Welcome to Milford, aka Loserville. Population: You

The image is from This Week In Milford, the Web's dominant Gil Thorp blog. GT is kind of a Mary Worth for the sports pages, only with even more self-loathing.

And what does this have to do with sports, you might ask, and is this part of that whole scary Experimental Phase that I posted about last night? You're both right!

When I was growing up with the Philadelphia Daily News, and playing fantasy sports back in the day when we had to (gasp!) use pen and paper and rely on the USA Today for stats, our only source for how our players did was the box scores in the newspaper.

And there, every day, was this strip.

For no good reason.

And since it's a cartoon, and takes only slightly more time to read than to look at... and it was on a page that we were all staring bullets into... well, it was impossible to *not* read Gil Thorp.

He was the "This Is Our Country" of the box scores. Only more persistent.

Every time you finish a Gil Thorp, you kind of want to hurt yourself, and then maybe, the guy who wrote it, or the people who brought it to you.

And yet, after a while, a dull -- very dull -- moment of zombie consciousness would kick in, and you'd realize that Milford was in a playoff and maybe they'd win AND HOLY MOTHER I'M READING GIL THORP!

Like most things about sports, you can easily imagine enjoying the experience without the strange '50s netherworld that is GT. But once you've gotten exposed to it, much in the same way that people eat at White Castle or listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or watch midgets wrestle, you're not getting out of it alive. (Perhaps I've shared too much.)

Anyway, FTT is... proud? no... ashamed? kind of, but not quite... nonplussed! that's it! nonplussed! ... about spreading this fevered aspect of our adolescence to a new generation. We're planning on sharing out of context panels from time to time, assuming that the Welcome to Milford guy doesn't freak out that we're impinging on his gimmick.

But by all means, go to his site, read some GTs, and then smack yourself in the face. It's curiously addictive!