Even I know that Clark Kent was the reporter and the Man of Steele was the do-gooder but that isn't stopping Jose Canseco from opening his mouth and inserting every foot in the city of Long Beach into his humongous mouth.

Canseco is running his gator again folks so that means it's time to grab the kiddies, lock the doors and cancel the cable. Consider packing your bags and move to Alaska because all the hot air out of California is bound to drift eastward.

Oops, it's 2006 and it's already here via satellite and the Internet.

If you care to believe it, Canseco wants to don a suit and tie and work with the governmant, even offering his services to the George Mitchell-led committee investigating steroid use in Major League Baseball.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

I guess the pullover jersey issued by his second ultra-minor, minor league team wouldn't fit over his ego, pardon me, head so he needed something with buttons.

Somehow the words Jose Canseco and law enforcement used in the same sentence give me the willies or maybe it's just a bad case of the oxymorons, with the emphasis on moron.

When I think of someone who would fit the role of Deputy Dawg, only one image comes to mind. It is Shaquille O'Neal tapping at my door, all 7-foot-1, 360-pounds of him, holding up a badge asking, "What seems to be the matter, sir?"

But Jose Canseco?

Pardon me while I try to stop laughing.

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Whew!

I just found out typing 26 dots for no apparent reason is greatly therapeutic. Maybe I should suggest it to the great sports writer who also plans a side job as a movie producer (has John Ford started to roll over in his grave yet? My bad, it was only the American hero John Wayne).

Working title? "The Promise."

Sounds like a great vehicle for a Tom Cruise recruitment video. Once heard their favorite beverage is Kool-Ade.

Oh my, it's time for those dots again now that I realize the paradox that will appear at the top of that manuscript.

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Ah, I can now pay myself $50.00 an hour and I don't have a PhD.

The trash Canseco threatens to unleash on the rest of the civilized world may not even draw that much in actual ticket sales but what the heck, The Sultan of Steroids has clearly made a liar out of the late Andy Warhol because his 15-minutes has turned into, the devil you say, an eternity.

Jose got himself blackballed from baseball and to show how much it was appreciated, he hired a ghost writer - it had to be because you rarely saw him signing anything else - and started telling tales out of school.

Had he done something like this 50-years ago you might have found him lying on a street in a desolate part of Miami with two-or-three-hundred tire tracks from a Chevy Bel-Air on an Edsel across his chest.

60-years? It would have been an easy flip off the back of one of those rail coaches.

75-years? I'm still haunted by the sight of Shoeless Joe playing for some obscure team at the end of the movie Eight Men Out which brings me to another obscure baseball team.

It is in a state that is governed by a man who can probably quote chapter and verse on how to make male parts of bodies go from small to large while others do the opposite, a great exchange if your ultimate goal in life is to be a eunuch after you pad the old bank account.

There are plenty of parties, blonds, and drugs - although I've been told you have to go to the more seedy part of town to get a syringe - and if you get busted, the arresting officer could have a glove compartment packed with "Get Out of Jail - FREE" cards personally autographed by the attorneys for O.J. and Robert Blake.

Steroids, uppers, human growth hormones, the clear, whatever the name of the drug du Jour. After all these years I can now understand why baseball execs came down with the same malady - sore necks from looking the other way.

Baseball knew it, the union knew it, the players knew it, the parking attendant knew it and even Joe Average who had just enough money to buy that GA in the upper deck knew it.

From the time that Lenny Dykstra went from having sand kicked in his face to showing up the next spring looking like Charles Atlas, anyone breathing knew it. Did anyone care?

Why would they?

Bud Selig and his merry band of the mentally challenged, the very same group who brought you the disappearing World Series and an All Star tie, are as culpable as anyone because they were counting the greenbacks as fast as the balls were flying out of their respective ball yards.

It was one of those circuses' everyone knew about but who could have ever imagined Jose Canseco being the ringmaster?

I was watching a sports show on the network that claims to be the leader in that department (I need to send them a map to show them that St. Petersburg owns a baseball stadium and team, not the city on the other side of the bay) having dinner when good old Jose appeared on the screen.

Desperately reaching for my wife's ginger ale to help keep my food down, I listened to the great one talk about how Major League Baseball did him so wrong. Now I am forced to question my wife, like the George Mitchell committee, because both appear to have the same case of selective amnesia.

Jose, can't you see people watched you ride one of those wave-runners days after going on the Devil Rays disabled list with a bad back? Or how about the interview you gave swearing you never drank but were seen at Benigan's on the Beach throwing down shots of vodka or Jagermeister (supposedly it has this herbal quality about it, didn't you know?) or some such adult beverage.

Credibility?

I will be the first to admit that sports, not just baseball, had drug issues. To think otherwise is being the south end of a northbound Jose. But we didn't need a buffoon to write a book to tell us what we already knew.

Some have gone on record saying without the book with the long-winded title, the politicians would not have come up with an excuse to get some face time on the tube. That is such hogwash. We were headed in that direction, Jose or no Jose.

(I still have problems believing the allegation that both Canseco and Mark McGwire were occupying the same clubhouse men's room stall, facing the same direction as one was allegedly injecting the other and not one teammate making mention they could have been card carrying members of the bathhouse set on the other side of the bridge.)

Now, with dinner firmly settled where it should be, I admit I was glued to the interview. Thank goodness too. It was filled with lots of nothing I asked for an extra bread stick and dessert before I excused myself to hunt and peck at this keyboard.

Talk about a fluff piece.

"Without naming names, could you ….."

There was so much sugar on it I think I am now a diabetic. The sports leader? Yeah, right.

Canseco is more than happy to do tell-all interviews if there is a price tag attached (maybe that's where a certain Rays' farmhand got the idea) so I wouldn't put it past the interviewer to slip him a few dead presidents on behalf of his bosses to at least give us a hint.

Any bets that they will have THE story when the time is right? Count on it.

While he did make a reference to Barry Bonds' latest troubles with the law and of course, to Canseco, it was "The Scoop of the Century."

Even Mitchell had to be proud because they all seem to state the obvious in their perpetual state of confusion. More surprising, Jose didn't get a job offer on the spot because at $2.500 a month, the Committee couldn't match the offer sheet.

What has my heart hurting so much is that decades from now Canseco could be viewed as some sort of giant who fell on his sword for the betterment of the game.

Forget the true heroes like Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood or Roberto Clemente. History could show Babe Ruth as nothing more than a beer-swilling home run hitter instead of the man who saved the sport from itself following the Sox scandal.

Time has a way of distorting the facts and what we have here is pointed in that direction.

Barf bag please.

In the grand scheme of things Canseco should be nothing more than a blip on a map. His "first" book opened some eyes but it still said nothing that wasn't already known. Now he threatens to write another with write being the operative word.

The ghost from Volume One is already pecking away at his keyboard.

As far as the movie project, I wonder if he has already contacted the Governator to play him in the flick.

The casting call for the human punching bags will be announced soon once the actual number of bar punches thrown in bars over the last two-decades can be tallied.

With this fame thing that Warhol talked about, he said it in the midst of the peace, love and dope era so when he said 15-minutes his mind may have been in a time warp.

Here in 2006 and for Jose it just keeps going, and going, and going………