The bottom line- She got creamed

Kim Crosby, a rookie on the ARCA stock-car circuit, probably spent less time driving at Talladega Superspeedway last Saturday than she did explaining her new sponsor.

That would be Boudreaux's Butt Paste, a budding diaper-rash product well-known in Louisiana, and Crosby swears by the stuff.

"Everyone on my crew has been using it because it's been so hot this week," she told The Associated Press before the race. "It prevents chafing and acne.

"It's good for poison oak, poison ivy, poison whatever. It will clear up anything."

Well, not anything.

"Except engine trouble," noted Jim Hodges of the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, "which took Crosby out of the race on the 42nd lap."

Pass the O.J.

In "this week's sign of the apocalypse," Sports Illustrated reports, O.J. Simpson has been invited to coach in a high-school all-star football game sponsored by the Florida-based Athlete Recruiting Service.

Said NBC's Jay Leno: "Just when it looks like California is going to take the title for the dumbest state in the union, Florida turns it around and snatches it back."

No canned answers

Still no explanation from that souvenir-seeking Phillies fan charged with stealing a Veterans Stadium toilet seat.

Her lawyer, we're guessing, told her to put a lid on it.

Tide? It's rollin', baby

Just hours after his Alabama football team lost in double overtime to Arkansas on Saturday, Crimson Tide coach Mike Shula's wife, Shari, was induced and gave birth to the couple's second child, a daughter.

As Shula told the Birmingham News: "She was one person I coached up pretty well to do her job on game day."

Otherwise, Shula is reserving further comment until he's reviewed both sets of game films.

They said it

Mike Downey of the Chicago Tribune on 1908 when the Chicago Cubs last won a World Series: "Babe Ruth ... wasn't the Bambino -- he was a bambino. Well, almost. A growing lad, let's say."

John Blanchette of the Spokane Spokesman-Review on the Mariners averaging 98 wins the past four seasons but never reaching the World Series: "This is the great riddle of the Seattle Mariners, the Phil Mickelson of baseball, the best team never to have won a major."

Syndicated columnist Norman Chad, wondering why NFL officials feel the need to throw penalty flags so high: "It's pass interference, not Cirque du Soleil."

Tom FitzGerald of the San Francisco Chronicle on the difficulties faced by the 49ers in their 35-7 loss to the Vikings at the Metrodome: "They had trouble hearing the signals above the roar of Terrell Owens."

He knows the ropes

Venezuelan Henry Ayala, 22, smashed two rope-skipping world records yesterday, performing 1,005 consecutive skips and 211 in one minute, England's Press Association reported.

Your middle-schooler could do that, you say? Well, Ayala did his on a high wire -- 26 feet above the center ring -- at a circus in Bristol.

And, just to clear up any misconception that Ayala once dropped out of school to join the big top: He merely skipped a few grades.

-- Dwight Perry, The Seattle Times