I’m wondering just which bull-based sport is more idiotic:

Bullfighting, which consists of taunting and dancing around an enraged bull for the longest period of time possible?

Or bullriding, which involves actually mounting a just-as-enraged bull and hanging on for dear life for several seconds?

On the one hand, bullfighting relies upon the matador avoiding direct contact with the bull — but only works if the event is prolonged for the longest possible time, thus risking harm. On the other hand, bullriding is all about direct contact with the bull — but by design, the bucking ride is of short duration, and the rider skedaddles out of the pen as soon as he’s disengaged.

I guess degrees of difference don’t matter — they’re both pretty stupid. If people really want to make a sport out of bovine-bothering, just drop the pretense of ceremony and go cow-tipping instead.

For years, I’ve retained this pithy response:

Not I, says this guy.

Where “this guy” is, of course, me. Don’t worry — this is the only regular instance of me referring to myself in the third person.

I’ve found it to be very appropriate as an email response, when confirming a denial. I just used it tonight, in fact.

What’s unusual is that I’ve kept this little phrase in my personal lexicon for 15 years. I swiped it from a colleague with whom I worked for the briefest of periods: Jason Heffron, at the St. Petersburg Times. Despite his subsequent move to Surfing Magazine for what would eventually become a managing editor gig, I doubt I would have remembered working with Jason at all, had he not imparted that little ditty one night on the Sports desk shift.

So I guess I owe him one.