I still hate Brett Favre, but I love the concept of a Jennifer Wilbanks rock opera!

- If you’re slotting the beauty pageants in terms of which one is cooler and more interesting, the Miss America pageant, which just awarded its title to Miss Oklahoma Lauren Nelson, would be a notch or two below Donald Trump’s Miss USA pageant. This is largely because Nelson, an aspiring Broadway star (deduct points for that), has not 1) had slutty photos of herself posted online, 2) been accused of drug and alcohol use, 3) helped corrupt a younger pageant contestant into her clubbing lifestyle, and 4) been seen making out with other chicks. She appears to be pretty squeaky clean, and thus pretty uninteresting. Other factors in this particular pageant losing status and relevance: Mario Lopez hosted, and as much as I love A.C. Slater, if he’s hosting your event and it’s 2007, that doesn’t say good things about you. One of the celebrity judges for the event was Chris Matthews, and if that blowhard is involved, then he is 1) promoting himself somehow, and 2) making the whole thing less enjoyable. Also, the pageant incorporated so-called “reality show tactics” like the aforementioned “celebrity” judges and increased viewer voting. Let’s face it, no one wants to hear about squeaky clean, girl next door types who are genuinely interested in helping children in the context of a beauty pageant. Give us the skanks, the partiers and the morally impaired………..

- I’m not sure when or where the trend of creating operas and rock operas based on recent news and cultural events got started, but I like it. First, it was an opera about the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding skating/assault scandal. You remember it, Harding had some of her goons whack Kerrigan on the knee in a back hallway of an arena because Harding wasn’t good enough to beat out a healthy Kerrigan for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. An opera was written and performed about the saga, and now that idea has been applied to the bug-eyed runaway bridge from Georgia, Jennifer Wilbanks. Who could forget that crazy whack job, with her eyes popping right out of her skull and her zany story about faking an abduction and going across the country on a bus on the eve of her wedding? Well, the Red Clay Theatre & Arts Center in Duluth, Ga., will be the site for a rock opera about the Wilbanks story beginning in October. Any time a society can hold our freaks and mental cases up to continued, increased scrutiny and do so by openly deriding and belittling them on stage, I’m down. I look forward to the Michael Jackson opera about his (alleged) child molestation and house equipped with “adult alarms” and the rock opera about that nutty lady who lived in a tree for a year to save it from being cut down (went by a nature name, something like Butterfly). This is about the only way to add any intrigue to operas, because hearing overweight tenors belt out unfamiliar songs in Italian just isn't doing it for me.

- What are the odds that a California jury administers actual justice to a celebrity accused of a crime? Well, there’s the O.J. trial…..never mind on that….well, there’s the Robert Blake tr-…..never mind on that. Umm, maybe the odds aren't good, I guess, but maybe the trial of singer Brandy for misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter will be different. I would advocate prosecuting her for the awful, atrocious music she’s unleashed on all of us, but I don’t believe there’s a legal precedent for that. In the case of the accident, Brandy rear-ended a Honda sedan with her big, frakkin’ Range Rover, sending the Honda into the center divider, after which it was hit by another car and the driver of the Honda, a 38-year-old waitress from L.A. (i.e. aspiring actress) was killed in the crash. It would be refreshing, for once, to see a rich, famous person actually receive justice for a crime they committed, and I’m sure the family of the victim would appreciate that as well. Of course, it’s SoCal, so there are better odds of a massive snowstorm hitting and the entire region running out of Botox than there are of Brandy actually getting the maximum one-year prison sentence that comes with a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter conviction.

- Will Brett Favre be back with the Green Bay Packers next season? Does anyone give a frak? Why is anyone paying attention to a past-his-prime gunslinging quarterback whose team is mediocre at best? All of the above are questions that need to be answered, and if last off-season is any indication, we’ll have plenty of time to debate each and every one of them. Think back to last year, when Favre ended another subpar regular season with promises to make up his mind on retiring or returning to play. He drug the decision out for an excruciatingly long period of time, seemingly vacillated back and forth, back and forth, screwed the team over because they couldn’t make a lot of roster decisions and moves until they knew his plans, then decided to come back. That meant a second straight year of sitting on the bench for 2005 top draft pick Aaron Rodgers, who has gotten zero chance to develop because he continues to be stuck behind Favre. Well, ol’ Brett came back, he was OK, not stellar, and the team finished a pedestrian 8-8. Now, he promises that he’ll make a quick decision on whether he’ll play in 2007, but how can you possibly believe that promise? He’s a self-promoting media hound who is being incredibly selfish and putting himself way ahead of his team at all times, yet he tries to pull off the “Aw shucks, I’m just a good ‘ol boy who loves playin’ football” routine. I wish he would just retire because he’s no longer relevant, but rather is a circus clown sideshow that has no bearing on the things that truly matter in the NFL. Go away Bret, go home to your farm and ride around on your tractor all day long. You’re no longed needed in the NFL…….

- Somebody should tell would-be thieves in Denmark that the Italian Job, The Score and The Thomas Crowne Affair are just movies, not blueprints for these tools to try to imitate. In downtown Copenhagen, thieves attempting to break into a department store’s jewelry department drove a car through the store’s front window and across the ground floor of the store, but they left empty-handed when they were unsuccessful at running the car into the jewelry counter. A metal security gate prevented them from accessing the jewelry area, so the masked men turned around and drove back out. Brilliant plan, you Evel Knievel wannabes, but next time maybe mix in a little planning and forethought with your daring automobile stunts and then you might have a chance at actually pulling off a successful heist. Questions like, “Is there an iron security gate guarding the jewelry?” would be an excellent starting point.