International conspiracy bent on world domination

By Doug Page | Thursday, January 4, 2007, 01:00 AM

We are faced with an international conspiracy.

It is not a cabal of bankers seeking a new world order.

Nor is it a murky network of religious zealots bent on reforming the world in its image.

Nor is it a retailer dedicated to domination through low prices.

It is not a small group of like-minded nut jobs. Rather, roughly half the world’s population is involved. Involved in creating a new world order that will reform and dominate the other half of the world’s population.

So insidious and nefarious is their plot that it has gone nearly without notice since woman discovered fire — but before man invented the wheel.

Why, indeed, did Eve hand Adam that apple?

To reform.

To dominate.

To create the new world order.

Seems to have worked rather well — so well, we hardly notice.

Aristophanes, the Greek playwright, uncovered the conspiracy in his “comedy” Lysistrata back in 411 BC. Women withheld sex from their men as a means of ending the Peloponnesian War. There just weren’t enough young, virile men left in any of the combatant city-states because they had all gone off to war. All that was left were the politicians and other feckless men.

Slim pickings.

That’s one way to make cut-and-run more palatable.

So we frail men now eat more fruits and veggies, all at the urgings of the females. We watch our cholesterol, drink in moderation, exercise, leave the toilet lid down, bathe, shave, pick up our dirty socks and behave — except in the company of other subjugated males — in an appropriate manner.

All well and good.

But the conspirators have gone too far. They have messed with Buckeye football.

A recent game was not televised on any channel most men could find. Not ABC, CBS, NBC, TBS, WB, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPN HD or the Home Shopping Channel.

Nowhere was it found except on a mystery ESPN channel that few, if any, cable providers bought. Call it the channel nobody could get.

Why?

Because one Lysistrata — married to a television exec — whispered into another Lysistrata’s ear — a cable executive — who whispered to another who whispered to another and so on. The ol’ girls network expanded its conspiracy to deprive their mates of Buckeye football — no doubt to get the garage cleaned or the Christmas decorations up. Just as we’d promised for a number of Saturdays.

It would, at first blush, have been kinder had they just denied us sex.

But my sex showed our intestinal fortitude for a change. Messages were slipped past the watchful eyes of female editors across the state so that newspaper advertisements appeared, trumpeting what bars had the capacity to receive the mystery channel.

We flocked to the watering holes, drank copiously, behaved inappropriately and watched our beloved Buckeyes.

Consider it a victory for guy-dom, though it may be a Pyrrhic one. There may be some repercussions on that sex thing.

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