A simpleton sheriff in Wisconsin, what I'll do if the Roger Clemens coverage doesn't stop and a new show I'm going to take a chance on

- If I lived in Grant County, Wisconsin, I would be feeling less than thrilled about the current state of law enforcement in my community. The current sheriff, a man who actually changed his name to Andy Griffith in an attempt to gravy train off of the popular 1960s TV series The Andy Griffith Show, has just finished up a legal battle with the original Andy Griffith over the legality of his name change. The law enforcement artist formerly known as William Harold Fenrick won a lawsuit against him by Griffith when U.S. District Court Judge John Shabaz ruled that Fenrick/Griffith did not violate trademark and copyright laws, as well as the actor’s privacy, by changing his name. The sheriff may not have violated those laws, but he did violate the Moron’s Code when he based a real-life campaign for public office on comments such as: “They never did unethical stuff like that in Mayberry (the fictional town where The Andy Griffith Show was set)!” Wow….you got us there, Sheriff, because it’s hard to refute what a fictional character on in fictional town on a fictitious TV show four decades ago did. If you’re basing your policies on law enforcement as practiced on TV, how’s about going for something more recent, say Miami Vice, NYPD Blue or Law & Order? Must be a great time to be a criminal in Grant County right now………

- So help me God, if I’m beaten over the head with Roger Clemens stories by ESPN every day for the next month until he actually makes his 2007 Yankee debut, I will drive to Bristol myself and burn the entire ESPN complex to the ground. The news of Clemens and his self-promoting ego trip of a career restarting with the New f’ing York Yankees has led every ESPN broadcast I’ve seen this week, and it just goes to show what a lack of intelligence and discernment the network’s decision makers have. The guy is in his mid-40s, he can't even get through more than six innings a start anymore, he doesn’t even care about baseball enough to travel with the team and be in the dugout for road games and series where he won't be pitching and he’s on a team that is a 50-50 shot to miss the playoffs at this point. Yet you tools at ESPN act like you’ve got Nolan Ryan in his prime coming back to the best team in baseball and forget that a dozen other stories, both inside baseball and in sports in general, are more noteworthy and relevant right now. Non-Yankee fans are already sick of hearing about the ass clowns in pinstripes, so maybe talk about how the Milwaukee Brewers have the best record in baseball, how the Red Sox are playing stellar baseball and lead the Yankees by six games, how the Cleveland Indians have gotten amazing pitching and lead the AL Central (baseball’s toughest division) or how the Chicago Cubs are finally putting things together after a massive off-season roster overhaul and have won six games in a row. Those are just a few thoughts for stories you may want to focus on instead of an overweight, injury-prone pompous ass of a pitcher coming back to a mismanaged, overpaid team of rotisserie all-stars that 98.4 percent of America despises.

- It’s always seemed like Ty Pennington is on some type of drugs and/or a bender based on his insane, loopy act as host of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and now we have confirmation of those suspicions. The freakishly energetic actor/host who spends an inordinate amount of time yelling into a megaphone and bossing people around while traveling the country in an RV with a crew of designers and carpenters to fix up homes for needy families was picked up by the LAPD’s West Traffic division Saturday for suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol and drugs. In an ironic twist, he probably had the chance to hear someone yelling at him over a bullhorn, as in “Step out of the car, keep your hands where we can see them!” As bad as this is, the whole driving under the influences of drugs and booze, Pennington can take solace in one thing: at least the LAPD officers didn’t administer their trademark brand of justice during the stop. He wasn’t beaten with a baton or shot with rubber bullets, so there is a silver lining in all of this.

- I don’t know what a special advance preview of a TV show is exactly, but I’m planning on giving a shot to ABC’s new offering Traveler this Thursday at 10 p.m. Partly it’s because the premise of the show looks interesting, but an equal if not larger part of the equation is the fact that by the time the fall TV season kicks off, as many as four of the shows I faithfully watched this year (The O.C., Gilmore Girls for sure, maybe Veronica Mars and a small chance for One Tree Hill) could be gone, so I need to find new shows to watch. Maybe the special advance preview means the series will officially debut this fall, but then having an episode air now doesn’t make much sense. Of course, I got burned by ABC with Six Degrees last fall/this spring and the network hasn’t had anything of quality to offer (and no, Desperate Housewives is not quality, it’s crap-ola) lately outside of the mildly decent Brothers & Sisters. In case you haven't seen the promos for Traveler, it centers on a trio of friends, two of whom are forced to go on the lam on New York City after their friend Will Traveler is involved in a terrorist attack. Not sure how this could be sustained for more than a season or two max, but I’m willing to give it a chance.

- Quite a week for Calvin Borel, the winning jockey in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. On race day, he whipped and beat his horse to a win, then after the race use a sopping-wet sponge to cool down his horse, including a swipe across the horse’s rear end with the sponge followed by him wiping his own face with the sponge. Then on Monday, he got up close and personal with another horse’s ass, except this one was named George W. Bush. Borel was invited to a formal dinner at the White House, where he also met Queen Elizabeth II of England. W. used the event as a platform to hawk his farce of an agenda for the war in Iraq, yammering on and on about the U.S.-British partnership in Iraq and dropping his meaningless buzz words “freedom” and “liberty” a combined seven times. The queen didn’t discuss the war at all, saying she was using her vacation to get away from that sort of thing. Makes me wish W. would take an extended vacation of his own, say for the next 19 months to Siberia, Antarctica, someplace he’s likely to do the least amount of damage.