To the championship entity

I promised a paean to the winning entity. Before I deliver on that, I'd like to thank the 41 of you who voted in this poll (or the 7 of you who voted 5.857 times apiece), both for contributing, and for not forcing me to write a paean to swimmies.

When we're young, we can't get enough chocolate. We think everything should come with chocolate, and that it's appropriate all hours of the day. Then we grow up and realize that the real king of the food pyramid is cheese. American and cheddar are the training wheels; feta, brie, and gorgonzola are what we plan the rest of our lives around. We eat it with meat, with bread, with fruit, and with wine, and we love it.

Dingers! To me, it once meant home runs. Then it meant baseball in general. Today, any positive event brings on a cheer of dingers!- anything as pure and wonderful as our national pastime. "They have a gorgonzola chicken sandwich? Dingers!" "There are boobs in this movie? Dingers!" "I don't have to write a paean to swimmies? Dingers!" Today is the best day of my life to celebrate dingers; the Yankees are 11-18.

A few grams of inflated plastic keep a 100-pound child afloat. A miracle of technology, or just a cool word. Say it: swimmies. Swimmies. Whatever.

On to the championship entity. From the day we're born, they're the first thing on our minds. They're our only source of food for our first few months, they're our handrests when we're picked up for years after that. In our teens, we can't get enough of them. Put a pair on a rock and we'll stare at it all day. Put a pair on a TV screen and see if we get any exercise. Even when we're grown and have a pair at our disposal at all times (whether under our chin or on a mate), we always want to see more- the same ones, different ones, any and all of them. We have a thousand words for them and a hundred magazines dedicated to them. We try to take basic rights away from people who don't like them (and people who have them and want more). They're apparently in such short supply that we're encouraged to choose one pair and stick with them for the rest of our lives. We use them to our advantage if we have them and make fools of ourselves trying to attain them if we don't. There's nothing else like a boob.