I asked this instant-poll question on Twitter today: “If forced to watch a purple dinosaur, would you choose Barney or Brett Favre?”

The poll results are in:

1. Barney and write-in candidate Dino tied for most votes.

2. “Can I gouge my eyes out” came in second with a single vote.

3. Brett Favre, who received no votes.

The parallels between Y.A. Tittle and Y.E. Yang are uncanny and alarming. For instance:

Y.A. is from Texas, Y.E. lives in Texas.

Y.A. was a Tiger at LSU, Y.E. beat a Tiger at PGA.

Y.A. is a Tittle, Y.E. plays a Titleist.

Y.A. was the “Bald Eagle” who wore number 14 for Giants on Sundays, Y.E. made an eagle at number 14 to beat giant on Sunday.

Friend (and frequent-poster) Mike has a challenge for all of us. Mike writes:

“I have always been fascinated by names in which you can’t tell when the first name ends and the last name begins. For example, I never really knew if it was Teemu Selanne or T. Mussalanne, or if it was Aurelio Rodriquez or Areely O′Rodriquez, the first Mexican-Irish ballplayer. Admin can tell you that when he was a kid he actually thought they were referring to him as  ‘A-really-old Rodriquez’.

“Being Irish ourselves, my wife and I have grown up thinking everyone else was Irish too. My wife went through most of her childhood proud of that great Irish-American Steelers running back Frank O’Harris.

“I am sure there are a million others and I know you guys are just the crew to remember them. It can also transcend sports. I remember many others from childhood, like Pia Zadora, who I thought was P. Isadora or Don Ameche who we thought was Donna Meche. I actually heard Ross McCall say he thought he was an Asian named Donnum Ichi.

“Have at it.”

Yesterday I asked on Twitter which baseball players, Coco Crisp exempted, could best lend their names to a breakfast cereal. I think Victorinos is the perfect breakfast brand, but allow that Braden Loopers and Candy Maldonados might also sell. Among other suggestions were Tony O’s, Minnie Minosos and that fiber-rich, cholesterol-reducing muesli better known as Kashi Saito. So I ask you all: Who are we missing? Honey Bunches of Oates?

I’ve written a story celebrating public golf courses for the August issue of Golf Digest (on newsstands now, as they say).

I somehow forgot to post this piece I wrote for the July issue of GD, on President Obama.

The unspeakable puns in the preceding comments section seem to have affected my 4-year-old daughter, with whom I boarded an airplane a week ago bound for Minneapolis. Once airborne, my first heir born said: “Dad, can I write with a pencil next month when we go to . . . Pennsyl-vania?”

I smiled and nodded and snapped open my newspaper but she went on: “Can I wear my jersey when we go to New . . . Jersey?”

“Sure.”

The paper went back up but she Kilroyed over it, looked me in the eye and delivered the coup de grace — or perhaps the coup disgrace. ”Dad,” she said. “Will you drink a mini soda when we get to . . . Minne-sota?”

Again, she’s four, but I fear she’s already caught the disease. And that it was hereditary. Both parents have worked as pundits. She’s now working as a pun ditz. And then there are my in-laws, who — visiting Prague recently — parceled out the requisite quota of tourist puns in every e-mail, until I could take no more “Czech-ered past” and “Czech-it-out” atrocities and stopped reading.

One cardinal law of sports journalism is that every headline about Czech Republic athletes contain the phrase “Czech List,” “Czech Mate” or “Bounced Czech” — “Hip Czech” is a hockey favorite — just as any article about the St. Louis baseball team, Arizona football team or Louisville basketball teams be headed “Cardinal Rules,” “It’s In The Cards” or “House of Cards.”

Such headlines don’t have to be terrible. Indeed they can be terrible enough to be wonderful. I recall the one in SI when Reggie Jackson moved to Anaheim: “Hark, The Heralded Angel Swings.” Or one that supposedly appeared in The New York Times decades ago with a dateline from Spain: “Too Many Basques In One Exit.” Or the famous Daily News headline when New York state bailed out the City’s subway system: “Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday.”

You may have your favorite (or least favorite) headline-pun conventions. And they probably violate the Geneva Conventions. Then again, one man’s tortured pun is another’s man’s pun enduring “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In this matter, Ogar is our linguistic Dick Cheney, a man for whom no pun meets torture standards. So take it away, readers. I’m outta here. (Or as my in-laws might put it: Czech, please.)

Who is the all-time greatest coach or manager with two first names? I asked this question on Twitter last night and nominated the following candidates: Bud Grant, George Karl, Connie Mack, Tom Kelly, Billy Martin, Herb Brooks, Doug Moe and Pete Carroll.

I’ll admit the list is Minnesota-heavy — I have a Midwest Coast bias — but those were all the names I could think of in 60 seconds, which seemed about the right amount of time to devote to Twitter. (I can afford to be more leisurely in this space, to which I’ve always applied a Domino’s Rule: Blogs must be conceived and delivered in 30 minutes or less.)

Write-in candidates began to pour in immediately. Among the two-first-named coaches put up for enshrinement were Buddy Ryan, Bill Russell, Norm Stewart, George Allen, Bill Terry, Charlie Manuel, Homer Drew, Bo Ryan and Don James. Strangely, voters also wrote in candidates with only one first name (Sean Payton) and  candidates with no first name (Doc Rivers) and candidates with a first-name-last and a last-name-first (Everett Dean).

A couple of people independently offered up Phil Jackson and Pat Riley as two-first-name exemplars, but the screening committee of one pre-emptively disqualified both on the grounds that Jackson and Riley were surnames before they were first names, violating the spirit of this competititon.

The election returns were coming in as I was watching the 3rd period of Game 7 of the Bruins-Hurricanes series, during which some inspired soul tweeted to say that the respective coaches in the game — Claude Julien and Paul Maurice — were pitted against one another in a four-first-name cage match.

Anyway, Tom Kelly narrowly defeated Bud Grant in the polling, which was as unscientific as it was unproductive. So my question to you is: All-time greatest coaches with two last names: Urban Meyer? Clark Griffith? Cotton Fitzsimmons? Miller Huggins? Houston Nutt? The polls are now open.

Swine flu alarmists are warning Americans not to touch their own faces, which means the only way to relieve my pollen-inflamed eyeballs is to dunk my head in a basin of water, bowing deeply at the waist with my hands behind my back, like a contestant in a pie-eating contest.

Three of the last four days have had highs in the 90s — the calendar’s gone January, February, March, August –  and everyone is saying it’s like late summer around here. If so, it’s a surreal, leafless, lawn-mower-silenced summer. A round of golf beneath the bald trees left my bald head Red-Lobstered with sunburn. The only grass clippings at my house are of the fake Easter-basket variety.

The pollen count renders me a shut-in. Serial sneezing, and the occasional effort to pluck out my own eyeballs, make writing nearly impossible (as this post demonstrates). Indeed, the endless sneezing jags have inspired an idea — a nickname for a Canadian Football League team. Picture the side of the helmet, with an allergy-addled big cat, a predatory feline violently ah-chooing: The Sneezing Jags.

All of which is to say I’m sitting in my basement, watching TV, wondering if global weirding will make August-in-April an annual event. And wondering what that will mean for children’s rhymes of the future: April sunstroke brings . . . marathons of “Gunsmoke”?

I know “Gunsmoke” hasn’t been on, even in reruns, for several decades, and that I’m actually bingeing on Champions League soccer. That’s not the point. The point is this: I’m a sneezing, sunburnt, half-blinded bald man who can’t leave the house right now. And that has me feeling — in every sense of the phrase — under the weather.

Mark Fidrych, who died last week on his farm in Northboro, Mass., was a wonderful guy, eminently aware that life is short. Eight summers ago, the Bird and I passed a day on that farm talking about his remarkable life.

Flew to St. Louis last week with the wife, the 4-year-old, the 2-year-old and the 5-month-old. Sat in the last row. As we descended, the Arch appeared outside our window and the 4-year-old, a budding comic genius, said, “Is that river the . . . Mister Sippi?” And the thunder outside sounded like a rimshot.

On landing, the guy in front of the 4-year-old said to me: “I hope your daughter plays soccer because she’s the next Mia Hamm, the way she was kicking my seat.” I pointed out that her legs couldn’t have reached his seat had he not fully reclined on takeoff in the manner of someone getting a shave in a barber shop, but he did not seem to catch my drift.

As we exited the rental car lot, in a predictable Biblical downpour, the booth attendant informed us we did not, alas, have a rental-car reservation. So we returned to the lot and reserved the very car we were already in. We drove into town on I-70, still signposted as the “Mark McGwire Highway,” as 17 cop cars with their sirens on raced in the opposite direction.

We stopped at McDonald’s for our first meal in nine hours. Four-year-old said: “This is good because McDonald’s has two arches and St. Louis has one arch.” I’m telling you, she’s a genius, that one.

On arrival at the hotel, we unloaded so many bags that the bellman wondered if we were Rolling Stones roadies. At the front desk we were informed that we did not have a reservation. We were in fact down the block, at a hotel with an identical name and a nearly identical address. So we reloaded the bags into the van, greased the bellman again, and did same thing on arrival at the hotel a block away, leaving me to assume that the two Renaissances kitty-corner to one another in St. Louis is a conspiracy of the Local Bellman’s and Porter’s Union 376.

Upon entering the room, I turned on the TV and saw that police on I-70 had been chasing a bank robber who abandoned his getaway car and stolen loot when he discovered a GPS tracking device in the bag of cash. And I wondered if bags of stolen bank money are like the ones in cartoons — canvas satchels with $ signs stenciled on either side.

On the first morning, as the wife worked, I took the kids to the Arch, noting the irony of this glorious engineering marvel rendered almost inaccessible by the inglorious engineering non-marvel of Memorial Drive, the high-speed thoroughfare that leaves pedestrians to fend for themselves to get from downtown to the Mister Sippi riverfront. You end up waiting for the bimonthly light to change and hope the 2-year-old is not swept into a raging river of traffic en route. Suggestion: Build another, smaller arch — this one a footbridge — over the street to access the bigger Arch everyone has come to see.

The girls wanted to visit the top of the Arch but the airport-style security required taking the sleeping 5-month-old out of his stroller so that we could run it — the stroller, not the 5-month-old, though I’m not positive about this — through the metal detector. I declined, and haven’t heard the end of it from the 4-year-old, whose sole purpose in life, in the days leading up to the trip, had been to drink in the vista from its observation deck, 635 feet up,  where she could see — she was certain — “parts of the North Pole.”

And yet there were moments of perfection on the trip: The White Castle marquee that said “CLAM STRIPS . . . YUM.” (Presumably they’d run out of Ks and simply put an M at the end of the sign instead.) There was the car we passed, the turquoise Topaz, an ugly ride but a euphonious phrase, one I kept repeating in my head the rest of the trip.

There were the kids, increasingly unhappy in their hammock of a fold-out bed, coming up with novel ways to complain. Two-year-old, at breakfast: “I don’t want that! It has a hole in it!” Me, sighing: “It’s a donut.”

I took the kids to Forest Park one day and noted that the names parents call on the playground seldom vary from city to city and scarcely ever include a Tom or a Sarah: “Kingsley! Socrates! Bennifer!”

That afternoon, driving back to downtown, I passed Busch Stadium, its scoreboard lighted up in a test-drive for the next day’s Cardinal opener, and all was right with the world again.

That night, when the kids finally fell asleep, five of us in a single room, I cracked the door to the  bathroom and set the desk chair in the narrow shaft of light coming from the vanity. And there I read by the light of the crapper, content in the knowledge that for once I had somehow defied the First Law of Hotel Living: No matter what time you return to your room — noon, 6 p.m., three o’clock in the morning — housekeeping will arrive 30 seconds before you do.