I promise my next post will be a serious one (actually, a very serious one on two books about Africa I recently finished), but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t occasionally share personal experiences with ten thousand or so total strangers? Saturday night I had a perfectly abysmal sporting experience. I was down at the home place in central Virginia, and since the ground hogs had apparently chewed up the wires from the satellite dish, I had to soujourn to the nearest city, Lynchburg, to watch my Georgia Bulldogs try to wrap up the SEC East against Auburn. Having googled up a “sports bar” in the ‘Burg, I sallied forth, pursued by my wife’s demands that I swear I would not touch Demon Alcohol before returning to the countryside. Forty-five minutes later, I settled in at the “sports bar,” where two screens directly in front of me were supposed to be showing my game, and then, of course, both sets were changed to the NASCAR Classic Channel or something, with the bartenders shrugging and alluding to shadowy robo-managers who programmed the sets two months ago. Finally, after exercising several complex moves I learned while riding Metro, I got to a seat where I could watch the Dawgs and the War Eagles from a 60 degree angle, and settled down with a non-alcoholic beer (dreadful stuff; it helps explain W.’s cranky disposition).About half-way through a tense second quarter, I suddenly saw bright flashing lights and heard a hideous wall of noise. Was I having a stroke? An allergic reaction to O’Doul’s? Had I died and gone to hell? No, I soon discovered, it was Karaoke Night in the “sports bar,” and for the next two hours I tried to watch a football game while being practically blown off the bar stool by bad music from every available genre, badly performed. And my fellow “sports bar” patrons, who were multiplying by the minute, were enraptured with the noise, greeting the first notes of Play That Funky Music, White Boy and Baby Got Back and even Rocky Top with bellows of sheer delight. And these were largely kids: is this what they are listening to on their I-Pods? In any event, I stuck it out to the bitter end, when Auburn beat Georgia on a last-minute field goal after an improbable long pass on a fourth-and-ten, just as the “sports bar” exploded with hormonal delerium to Fight For Your Right To Party. I paid off my tab for an evening of buzzless beer, and wandered off into the packed parking lot–somehow missing the army of Designated Drivers preparing to shepherd the drunken crowd inside safely home–and made a firm resolution never again to mix football with Karaoke. The funny thing is, I sort of like Lynchburg, despite its association with Jerry Falwell’s Church of the Angry God. The other city reasonably close to my Amherst digs is Charlottesville, whose snooty pretensions must torment Thomas Jefferson’s soul each and every day. Lynchburg is a cheerfully unpretentious old river town with impressive architecture and genuine southern food. But you just don’t want to go to its “sports bars.” Not unless you want to watch a game while protecting your non-alcoholic beer from a twenty-two-year-old Baptist strutting her stuff to Baby Got Back.