It’s always nice to get a good laugh over your morning cup of coffee. This morning, Baseball Primer called my attention to a couple of amusing takes on the Sammy Sosa situation that are too good not to pass on.

First up is Charles P. Pierce of Slate, who asks, “Is this man a danger to your children?”:

Whenever anybody in the modern communications media starts vaguely maundering about The Children—whether it’s Weepin’ Joe Lieberman talking about rap music, or Cokie Roberts wondering how she’s going to explain Oval Office blowjobs to her daughter, or sportswriters worrying about the dearth of good role models—it is time to turn off the set and throw the remote control to the dog. My lord, on Tuesday morning, a full week after the incident happened, Jay Mariotti in the Chicago Sun-Times was still gathering the shattered young ones under his wing. “Children deserve to know what he did and why it’s wrong,” Mariotti thundered, perhaps mindful of the generation we lost to drugs and crime because of society’s tolerance for Gaylord Perry.

Speaking of Mariotti, an otherwise anonymous Primer poster offered a parody, “Sammy Sosa Is a Fraud Who Poops His Pants,” that’s so dead-on that it makes you wonder how many of the nation’s sportswriters churn this kind of stuff out while napping.

Also worth a grin is John Levesque of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who says that Sammy was merely taking up the cause of the world’s cork farmers:

He says he uses the corked bat in batting practice to put on a show for fans, and that he used it an actual game completely by mistake.

I believe him because, well, the whole premise of this column would be shot if I didn’t. By using a corked bat in practice, Sosa is telling the struggling cork growers of Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, France and Tunisia: “I’m with you guys. Try to stay afloat.”

As a popular role model, he’s also telling America’s kids it’s OK to buy a bulletin board, or to ask their parents to install cork flooring in the rec room.

One of my friends, warning that the use of synthetic wine corks is on the rise (dear God, NOOOOO!), asked with a wink, “Won’t somebody think of the cork-growers’ children?”