footers bumping their heads into lintels," the horizontal load-bearing member spanning an opening such as a door.

Chamberlain snags a rebound in another losing effort against Bill Russell.

Chamberlain towered over most players during his time, attracting women "like mosquitoes to a bug zapper," according to demographer Norman Schonfield.  "For some reason chicks dig tall men," notes the 5'10" senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Population Change at the University of Iowa-Keokuk.  "They don't seem to realize that you're much better off with a shorter guy who's going to love you for who you are," he says, before excusing himself to sob quietly while eating alone.

In one day?  When did you have time to eat?

Chamberlain was known as "The Big Dipper" because he had to duck his head to enter most buildings and rooms, but he lacked the political clout to force changes to American building codes.  "What you'll see as Chamberlain's offspring become eligible to vote is a new standard," says Tuttle.  "Most doors are 6 feet, 10 inches now, or about the size of Bill Russell," Chamberlain's long-time nemesis on the Boston Celtics, he notes.  "If they try to go through them, they'll get rejected."