Preakness 136, Baltimore, MD.  © 2011 Matt Dunn

Pimlico, Baltimore, MD.  © 2011 Matt Dunn

But the Maryland Jockey Club, which runs Pimlico and Laurel Park and controls Thoroughbred racing in the state, is evidencing supreme self-awareness in the marketing campaign for the 136th running of the Preakness Stakes.

The group has just announced that advertising for this year's race, scheduled for May 21 at Pimlico, will feature Kegasus.

The character, hailed as "Lord and Protector of Infieldfest," is a beer-gutted dirtball with four legs and a tail and, judging by the tapped keg that Kegasus keeps in his stall, an obvious problem with booze.

In other words, Kegasus is exactly like a typical Preakness Day infielder, only with two more legs and a tail.

Among the value-added products Kegasus will be pushing to race-goers in the campaign: Membership to the Mug Club, which will get you a bottomless cup of beer on race day for $20.

I'd bet sociologists could link the demise of racing and the availability of all-you-can-drink promotions.

“Kegasus speaks directly to our InfieldFest demographic with his no-nonsense personality and total embodiment of a good time,” says Tom Chuckas, Maryland Jockey Club president.

Translation: The character does nothing to promote the fabulous athletic or majestic or parimutuel aspects of the sport of kings. But Kegasus would whup Seabiscuit in a Running of the Urinals.

The piece has some likely suspects — David Geffen and Google, among them.

But the most intriguing and, for us locals, scariest of the alleged Times takeoverers?

Howard Milstein.

Yes, THAT Howard Milstein.

The Howard Milstein who a decade ago tried to buy the Redskins at the Jack Kent Cooke estate sale! The Howard Milstein who brought Dan Snyder into the fold to give him the local color he thought would get him approved! The Howard Milstein who had too many enemies at NFL headquarters and got kicked out of the buying process! The Howard Milstein who then stepped aside and watched as his former partner took over the buying process!

THE HOWARD MILSTEIN WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DAN SNYDER OWNING THE REDSKINS!

Whew.

According to the Fortune piece, Milstein, identified simply as "a New York-based financier," has been "buying shares" of NY Times stock.

Run for your lives, New York Times readers!

Or, maybe, just renew your subscription and give subscriptions to all your relatives so the Sulzbergers don't have to sell.

Just don't say we didn't warn you...

***

Those streaky Nationals are at it again!

Ryan Zimmerman's hitting skein ended at 30, but the team has picked up where the Face of the Franchise (is that a compliment any more?) left off: The Nats haven't won since Zimmerman's streak stopped, and go for their sixth loss in a row tonight against Pittsburgh.

Back to feel-good streaks: Tonight the Nats will start Shairon Martis, who is 5-0 (really!) and will have to arm wrestle Zimmerman for the team's one set-aside slot at the All-Star game.

***

At Pimlico on Friday I ran into the RoboVendor, Perry Hahn. He was at the track selling Black Eyed Susans by the tray on Black Eyed Susan Day.

Hahn is up there with the most fascinating folks I've ever come across in my years of typing. He got a mechanical engineering degree from Maryland, but has devoted his working life to vending mostly beer at mostly sporting events.

Hahn was planning on going to the Nationals game that night after racing, and he had worked the Nats game a day earlier. He travels the country for Super Bowls and rock festivals and anywhere else a dispenser for hire is needed.

"I'm averaging more than one event per day now," says Hahn, 47.

Hahn is much more than merely a workaholic alcohol vendor, however.

In the early 1990s, back when stadiums sold beer in cans but wouldn't let customers keep the cans, Hahn decided to put his engineering brains to work. He designed what the US Patent and Trademark Office calls a "Tandem High Speed Can Opener," as well as U.S. Patent  #5,228,203. The gadget rips the tops off of two beer cans simultaneously and in a nano-second, which eliminates the need to flip the flip-tops and allows the beer man to empty the beer into cups in no time flat.

Hahn told me back in the day he could open and pour a case of beer cans in one minute.

Fans at Camden Yards noticed him wearing the battery-powered mechanical device on his wrist and dubbed him RoboVendor. Most stadiums have gone to selling plastic bottles, and Hahn designed another machine to twist the caps off of two bottles at a time.

I asked him the other day what his biggest vending day ever was, and, while he didn't give me a dollar figure, he did say it came at a Harley Davidson party in Milwaukee.

(By bizarre coincidence, I'm pretty sure the pair of hands selling beers in the Washington Post's slide show of Saturday's Preakness, with a contraption attached, belong to my guy Perry Hahn! See for yourself — photo #4 in the sequence.)

***

The NBA's draft lottery is tonight.

The Wizards, with the second worst record in the league, have a 17.8 chance of getting the number one overall pick. If they get it, we'll talk even more about Kwame Brown.

For all the badmouthing Brown gets around here — he's Heath Shuler in shorts and no helmet, essentially — he's still in the league, with Detroit. And he averaged 17 minutes and five rebounds a game this season, so he'll be back somewhere.

Can you be rightly called a bust if you last nine years?

***

My hero Robin Ficker is running for office today in the race for the District 4 seat on the Montgomery County council.

His politics are as odd as his antics at the old Capital Centre, but I'm pulling for Ficker. If he gets in, he'll do enough wacky stuff to fill several columns.

If it was really a race and these folks really ran, Ficker wins, no problem. He still runs up and down the Cole Field House steps a few times a week to stay in shape.

He can even run there on Sundays now that he's dumped his Redskins season tickets.

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

Dibble, the Nationals color commentator, spoke for every fan yesterday. He went off when second baseman Anderson Hernandez jumped out of the way of a fine throw from pitcher Jesus Colome on a routine sacrifice attempt in the eighth inning and the Nats up a run over Philly.

Hernandez's merkel let the Nats blow yet another lead to give the Phillies a sweep of the four-game series.

"[Toronto pitcher] Roy Halladay may pass us for wins by the All Star break," Dibble huffed. "Have you ever seen a play like THAT?"

In an age when team owners have a lot of control over who announces their games, that's about as off the reservation as a commentator's going to get.

Looks like fans have seen enough, too: Hell if Nationals Stadium didn't look empty during the game telecast.

***

"It's a great day for the Redskins," an attorney for the team, Bob Raskopf, said on Friday.

Not a great day for redskins, however: A federal court ruled in favor of the team in a lawsuit filed years ago by a group of Native Americans alleging that the name "Redskins" is too racially offensive to be afforded trademark protections.

The plaintiffs have had some victories on the merits of their case so far — in 1999 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the handle was indeed too offensive and canceled the Redskins marks.

But the team appealed, saying that the Native Americans, who began their litigation in the early 1990s, didn't file their trademark challenges in time. So even if the team's name is too offensive, it's irrelevant because the legal shot clock already went off.

And the Redskins technical argument has now been upheld. Clearly, that's the right decision. Because one thing everybody should agree on is: America is a nation of laws. Well, if you ignore all that land stealing and those human-roundups and attempted genocide of native peoples, we're a nation of laws. Kinda sorta...

(Whenever these stories pop up I seek out the best rock song ever written about the offensiveness of the Redskins name: "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock," by the great Atom and His Package. The message predates Dan Snyder.)

***

On a happier football note: Women's football has arrived!

But not because of the launch of the Lingerie League. No, women's football has arrived because there's now a ranking system just for the football ladies, put together by something called the Massey Ratings.

And our DC Divas are atop the poll of 49 teams with the IWFL

The undefeated Divas had the No. 2 rated offense and the top rated defense in the land heading into Saturday's game in New York.

DC beat the No. 8 ranked NY Sharks, 21-7, so the No. 1 overall ranking should live another week.

Get on the Divas' bandwagon now!

***

So women have rankings...What's the next step for acceptance?

Betting lines!

Why not? The state of Delaware very quietly passed laws allowing sports betting.

Major sports leagues, mostly the NFL and NCAA, have for decades bullied jurisdictions into not allowing sports books, so Las Vegas has been the only town in the game.

But Delaware didn't have much of anything to lose — no pro franchises, only a couple major college teams — so they put it through. The University of Delaware apparently won't be hosting any lower-tier NCAA playoff games from now on.

There's still some legal issues to work through, but if Vegas-style sports books show up in Delaware, the WHOLE WORLD could change.

All the states that waited too long to get into slots — Maryland, anybody? — should try to get in early on sports betting and balance their budgets with the bucks of all those dumbasses who think they can beat a betting line.

They can't. But why not have sports books everywhere? The pursuit of happiness should include the chance to make a futures bet on the Capitals or Redskins.

And the Divas!

***

Speaking of betting on women in sports: The Preakness!

Nobody showed up to the infield, thanks to those anti-running-of-the-urinals fascists who banned BYOB at the track.

But what a race! Let's hope for a Rachel Alexandra/Mine That Bird rematch in three weeks!

(Alas, the educated picks John Scheinman gave Cheap Seats Daily readers FOR FREE on Friday didn't come in. But anybody who boxed the Purely Sentimental Rachel/Bird combo passed along in the same space cashed an exacta ticket worth $39.20.)

***

I went to Pimlico on Friday, for the running of the Black Eyed Susan Stakes and to get a look at the contenders for the big race a day later.

Mine That Bird looked very small in his stall, noticeably smaller than filly Rachel Alexandra and all the other horses he was sharing a barn with. So I was rooting for the little guy against the big girl. Not just because he's small, but because he's a gelding; that means there's no stud career in his future, so he could be racing for a while.

If Rachel Alexandra was an ungelded boy, the horse would surely be retired right after the Belmont. But he's a she, and there's not as much value for her in retirement, since top stallions can make babies day after day — Maryland stud hero Allen's Prospect once fertilized 120 mares in a single year –  while Rachel can have just one child at a time.

The big buzz on the backstretch was that former Pimlico owner Joe DeFrancis, who grew up in Maryland racing — his father Frank is a legend — might buy back the track from current owner Magna Entertainment, which is now in Chapter 11 reorganization and looks like a goner, at an upcoming bankruptcy auction.

Sell high, buy back low. In the '00s, that's the formula for success.

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

The story appeared on Page E3, inside the sports section.

Beyer details how Magna, after years of crying about how unless slots come to the racetrack the racetrack will go away, didn't even file a sufficient application with the state for a license.

As a result, Magna has been kicked out of the running to even get any machines at Laurel Park or Pimlico.

Instead, a shopping mall in Anne Arundel County will get the slots Magna allegedly coveted.

Though Beyer makes Magna's elimination from the licensing process sound permanent, there are probably several more court cases to go before it's a done deal.

Bad as it looks right now, given the power of the racing lobby in the state, I'd bet the tracks, if they really do want slots, eventually do get slots — no matter how big a mess Magna has made.

Racing's bigger problem over the long term, the way I see it, comes in the Post's placement of Beyer's story.

The fact that an amazing, newsworthy column written by the most important turf writer of all time gets buried on the bottom left portion of an inside page — on a holiday, no less — sure seems like a harbinger of racing's apocalypse. Slots or no slots.