We hate Philadelphia. We’ve made no secret of that. And we think it’s hilarious that someone in Citizen’s Bank Park thought hot dogs for the Phillie Phanatic’s cannon were suspicious packages, especially considering how the Phillie Phanatic obviously doubles as Philadelphia’s bomb squad.

In fact, we wish we were there for the detonation of the hot dogs that people thought were bombs. It must have stunk of beef and nitrates, and, as baseball fans, we’re programmed to love that smell. Plus, it’s got to be the best Philadelphia has ever smelled.

But the one thing that bothers us about the whole affair is that Philadelphia has a hot-dog cannon when the Mets have only a t-shirt cannon. Sure, Girls Gone Wild has shown the lengths people will go to for free t-shirts, but have you ever seen the t-shirts Mr. Met fires into the audience? They say Pepsi Party Patrol on them, because that’s exactly the crew you want to be repping when you put your free t-shirt on and hit the streets. Plus they’re paper thin, so your nipples and (if applicable) chest hair are totally exposed. And people jockey for those t-shirts like they’re woven from gold.

With the destruction of Shea Stadium should come the dismantling of the t-shirt cannon. In its place, Mr. Met should hold the world’s greatest and most powerful hot-dog cannon. Because hot dogs, unlike crappy t-shirts, have real, tactile, wonderful value. Delicious value.

We were going to finish this post with a staggeringly genius conclusion about how hot-dog cannons somehow embody all that’s awesome about our society, but that will have to wait until after we go get a hot dog.

We’re not talking about the Mets today. Too traumatic. There’s all sorts of nasty things to say about the Amazins, but we’re all out of jokes.

The Jets, though? Ripe for comedy. That’s because the Jets are quickly becoming the joke that they seemingly always are, even though everyone thought Great Big Brett Favre would somehow make the team “relevant,” whatever that means. Is a team relevant if it’s led to an 8-8 record by a Hall of Fame quarterback? Is a team relevant if its defense can’t get out of its own way, if it’s high-priced offseason additions are pulling lame and pulling up bad?

The Jets only have two types of seasons: Mediocre and bad. Sure, they could end up 9-7 or 8-8 and squeak into the playoffs, only to lose to some barely superior team and get that 15th overall pick they covet. Or they could go 4-12 and get the third overall pick, which they’ll blow on someone who stinks.

Of course, we’ve counted out Fav-ruh before and he’s come back to bite us. And since we’re big Jets fans and big Favre haters, it would only be fitting that Favre would lead the Jets to a championship this season so the one time our team wins in our lifetime the quarterback is some old dude we can’t stand.

Still, until that happens, we’re going to revel in Favre obviously wishing he stayed retired.

Does anyone know? We haven’t really been paying attention, and all we know is that Michael Phelps’ run to eight medals is complete and he’s a national treasure and maybe The Greatest Athlete of All-Time, depending on who you ask.

The bad part is we don’t really care. Sure, Phelps’ accomplishments are certainly impressive, but we wonder why, if he’s such a great athlete, he didn’t take up a real sport like baseball or basketball or cribbage. Swimming’s hard as anything, we know that. We can barely do it ourselves. But swimming is merely a contest, not a sport proper.

That’s essentially why we haven’t been following the Olympics, because there are far more contests than sports being contested. Basketball? Sport. 100-meter dash? Contest. And the problem with contests is that someone wins and everyone else loses, and there’s not much else that can happen. Whoa, some guy ran faster than all those other guys. Wow. What else did we expect?

Here’s the thing about Phelps: He should take up competitive eating. That’s something we’d love to watch.

We love the third person. We believe all athletes should be required, by law, to refer to themselves only in the third person. Not only would this provide for lots and lots of hilarity, but it would really help clarify a lot of their statements.

We bring this up, of course, because Plaxico Burress referred to himself in the third person about 30 times in 30 seconds this weekend, making him our new favorite athlete in New York. Jose Reyes and Pedro Martinez have also referred to themselves as “Jose Reyes” and “Pedro Martinez,” so points for them. David Wright? Almost certainly not.

Duke Casanova feels its time for David Wright to start behaving less like an all-around good guy and more like a professional athlete in the nastiest sense of the term. C’mon, dude, we know it’s there somewhere. Just let the beast out, D-Wright. It might not help your ad revenue, but it’ll jack up your street cred.

We’re done whining about the Brett Favre thing for now, so we’ll focus our attention today on the one guy who’s saga has lasted longer and irritated more viciously than Favre’s, Roger Clemens.

Today, the Rocket’s lawyer, whose name is Rusty Hardin, filed a 97-page report to kick off Clemens’ defamation case against Brian McNamee. If you’re scoring at home, McNamee hooked up Clemens and just about everyone else in baseball with steroids, but Clemens still denies everything. Also, Clemens likes young girls, and his lawyer is named Rusty Hardin.

Here’s an excerpt from the thrill ride that is Rusty Hardin’s case against McNamee:

No legal system would allow government agencies to somehow ‘deputize’ a private individual or entity such that any statements a person makes to the private entity would be covered by a priviledge.

Hard-hitting stuff. The most amazing part of the whole thing is that the Clemens’ legal drama got buried after 11 pages of Favre coverage in the Daily News, the same paper that covered Clemens’ every move a few months ago.

Maybe the big problem with the 24-hour news cycle and all the related fallout is that news gets pushed out of mind so quickly. If we all forget about Clemens’ legal proceedings, will we all forget that he’s an outrageous and intolerable jackass? We hope not, because we want to continue to relentlessly bash him here and on the show.

Wow. After all that talk, we really didn’t see this coming. Now we’re conflicted. As Jets fans but Favre haters, what are we to do?

Favre’s an upgrade over whoever the Jets were going to trot out at starting quarterback. Is he a solid plan for the future? Not at 39 with an undisclosed number of concussions weighing on his brain. Would we rather they tank the season with Kellen Clemens learning on the job? Probably. But that’s not happening. The Jets have Fav-ruh.

Here at The Nooner, we’re actually pretty excited about it. For better or worse, Favre always takes the headlines. Headlines like: “Favre Wins, Weeps” or “Favre Loses, Weeps” or “Favre Throws Six Interceptions, Weeps” or “Favre Shaves Stubble, Grows It Back Instantly, Weeps.”

Frankly, we’re just psyched to see how the whole down-home-country-boy-who-wears-Wranglers-and-drives-a-pickup-truck thing plays in New York. Where’s Favre going to play his funtime pickup game with all those other guys in Wranglers? Central Park? Too crowded. Prospect Park? Too hilly. Washington Square Park? Too many drug dealers, and none of them selling pills (though Favre might play there just to get Mario Manningham with his first pick). We fully expect to see Favre scrambling around one of those dank alleys over by the Midtown Tunnel, using telephone poles as yard markers and throwing touchdowns to the guy using the abandoned Hyundai to set a pick on the defender.

We’re still trying to rationalize the whole thing. At least Favre can throw the ball farther than Pennington and more accurately than Clemens, plus he might be a good mentor to the young quarterback, who only has the throwing-interceptions part of Favre’s game studied.

So Brett Favre turned down the Packers’ offer of $20 million to stay the hell out of training camp. Then he refused to talk to the Jets, one of the teams in hottest pursuit of The Most Overrated Quarterback of All-Time. Then he leaks word that he wants to play for the Vikings, which has got to be the No. 1 way to ensure that the Packers will do everything in their power to make sure you’re happy and not in Minnesota.

Now, after all the nonsense, Favre is talking to the Jets. We’re onto you, Fav-ruh. This is probably just another dupe move to make the Bucs more likely to trade for you or something, so you can go throw interceptions like Chris Simms would if given the chance.

The funniest and yet most irritating part, of course, is that every time Favre farts, ESPN covers it as breaking news. There’s nothing about Favre’s stupid non-comeback that’s breaking or even news at this point. The guy wants to play overrated football, the Packers want to start their younger quarterback, but the media wants Favre Favre Favre so he can cry in interviews and make headlines and fill up their front pages with his stupid down-home stubbleface.

Just stop, Brett Favre. Stop. We don’t care where you go or even if you play anymore. Just shut up and stop making noise. Some team will want you, and you’ll end up playing somewhere, probably nowhere near as well as you played last year. It’s on you and the Packers brass to make this end soon, or else we’ll figure out a way to intercept your comeback attempt. We don’t know how yet, but based on your history, it shouldn’t be that hard to pick off.

Jason Giambi shaved his mustache yesterday, a tragic day for facial-hair enthusiasts but a good one for those who wish Jason Giambi would just shut up and go take walks and hit home runs and stop bothering us with his thongs and mustache and nonsense.

We used to love mustaches. Really. They’re totally hilarious, and in some contexts we still find them funny. But when Giambi grew that disgusting hellbeast of a lip ornament, we knew mustaches had jumped the shark.

The mustache hit the peak of its hilarity sometime around the turn of the millienium, but once it became a fashionable accessory for every tight-jeansed hipster in Williamsburg it started to lose some of its luster. The great mustaches are the unironic ones, like those belonging to Keith Hernandez, Tom Selleck and Salvador Dali. Silly pencil-thin jobs or jokey handlebars are not what the mustache is about, and not why the mustache is or ever was funny.

If you want to grow a mustache, grow the classic “Dad” stache, and wear it proudly like your old man once did. Otherwise, you’re just contributing to the sharp decline of one of our nation’s most hysterical traditions.

This is a tough card for us to play since we’re affiliated with a different sports news network, albeit a regional one. But man, is anything going to be lamer than SportsCenter going live every day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.? We guess this is some sort of attempt to tap into the network morning show audience, and it just so happens that network morning shows are a festering boil on the backside of humanity. “Look at this really fat puppy! Breaking news: We found a fatter puppy! Aww.”

So now ESPN’s going to serve you its nonsense live. Woohoo. Finally we’ll get to know Who’s Now right now, instead of who was now an hour ago, when they filmed that segment. First breaking story on ESPN live? ESPN goes live! Second story? Brett Favre just farted! Someday the Yankees will play the Red Sox! And these stories are all coming at you LIVE! NOW! LIVE!

Sorry, we don’t want to seem bitter. We used to love SportsCenter back in the day, with Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann and Craig Kilborn. In fact, we loved it so much that we’re psyched to see Patrick and Olbermann relive their old glory on Football Night in America, even if we know they’re not going to be as funny as they used to be and they’ll most likely end up as a parody of their former selves. Whatever.

Also, where have you gone, Craig Kilborn? We thought your show was pretty awesome, just not quite as awesome as Conan. But now we have TiVo, so we could watch both. Come back, Craiggers. The world needs your patented sleazy brand of humor now more than ever.