Man, that was a long break, way too long. Remember all that praise I was heaping on antibiotics last month? Forget I said it. I'm moving ATMs ahead of them on my greatest-inventions list.

Paul Tagliabue just finished his Imminent Collapse of the NFL press conference by telling us that there's nothing to talk about with the union on a new labor agreement, that what the union is asking for is unreasonable, and that they're "trying to have their cake and eat it, too.'' That meant that the players were asking for a bigger cut of the revenues without recognizing all the risk and debt the owners were taking on by building those big, pretty, state-of-the-art stadiums that are bringing in the revenue lately - including the increased TV money that, apparently, is a direct result of those nice stadiums.

For the record, those are the same stadiums that the owners and league stumped, lobbied and blackmailed local governments to build for them, at an absolute minimum of cost to the teams themselves. Teams have threatened to move unless those governments bankrupted themselves to keep them in town, and Tagliabue sometimes dangled Super Bowls in front of those cities to get them to roll over (which is, as we know, why the last two games were in Jacksonville and Detroit).

As for that TV money, the NFL is beginning the process of keeping that in-house, now that its NFL Network is carrying regular-season games this coming season. Just Thanksgiving so far, but you know it won't stop there.

Some would call that a necessary negotiating ploy, others would call it posturing and gaining leverage with the public. Still others would call it lying through your teeth. The title of this posting is the punchline to the old joke, "How can you tell when (some owner, commissioner, spokesman, or whoever habitually struggles with the truth) is lying?"

Speaking of which, Tagliabue said the situation with this new agreement is "as dire as dire can be.'' Which is not far from what his NBA counterpart, David Stern, said last summer, not even two weeks before the league and union struck a new deal - and the old deal didn't have two more years to run, as the NFL's does. As always, take it all with a grain of salt.