Do you not understand how this works? If we wanted to see who was faster, we'd give you both starting blocks and have you race. There's an entire sport based on just that.

You're supposed to bend all the way over at a 90-degree angle and then spin so fast blood rushes to your head, overflows your capillaries and spills into your eye sockets and ears, blinding you and drowning those little bones that control your balance: the anvil, the pinto and the Santa Maria.

And then you try to race. But here's the secret. It's not a race. You're supposed to be so dizzy that you stumble and fall. And not just fall, "crazy" fall, face first, because the part of your brain that controls your arms has been flooded, too, and instead of breaking the fall, you crumble like a wounded giraffe, your legs still spinning as you spit out a big hunk of sod.

The crowd laughs, because that's our role in the bat-race/crowd relationship. It's highly-entertaining when done correctly. Of course everyone knows this by now. No one goes into the dizzy bat race thinking, "Hmmm. Wonder why we have to spin at the begining of the dizzy bat race." And you don't need a medical degree to figure out that less spinning and less bending make it easier to win.

A lot of people don't realize that performing a memorable fall is the ultimate victory, especially if the other person just sprints to the win and the entire crowd knows he or she didn't commit to the true spirit of the dizzy bat race. So until then, we're stuck with lousy, lousy dizzy bat races. That's why participants should only be little kids. Because they're gullible and they appreciate a good fall.

When aliens invade -- as they inevitably will -- before they drain our bodies for fuel, or are recruited to the cast of "The Real World" for their culture-clash potential, we should line them up for dizzy bat races. They'd never see it coming. At least we'd go out with smiles on our faces.

Assuming blood rushes to their heads the way it does ours. Or that they even have heads.