All Chino Hills precincts have reported making it official: February has once again finished 12th on Rankman’s annual ranking of months.

Order of merit:

1. April (Masters\Rankman’s birthday\Hitler offed self)
2. June (also Alice Cooper’s favorite month because, you know, school’s out)
3. July (trashy novels at beach while sipping umbrella drinks under an  umbrella)
4. May (merry month and, unlike February, easy to say and spell)
5. March (NCAA Tournament, favorite month for dimes)
6. November (college football rivalries trump Kennedy assassination)
7. January (naive hope of better times to come)
8. December (Boxing Day, college bowl picks, Charlie Brown Christmas Special)
9. August (too many nightmares involving Pop Warner practice, Hiroshima and Manson Family)
10. October (um, Columbus didn’t discover America)
11. September (back to school…February’s bastard child)
12. February (shortest\longest month)

February is such a downer even this year’s awards banquet has been rescheduled for a better month (tentatively June or July).

February should be dropped from all “book of the month” clubs and scraped off the Gregorian calendar, easily accomplished by adding 14 days to January and March. This being a Leap Year, March has to take on 15 days.

February is so “this again?” it seems like Groundhog Day (Feb. 2). Don McLean once sang “February made me shiver, with every paper I’d deliver.”

The month dropped more bad news on his doorstep this week when authorities in Maine filed six charges against McLean in connection with an alleged domestic abuse case.

And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died

February is about as necessary as your appendix and stinks worse than left-out cantaloupe. What good is a month famous only for mattress sales? Wait, my apologies:  it is also National Bird-Feeding month in the U.S.

You think it’s a coincidence Sports Illustrated releases its annual skinsuit edition in the dark, dank, dreariness of February?

The month also co-sponsors the biggest fraud of the year: Valentine’s Day, the blatant, wholesale and jacked-up exploitation of romance.

“Sportswriter” Rankman dreads February because it has little to offer beyond trumped up events like the NFL Combine and the winter doldrums of college hoops, NBA and NHL. Baseball only promises “pitchers and catchers” will soon be reporting.

Every four years they hold the Olympics in cheery places like Russia.

This February, other than Duke vs. North Carolina, has been particularly gloomy, as if someone literally turned out delight. Tiger Woods is nowhere in sight but former girlfriend Lindsey Vonn stands broad-day naked in SI’s swimsuit body-paint section. A Supreme Court Justice dropped dead in West Texas, the worst place you could imagine anyone dying. The stock market has been one big conniption fit while presidential politics have become more toxic than the water supply in Flint.

February’s low-light list (so far) excludes National College Football Signing Day only because an entire blog was recently devoted to an event that received a half-star rating by Rivalmonths.com

Football: You know the Super Bowl is bad any time a defensive player wins MVP. The postscript to Denver’s win was America’s punditry piling on Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for handling defeat like a kid who dropped his ice cream cone. To punditry’s defense, plenty of writers have criticized the petulance of white quarterbacks (Johnny Manziel, Ryan Leaf).

Some thought Newton-bashing required a tit-for-tat take down of choir boy Peyton Manning by reciting recent allegations proving a double standard. By “recent” we mean 1996, when Manning reportedly placed his junk in face of  female trainer at Tennessee.  Yeah, that was 20 years ago, and the story was covered by most media outlets.

Rankman thought the Newton reaction may have been disingenuous when hard-hitting African American sports columnist Jason Whitlock took Manning’s side Monday morning on The Dan Patrick Show.

Basketball: Anyone who follows the Lakers knows defense is “optional” in the NBA but this year’s All-Star game in Toronto was a Matador Convention. The West’s 196-173 win over the East was so embarrassing Rankman switched channels to  professional bowling, where at least the pins appeared to be trying to stop the ball. Rankman swears he remembers an NBA when players like Jerry West and Walt Frazier took the All-Star game more seriously.

Golf: Fan favorite Phil Mickelson nearly won at Pebble Beach last week but yipped on a short putt that would have put him in a playoff. Typical February, handing us champion Vaughn Taylor. At least Pebble “jester” Bill Murray provided levity in the after hours of the Pro-Am by allegedly throwing a fan’s smart  phone off a rooftop bar in the sleepy hamlet of “Carmel by the TMZ.”  Murray seems so much more jovial during on-air coverage. This week at Riviera expect Brendon de Jonge to roll home a 20-footer on Sunday to beat Jordan Speith.

Boxing: Manny Pacquiao went toe-to-toe homophobic this month by saying people who engaged in homosexuality were “worse than animals.” The good news is heavyweight Nike immediately dropped Pacquiao with a vicious left-hook to his sponsorship.

Baseball: Rankman was excited about newsprint “retirement” because it meant he could more closely follow his favorite childhood team. Image what a shock it was to learn the Los Angeles Angels of Inactivity did little in the off-season to improve their roster.

Years ago we had a saying: “Tanana and Ryan and two days of cryin’.” This year it’s “Richards and Trout and a whole lot of doubt.”

Grammy Awards: On the positive side, it drove the Lakers out of Staples Center for more than a week. Other than Kendrick Lamar and nice tributes to Glenn Fry and B.B. King,  however, it was mostly another self-absorbed orgy of sound. Lady Gaga did a clown-show ode medley to David Bowie-Hey man, please don’t do that again– with singer Adele garnering top honors in the category of “technical difficulties.”

The good news about any February is that it’s almost always March.