Morning Bytes; Fitzpatrick Bites

Oh, that wacky Frank Fitzpatrick. Filing from Athens, he devotes his entire piece today to a bunch of short Olympics-related items in which he pokes fun at Greek ruins and sports he's not interested in. Because, you know, the Olympics are all about what a calcified, coffee-breath, aging Philadelphia sportswriter thinks is interesting. There's even his weekly note of bigotry, this one because a Greek politician has some trouble with English:

Greek to me. I speak no foreign languages. And if asked to translate English into a another tongue -- the reverse of which is often the case with my copy -- it likely would be more incomprehensible than a Stuart Scott-hosted SportsCenter.

That being said, however, if I were a city official preparing a written statement to hand out to the world's media, I'd do a better job than Panayiotis Janikos did.

Janikos is the mayor of Maroussi, the Athens suburb where the main Olympic stadium is located. A packet handed out to the assembled journalists contained an official welcome by the mayor.

"At the end of the 20th century," the welcome begins grammatically enough, "our Greece, was candidate for organizing the games here in the place that were born and revived, was also placing a bet on capability towards the world, and putting the stakes for such a small very, very high."

Ha-ha! Does Frank Fitzpatrick bring the funny or what? There's even an ironically placed typo ("a another tongue") in the first 'graph of that item. He is the master of irony! Maybe next week he he'll write something hilarious about the fact that so many of the Olympic athletes look ... different than he does. We can only hope.