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Who in the world cares?
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In case you have been vacationing on the moon, you may have missed the news that the student-athletes from the University of Georgia, the oldest state-chartered university in the nation, located in Athens, the Classic City of the South, came up a wee bit short in attaining the football championship of the Southeastern Conference. That honor went to the young men of Louisiana State University who, having observed them in post-game interviews, are destined to become either, you know, great orators or, you know, quantum physicists.

I can't say I was surprised at the outcome but I was disappointed. I love my alma mater passionately despite the fact that the current administration has me on their Do Not Call list. That occurred about the time I discovered they had thin skin and no public relations skills and pricking their egos was the journalistic equivalent of bear-baiting. Today, I am now relegated to the outhouses of their mind. Cry me a river.

As bad as it was to have the Dawgs lose, let's keep it all in perspective. There are currently some seven billion people walking around the planet. I submit many of them really didn't care about the outcome of the game. Let's do the math.

First, there are 1.3 billion people in China and about that many in India. The Chinese are too busy trying to manipulate the world economy and the Indians are tied up in their call centers trying to explain to the rest of us how to download the latest version of Adobe. That is roughly one-third of the world's population right there that didn't see the dropped passes, missed tackles, sacks and the (aack!) fumble early in the third quarter that led to our demise.

Also, there are the 1.7 billion Muslims. They sure don't care about the Southeastern Conference Championship. Most of them are in the Middle East, overthrowing oppressive governments so that they can take over and install their own oppressive government. Their counterparts in the United States are equally busy, whining about how unloved they are and wondering why we don't trust them simply because they sit on their hands when some goat-brain wants to blow up an airplane in his underwear. The best thing I can say for Muslims is that if you add them to the Chinese and Indians, we are up to about half the people on earth that didn't know a football game broke out in Atlanta.

I doubt anyone in the Northeast got too excited about the contest between the student-athletes of our respective universities. In the first place, their brains are probably frozen stiff from the snow that started falling in July. Second, all they seem to care about is professional football. Why people would prefer to watch an overpaid wide receiver make a fool out of himself after catching a forward pass, which is what he is overpaid to do in the first place, is one of life's great mysteries. I guess when you inhale snow 10 months a year, it can impact your judgment. Still, we are talking another 40 million who don't understand the importance of college football. Unfortunately, given that the Northeast is sucking wind population-wise, most of those people likely will end up here pretty soon and can tell us in person that they don't care about college football and that we talk funny. I can't wait.

Now, let's say that all of Europe - including Russia - ignored the game to watch a cricket match. That's another 857 million or so. Same with Africa. Let's be generous and assume that maybe 10 percent of the people on that continent gave two whoops about the East Division Champions facing off against the West. We are still talking about close to 900 million who didn't give a single whoop.

Admittedly, we are getting down to the nits and nats now but if you throw in the population of Antarctica, South Dakota and the Occupy Wall Street hippies, we are up to 6,999,999,998 people on this planet that didn't give a rip that Georgia had a 10-point lead on the Number One team in the nation and had held them to no first downs in the entire first half and still got beat 42-10.

If my abacus hasn't sprained a bead in figuring all this out, I estimate that this leaves two people on this earth who care very much. That would be you and me. And that is more than enough. Woof! Woof!

Reach Dick Yarbrough at yarb2400@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, GA 31139.