Smarty's Ass: I don't know what the rest of the country is like, but ever since the Kentucky Derby, Philly and its environs have been punch-drunk in love over Smarty Jones. The Inqy has been running stories on Smarty every day from about a week leading up the Derby and ever since. Sometimes you get three in the Sports section, one in the Front Page, and another scattered in the Magazine or Business section.

Philly has a well-known inferiority complex (that city between New York and D.C.), which is no doubt helped by the fact that our sports teams seem limited to one or two championships each, and nothing in the past twenty years. Meanwhile, NY can buy one fairly regularly, and then, even more maddeningly, cities like Tampa Bay and Miami get them with upstart expansion teams, or their perrenial loser suddenly turns champeen.

So, with the Flyers having recently gone down to TAMPA BAY and all that city's glorious hockey traditions, we're banking on Smarty (and by the looks of the 2-5 odds, so is everyone else).

Of course, we know deep down that he won't win. He can't. He's actually from Philly. We don't win. Not the big ones; not when it really matters. But that knowledge doesn't stop us. See, we can't stop ourselves; we leave that up to our opponents.

So, I can't tell you who will win, but I can say with certain conviction that Smarty will throw a shoe, get bumped, or (more fitting to our sense of self-loathing) run in the wrong direction. Put your money elsewhere, I tell you.