Swing batter! Let’s hear some chatter out there!

I intend to download the ringtone of that blues lament onto my iPhone, except I carry some dirty old gray LG that looks like a pregnant potato bug and vibrates like a carpenter bee inside a deck railing. I often punch my own thigh when I get a call. Several sports peeps on my beat now accuse me of being a lacrosse groupie, and as I stood on the lax sidelines down at Worcester Prep last Wednesday amidst yellow labs, golden retrievers and BMWs and listened to parents chortle encouraging words to young girls with hyphenated names, I thought “Is this the guy I’ve become? Am I a part of this culture?”

My friend Bruce Hefke once told me, “You are the journalistic Chia Pet of the intellectual wannabes,” and all I thought was, “What nail banger talks like that?”

BIG BEN GONE - What is the difference between a Hoover and a Harley? The location of the dirt bag! Big Ben Roethlisberger became a hood ornament on an old lady’s Buick while Harley-hogging drunk a few years ago, missing part of training camp, and pundits discussed his risky business behavior as part of some underlying psychological deficit: perhaps he was an over-hyped and overpaid self-important sexual deviant who measured his manliness in engine cubic centimeters.

Now on the far side of two police reports, Ben has been exposed as a beer leaguer so sleazy even Iron City won’t sponsor him.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have long been a franchise that ships talent with criminal inclinations out of town because it not only runs against the values of the Rooney family but it’s bad for business.

The happiest quarterback in the league after all of this is Mike Vick, because there is some forgiveness among sports fans for electrocuting fighting dogs but no tolerance for drunken behemoth millionaires who degrade young women.

CYBER CHATTER - Yes, it is true that Cape and Collick (Bill) have been talking to each other about the vacant football position. And yes, it’s true that Cape is considering going interim for the superintendent’s position and yes, it’s true that I don’t get to endorse anyone, which would instantly guarantee them second place in a large field. I must say that the rules and regulations encumbering public schools from finances to the movement of personnel make all sensible and obvious deals clunky and slow-moving at best, and anyone looking for a guarantee should buy a Samsung.

SNIPPETS - Maren Ford and Carrie Lingo are current members on the U.S. Field Hockey team, not former members as was written in my column last Tuesday.

I can only assume someone hacked into my email - which seems to be a millennium version of the lame excuse “I didn’t say it.”

The NFL draft extravaganza is flesh peddling for big-money players and has all the class of an ESPN-sponsored poker tournament. I was compared to “Welcome Back, Kotter” when I came to Cape in 1975, and I saw actor Gabe Kaplan on television at the poker table and thought “He’s aged less gracefully than me,” and the only person who still calls me Kotter is a guy named Chin who lives in Slaughter Neck.

Little League opening days are this weekend; last year I almost lost my left arm in Rehoboth taking a picture of a winged pick-up truck. My 5-year-old grandson Mikey got moved up from tee ball because there were not enough players to make two teams. So now there is coach pitch and machine pitch and pretty soon sitting in the shade eating a hotdog and playing with a phone application pitch. Swing batter! Let’s hear some chatter out there!