Through years of hearing that this business is on its way to extinction, I’ve always figured that newspapers won’t go away as long as guys take dumps.

But I’m reconsidering my rosy, bowl’s-half-full outlook, all because of today’s Washington Post.

I hit the reading room this morning expecting to have my pick of stories and columns about last night’s Skins/Steelers game. After all, ads that ran throughout the radio broadcast from FedExField promised I’d be able “read all about it…in tomorrow’s Washington Post.”

All I got from the Sports section was a photo of Shaun Suisham kicking a field goal in the first quarter and a disclaimer: “The game ended too late to be included in this edition.” The section’s lead article was about Thursday’s Maryland/Virginia Tech game. Real timely stuff.

And this wasn’t the sports section from the roadie edition you get at truck stops in Dumfries and Aberdeen. This was from the home edition that was delivered to Petworth, right smack in the middle of the city.

The damn game didn’t end any later than “Monday Night Football” games have been ending since I delivered the damn paper in the 1970s, and I used to go to bed at halftime knowing I’d be able to read about what I missed when I woke up.

How could the Post let this happen?

I’m mad. The unexpected lack of Skins info ruined my morning.

Am I going to have to start bringing my laptop into the, um, reading room?

Nothing is sacred in sports anymore. So who’d be surprised if the scheduled resumption of Game 5 of the World Series tonight got the powers that be in baseball to think about fundamental rules changes?

Such as:

1. Why not just play in the rain?

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More proof that horse racing coverage is in the toidy: John Scheinman, who covers the track for the Washington Post, has been spending the week writing up the Washington International Horse Show, which is being held this week at Verizon Center.

In a perfect world, or at least the pre-2008 world, he’d be at Santa Anita, where the Breeders Cup, the biggest weekend in the sport, will be running beginning Friday. Local horse Heros Reward and trainer Dale Capuano are in the $1 Million Turf Sprint.

Show horses and horse racing have nothing in common, other than the number of legs the competitors have. Also, while the racetrack draws assholes from every economic spectrum, horse shows only attract really rich assholes.

And, biggest difference of all, you can’t bet an exacta at the horse show.

Though, knowing Scheinman, he’s probably trying to work up some action for the nightly terrier races.

Dan Snyder’s ahead-of-the-financial-collapse-curve theme park chain, Six Flags, really knows how to scare a guy. And injure a gal!

Snyder’s outfit has kicked off its annual Frightfestâ„¢ promotion for the Halloween season.

The horror got real real fast at the Six Flags Great America outpost in Illinois. That’s where a park employee in a werewolf costume and on stilts got wobbly and then came flying through a plate glass window and into an ice cream parlor.

A female patron in the parlor suffered facial cuts from the flying glass. Litigation to come.

“The werewolf was not injured,” reports the Chicago Tribune.

Whew.

Speaking of scary falls: Six Flags stock (SIX) traded for 31 cents a share this morning.

That’s down from its $11.93 per share selling price in early 2006, not long after Snyder took over the company by leading a stockholder revolt by leveling charges that Six Flags’ stock was undervalued.

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

From the D.C. Sports Bog. Clinton Portis responds to a question on his “ever-changing post-game sunglasses”– “I guess you’ve got to stay up with the latest trends, my brother.”

Today’s Washington Post has still another ode to Sean Taylor, continuing the DC media’s reformation of the Skins’ former safety into a Gandhi/Chuck Norris meld.

This latest piece pumps up LaRon Landry’s aimless wanderings without Taylor beside him in the defensive backfield. The article’s subhed: “With Sean Taylor, Laron Landry Once Formed a Cornerstone…”

“Cornerstone”?

What? Jerry Rice and Joe Montana, ok: They formed a cornerstone.

Landry and Taylor played nine games together.

And, um, the Redskins have a better record with Landry playing without Taylor than with him.

Stop the madness.

Just when you thought it was over: Another Redskins personnel story by Jason La Canfora, another no-comment by Vinny Cerrato.

Readers only had to get to the third paragraph of Jason’s primer (co-written by Barry Svrluga) in yesterday’s Washington Post on all the new Seahawks coming to town before the beat writer let everybody know DJ Vinny is talking to everybody but him.

“Vinny Cerrato, the Redskins’ executive vice president for football operations,” the story went, “declined to comment on the moves.”™ 

This latest, um, flareup in the feud comes after a relative cease-fire period, which followed Vinny going on the air to call Jason unprofessional and devious and Jason calling Vinny a liar in emails to readers. 

So how long can Jason vs. Vinny go on?

Well, by next season, if not sooner, we’ll see that this beat ain’t big enough for the both of ‘em.

Speaking of no-shows: today’s sports section has a big advertisement for a Post promotion called “Chalk Talk.” The event invites all comers to the paper’s 15th St. NW headquarters next Thursday for a two-hour chat with “the Washington Post’s football writers and editors” to talk “football, football and more football.” 

“If you’ve wanted to meet the people behind the words, this event is for you,” reads the ad copy.

Well, judging from the banter at Post-hater Dan Snyder’s Extremskins message board and Post-hater Vinny’s radio show and Post-hater Larry Michael’s TV show, if there’s any media type that fans want to share quality time with, it’s Jason.

So why isn’t his name among the six Post football writers and editors scheduled to appear at the event?

Must be a scheduling conflict.

But, according to the ad, in lieu of Jason, those who show up will get “Great food!”

Even Vinny, the guy who gave up a third and a fourth rounder for Brandon Lloyd, can spot that as a fair trade.

In his Washington Post column about the NFL meetings, reporter Mark Maske tells us that Dan Snyder has been appointed co-chairman of the owners’ Digital Media Committee, alongside Seattle Seahawk boss Paul Allen.

Allen’s a natural choice: He co-founded Microsoft, for crissakes.

But Snyder’s got at least one huge hole in his digital media resume.

Redskins fans have been complaining for years about FedExField’s having the worst video screens and scoreboards in the league, and about the lack of replays and scores shown during games.

Yet instead of giving his customers what they want, Snyder has acted as if there’s nothing he can do to satisfy their digital desires short of building a new stadium.

In his 2005 chat on extremeskins.com, for example, Snyder was asked why Redskins fans have to put up with lousy old school media while everybody else had already gone hi-def.

His response: “We’ve asked our architects to come up with something for the future because we recognized that what was installed when the stadium was built prior to my ownership was an analog system. By the way, because it is an analog system we have a hard time showing replays because we have to manually roll back the videotape, unlike today’s digital systems where you push two buttons and have a replay. Now I see these big beautiful digital systems, high-definition systems, in the newest stadiums and we surely want that for the future. We’re looking hard at making something like that happen. It’s a shame that some of the local media, who know this to be the case, try to create a negative story out of replays when they know it’s because of the existing analog system.”

Snyder’s spokesman Karl Swanson has been repeating the same “It’s not us! It’s the stadium wiring!” line for years.

So the FedExField jumbotron — dubbed the “Lite Brite” by angry patrons — remains the NFL’s turd standard.

Perhaps for the next committee meeting, Allen could could put together a seminar for Snyder on “How to Plug In a Digital Screen.”

Dan Snyder’s flat-bustedish theme park chain, Six Flags, has decided that kegs, not cartoon characters, are what can bring the company back from the brink.

A Texas administrative law judge opened a two-day hearing in Fort Worth today to allow residents and even the Mayor of Arlington a chance to protest Six Flags’ application to sell alcohol at its Six Flags Over Texas and Hurricane Harbor parks.

“I would truly hope and suggest that a marketing strategy would not be ‘Beer and Bugs Bunny,’” said one of the early testifiers according to a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Another local told the board: “I don’t want to ride through a park full of puke because somebody got drunk and decided to ride the Superman.”

The judge will issue his opinion to TABC within 60 days, after which the state board will give the thumbs up or down on the booze application.

Assuming Six Flags is still around, that is.

When Snyder took over the chain, he told the press that the company’s parks weren’t “family-friendly” enough.

Six Flags stock (SIX) was selling for around $12 a share at about that time.

The stock closed at 49 cents today.

So at some point on the way down to sub-four-bits-a-share, Snyder expanded his definition of “family friendly” to include taking a faceful of breakfast and Lone Star beer at 70 miles per hour courtesy of the dude in the lead car.

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

Following yesterday’s pathetic loss to the lowly Rams, a poster on Extremeskins.com writes:

A few of my friends and I had bad omens happen to us. I laughed them off at first but there’s no ignoring them after the fact we loss a game we should have won.

First example, My good friend and fellow Skins fan, who lives in Colorado sent a mass email Saturday night saying, a long haired sheep (ram) jumped out in front of his car and almost killed him and we shouldn’t take this game lightly.

He sent the email to the same 20 or so friends as we do every week. We talk about the game pre and post. Most of us laughed it off.
I was glad he was okay. But I told him the ram wanted to be put out of his misery. Jokes on me.

Then, as I do every week, I nerd out and simulate the game on Madden. I always play as the Skins and play next weeks opponent. I got the game around week two and have won against the computer on the first try every time, not against the Rams. I lost 4 in a row. I had to turn down the difficulty but I knew I was cheating myself.

So question is, anybody else have any bad signs?

Another fictional true sports story hits theaters this weekend with the release of “The Express.”

It’s based on the life of Ernie Davis, a Syracuse running back and the first black player to win the Heisman Trophy.

Among the movie’s climactic scenes is one where Davis gets hit by a barrage of racial slurs and debris during the Orangemen’s game against West Virginia in his senior season.

As a letter writer to the Syracuse Post-Standard pointed out, the Syracuse/WVU game was played in Syracuse that year.

Is this gonna be “Remember the Titans” all over again?

Why oh why wasn’t Davis’ real life story good enough for Hollywood?

Photos from youth football games at Dunbar Senior High School on October 4 prose here .

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Dan Snyder’s pushing-up-daisies-ish theme park chain, Six Flags, finally got the warning from Wall Street that we all knew it would: Shape up or get out.

And there ain’t a whole lot of shaping up going on up there lately.

The New York Stock Exchange put Six Flags, which is carrying more than $2.3 billion in debt, on notice that its stock was on the verge of being delisted. Warnings like this are issued when a firm’s shares close at an average of less than a buck a share for 30 consecutive days.

Absent a fiscal miracle, Snyder’s simplest option to fight the delisting would be to engineer a so-called “reverse-split,” in which every two shares of Six Flags stock (SIX) would be consolidated into one, theoretically doubling its value.

But things have gotten so bad at Six Flags recently that even that strategy might not be enough to keep Snyder trading with the big boys.

Six Flags was selling for $11.93 a share shortly after Snyder’s 2005 takeover of the company, but has been diving like Greg Louganis ever since.

Earlier today, the stock could be had for 40 cents. Double that, and you’re at 80 cents — or still well below Wall Street’s Mendoza Line of a buck a share.

Bill Gates is among those to be dealt the beating of a lifetime under Snyder. Gates’ money company, Cascade Investment, L.L.C., owned a reported 10,210,600 shares when Snyder grabbed the reins of Six Flags.

So in March of 2006, Gates’ investment was worth $121,812,458.

As of this morning, Gates’ grubstake was good for just $4,084,240.

That means Gates is down at least $117,728,218.

Guess the cure for malaria and the eradication of global poverty are gonna have to wait.

Good news for Gates: He’s a PC. Macs are a little extravagant for a guy who’s taken a nine-figure hit.

Good news for Snyder: There’s always Chapter 11! (Around here, bankruptcy “isn’t bad news.”)

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

During the Redskins’ win over the Eagles, play-by-play man Larry Michael announced that QB Jason Campbell just broke a longstanding franchise record for most consecutive passes without an interception.

“Was that yours?” color man Sam Huff asked his radio partner and former teammate and Skins legend, Sonny Jurgensen.

“No. Theese-mann’s,” Jurgensen huffed.

He meant Joe Theismann, whose name Jurgensen has mispronounced intentionally for decades.

The previous record, 161 passes without a pick, was set in 1983 by Theismann. Legend holds that Theismann changed the pronunciation of his name from “theese-man” to “thyze-man” during his days at Notre Dame so it would rhyme with Heisman, as in Heisman Trophy.

Theismann finished behind Stanford’s Jim Plunkett in the Heisman voting after his senior season in 1970. It’s often said that Theismann blamed his runner-up finish on voters’ sympathy for Plunkett, whose parents were blind.

Jurgensen has always gone with the original pronunciation. For a reason: He and his former running mate Billy Kilmer both instantly disliked Theismann when he came to the Redskins in 1974, in no small part because Theismann vowed to win the starting quarterback job and “put the old men [Jurgensen and Kilmer] on the bench.”

Jurgensen’s in the Hall of Fame; Theismann is not. Theismann’s got a Super Bowl ring; Jurgy does not. Skins fans love ‘em both.

But, based on Sunday’s radio call, the 35-year-old feud lives on.