We have, and we don’t mind telling you that we’re royally ticked off. Can you believe it? Doesn’t the American Heart Association have something better to do than to pick on our beloved county? But there it was last week, blasted across the front page of our morning newspaper, the AHA saying that our very own Fresno County is the second smoggiest county in the nation.

We can’t understand where we went wrong. Sure, we doubled the number of smokestacks at the Pollstar.com typeface refinery. After all, when you consider how many big tours were launched last year, such as The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and Cher, only an idiot could have missed that perfume-like black smoke spewing from our world headquarters. But number two in the nation? We don’t think so.

And yeah, we did up the capacity of our sludge burners, those football field-size incinerators where we dump all the dates after they’ve taken place. Like last year’s co-headline tour starring Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth. But we hardly thought all those birds dropping out of the sky would put us in the number two position.

Then there’s the Pollstar.com HTML rendering plant. Yeah, they had a good chuckle down at the pork processing facility when we bought off all of their leftover hides, knuckles and snouts to manufacture our own unique glue that holds all of our Web elements together and ensure that the dates for Dave Matthews Band and Status Quo display in a mostly chronological order. Yes, they all laughed at us. That is, until the sweet smell of pigskin filled the air. Ha! But nobody here is laughing at the thought of being number two in the smog-a-rama sweepstakes.

But there it was in the paper last week, in headlines bigger than the dates for Radiohead, Phish, Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac combined, proclaiming that we’re number two in the nation when it comes to smog, smoke and soot. Well, we have only one thing to say to those buttheads down at the American Heart Association. Yeah, that’s right. Just wait until next year. Come next May you guys won’t be calling Fresno County the second most polluted county in the country. And you wanna know why?

Because, when you’re number two, you just have to try harder.