As we check out for the holiday, I'd like to confess being thankful to two of the nicest people in D.C. media and personal heroes, Dan Steinberg and Grant Paulsen, for making me aware of the coolest story of the season: This weekend, Macho Harris will make the jump from Fairfax County flag football to the NFL.

Sure, Harris, a safety who has already spent time on the Philadelphia Eagles roster, only played one game of touchy-feely-grabby football in NoVa, and did it to help out some buddies whose resumes show stints on top-shelf D-1 teams.

But if you white-out those details, the Macho tale gives Hollywood more strange truths to work with than that fictional "Invincible" did, more even than the yarn about the D.C. kid (and alum of Gonzaga High) who leapt from a Notre Dame dorm football league to the starting lineup for the Fighting Irish.

How can you not root for Harris to come up large against the Vikings? Just make one play, Macho, and we'll start working on the script...

Back to me:

For those looking for something other than feel-good anecdotes about the Redskins as we head out, check out the audio of my appearance on WJFK's "LaVar and Dukes" show.

You'll hear about 20 minutes from somebody who cares way too much about caffeine and Dan Snyder, not necessarily in that order, than is healthy. Plus, if you stick around for the train wreck, several seconds of stammering while a four-year old yells that Grandma is at the front door and locked out.

Great radio!

I'm not ready to say he wouldn't've, either.

Jagr was once to Leonsis and the Washington Capitals as Albert Haynesworth was last season to Dan Snyder and the Washington Redskins — the highest paid and surliest player on a team headed nowhere good.

Back to me: In March, I was summoned to Leonsis' Arlington offices. He wanted to discuss something I'd written a few weeks earlier in this space. I'd called his 2004 trade of Jagr "on paper...the worst trade in NHL history."

I was early into paternity leave at the time of the summoning, but I took a break from my break for a private audience with Everybody's Favorite Owner. He gave me a bottle of water, sat me down, and spent about 90 minutes letting me know, with equal parts charm and righteousness, that I was a tool.

I believed what I typed about the Jagr deal. The way I saw things: The Caps gave the New York Rangers a past and future Lester B. Pearson Trophy awardee (given annually to the NHL's best player, and to Jagr in 1999, 2000 and 2006 ) plus millions of dollars in cash in exchange for...Anson Carter.

The way Leonsis saw things: "I traded Jagr for Alex Ovechkin."

OK, so Jagr was killing the morale of coaches, teammates, fans and the owner from the time the Caps brought him here in 2001, along with the biggest contract in NHL history — seven years, $77 million.

Leonsis even gave me a hockey-for-dummies demonstration, using magic markers on a dry erase board in his office and dropping all sorts of puckhead nuance (including: left-hand-passer + left-hand-shooter = tough one-timer), to show how Jagr's unwillingness to adjust his game had unplugged the Caps' power play, which was tops in the NHL before his arrival.

It was an awesome display.

And, as we all know, getting rid of Jagr (as well as Peter Bondra, Sergei Gonchar, Robert Lang, and Steve Konowalchuk) sped up the Caps' race to the bottom of the standings. The team's 59 points in 2003-2004 was second worst in the league, above only Pittsburgh. Then Leonsis, as has become his habit, won the NHL lottery for the 2004 draft, and used the top pick on Ovechkin.

On the whole, things worked out darn good for Leonsis and his squad in the years since Jagr went away. When he speaks of Ovechkin, he gets a look in his eye similar to that, say, a father on paternity leave has when talking about his baby. But while he's, at least outwardly, Mr. Positive about everything from A to Z, I'm not sure he's over his breakup with J.J.

I wouldn't have gotten the one-on-one tutoring session if he was.

But I did get that session. And I found that I was sadder than I should have been when Ovechkin and the top-seeded Capitals went out in the first round of this year's playoffs a few weeks after our summit. And sadder still when Jagr's squad took the world title from Ovechkin.

I've forgotten all about Anson Carter. And no matter what happened in Germany, Leonsis' Jagr-for-Ovechkin trade looks like a steal to me.

I'm beginning to wonder what was in that water bottle.

Kornheiser, of course, really didn't give a rip about Wise's column. He just wanted to rip Wise.

Full disclosure: I think Kornheiser's a bad guy with a dark heart.

'Course, I only met him once, for about 10 minutes about 10 years ago at a Washington Post holiday party. It's one of my favorite party stories, right up there with having Alan Greenspan wonder if he'd shown up at the wrong event after encountering me and my thrift-store wardrobe at a book party, and getting attacked by Buddy Holly's shop teacher during a night out in Lubbock.

Tell the Kornheiser-and-me one again? Sure!

Kornheiser had gotten a Post editor who now makes appearances on his radio show to invite me to the party, so he could attack me for something I'd written that he didn't like. When I arrived he cornered me and pulled an old column of mine out of his coat pocket that he'd been carrying around for a while and waved it in the air while yelling that I'd "never write for a real newspaper." I could tell from the way his co-workers acted after he finished yelling that they'd seen his bizarre act before.

And not long after that party Kornheiser got me fired from a $75-a-week freelance job with the Washington Post's sports section because of something else I wrote for Washington City Paper.

Kornheiser got me canned for writing about a February 1981 story he wrote for the Style section of the Washington Post called "Ken Beatrice: Facts and Fears on the Airwaves."

Beatrice was a beloved oddball back then, with a popular nightly sportstalk radio show. Kornheiser was much newer to D.C. than Mike Wise is now, and, to use the angle Kornheiser used during his rants against Wise, didn't understand what Beatrice meant to this town.

But Kornheiser had learned that Beatrice had fibbed about his college football career, and that Beatrice's PhD was from an unaccredited university, and used those tidbits to write 4,000 of the meanest words to ever appear in the Post. Beatrice weighed less then Karen Carpenter, and on good days looked more frail than the average intensive care ward patient, yet Kornheiser spent much of the story reveling in how much distress he caused Beatrice during "at least eight hours" of interviews. Even if he'd never gotten weird on me at a holiday party or gotten me fired, his Beatrice story was enough by itself to leave me believing Kornheiser's a bad guy with a dark heart.

One passage of Kornheiser's piece:

[Beatrice] was not looking well.

Pale. So pale and waxy that he could have been on exhibit at Madame Tussaud's.

And gaunt, like he hadn't eaten in weeks.

Nervously, he wiped his right hand hard across his forehead and through his dark hair, matting it. There were white flecks at the corners of his mouth. When he went to light his pipe his hands trembled. He took in great gulps of air. It seemed like he was drowning.

In fact, he seemed terrified.

About the prospect of this story.

Kornheiser was trying to hurt Beatrice, and he succeeded. Beatrice had a nervous breakdown after Kornheiser's story ran and had to leave the airwaves for a while to convalesce.

Listeners begged Beatrice to come back to his radio show, and he eventually did.

Despite knowing he'd caused Beatrice physical harm, Kornheiser never backed off Beatrice. When Kornheiser got a show of his own on WTEM a decade later, he used it to continue to bully Beatrice.

I listened to Kornheiser's radio show on Monday, and he sounded pretty frail himself. He sure seemed hurt while talking about Jon Gruden, his replacement on "Monday Night Football," being re-signed to a long ESPN contract, the deal Kornheiser was never offered. So he tried to work out his wounds by going after Mike Wise, who he's been saying mean, unfunny things about for years. Just like he did Beatrice back in the day. But now Kornheiser sounds too weak to even be a good bully anymore. He just comes off as sad.

Back to me: Over the years, because of his multi-media successes, I've probably been asked more about getting fired because of Tony Kornheiser than about anything I've ever written.

So I don't like seeing him falling like this. Pretty soon nobody's going to want me to retell the story of me and Tony Kornheiser.

Oh, well. The one about me and Buddy Holly's shop teacher's more fun, anyway.

Here's what I wrote back then:

"Last Monday, At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson held one of his Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearings on the D.C. Police Department. For the most part, the hearing was routine: right down to the councilmember asking for the investigative materials related to the DeOnte Rawlings shootings. By Mendo’s own count, he has asked for the Rawlings report at least three times.

At Monday’s hearing, D.C.Police Chief Cathy Lanier and her top brass assured Mendelson that he would have the Rawlings case report on his desk very soon. The expectation was for a Friday deadline"

Well, it's almost May. And according to Mendo's office, the Councilmember has yet to receive the Rawlings investigative reports. How long is this going to take? How many more cheap blog posts am I going to have to write before Lanier makes good on her promise?

A friend offered me tickets on Saturday.

I told him I don't own a tux — ostensibly, it's a black tie affair — and it was too late to rent one.

But my friend said that, given the state of the economy, tuxes aren't the only acceptable garb this time around. Plain ol' dark suits will abound and won't be sneered at.

I don't own a suit, dark or otherwise. (Well, I still own my wedding suit, but the scales tell me I'm half the man I was when I got married — plus the man I was when I got married. So it's just a keepsake.)

Actually, heading into the weekend I didn't have a dress jacket or even a clean pair of long pants that fit me.

But I figured I'd give my nearest thrift shop a shot. I was there for 20 minutes and walked out with a black wool suit, black shoes and a fab Lou Rawls live LP.

Total cost: $20.54

Looks like I'm going to an inaugural ball tonight.