Awesome trivia about Austin Kearns: Kearns had his first RBI since May 7 during Saturday’s Nats loss to the O’s. He’s hitting .197. Awesomer trivia about Kearns: He makes $8 million this year.

Awesomeist trivia about Kearns: He’s not hurt!

Kearns is one of the many Cincinnati Reds brought to DC by disgraced and departed GM Jim Bowden. It’s like he’s still here.

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Adam Dunn‘s two-run, one-bouncer off the warehouse at Camden Yards yesterday let the Nats not get swept in Baltimore. Dunn’s was the 50th homer to land on Eutaw Street in the stadium’s history. I’m pretty sure the only guy ever to hit the warehouse on the fly is Ken Griffey, who did it during the home run derby at the 1993 All-Star Game. Nobody’s ever hit it in a real game. That’s awesomely trivial, now that I think about it.

And, now that the Dead Balls Era™ is over and Nobody’s Using Steroids in Baseball™, the wall might never be reached. Shame.

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The Old Grey Burgundy and Gold Lady?

While the Washington Post is selling a faux front page with Michael Jackson’s obit, the New York Times is hawking “The Greatest Moments in Washington Redskins History,” a package of “63 historical newspaper pages” about big Skins games taken from that out-of-town paper’s back catalog. These are apparently from surplus newspapers, not repros. According to a poster at Dan Snyder’s web site, extremeskins.com, you can pick one up at area Giant Foods for “about $11.”

Seems like a good deal for Skins fans, but strikes me as a bizarre thing to do for a newspaper like the Times.

Pretty soon any page from the New York Times will be collectible.

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Brian Mitchell tells USAToday that his firing from Dan Snyder‘s WTEM “didn’t have a damn thing to do with the economy” and instead had everything to do with him not being a company man. But if Snyder only let company men and toadies over his airwaves, then how the heck did Vinny Cerrato get a show on the same station?

Oh, nevermind.

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PBS has put a great documentary on synchronized swimming back in heavy rotation. A local synch club, the Northern Virginia Nereids, gets a lot of play in the film.

But the highlights for me were 2)watching Kenyon Smith of the Santa Clara Aquamaids, the lone male syncher in a sea of, um, non-males, and 1)hearing Smith’s teammate Anna Nelson say that to get in the mood for her swim in the U.S. Open synchronized swim tournament that anchors the documentary, she thought “about the holocaust and World War II and how tragic that era was.” Kind of puts things in perspective. ‘Course, when I wanna get in a bleak mood, I dwell on the fact that synchronized swimming is an Olympic sport.

Who let that happen?

The Nereids will be in Gainesville, Fla., all this week as part of the 2009 Esynchro Age Group Championships.

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The Nation’s Best and Brightest, or maybe just those with the most free time, came to DC over the weekend as the National Guard FLW College Fishing tour hit the Potomac.

A pair of Fairmont State University students, Wil Dieffenbauch of Hundred, W.V., and Brent Dodrill of Fairmont, W.V., took Saturday’s fish-off by bringing in six bass weighing 15 pounds, 5 ounces. The school and its  bass club will split $10,000. According to organizers, the winners caught all their fish “throwing topwater frogs targeting grass in about three to five foot of water.”

Dodrill, a sophomore majoring in something called Occupational Safety, explained that the turning point came when he and his fellow student-athlete “found some fish.”

“They were all in one area and we just sat there and pounded it out,” Dodrill said.

Why the hell isn’t fishing an Olympic sport?

(All fun-poking aside, I wish I could fish. I also wish I could say I was from a place called “Hundred.”)

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