Residual bad effects from the World Series, Heroes talk and blackmail gone bad

With Prison Break off for a week (thanks for nothing, World Series, forcing a postponement of my favorite show even though you’re over), Heroes got my full attention Monday night and somehow managed to pack enough action into one hour to almost make up for missing PB. Among the things on the slate for our heroes was the continuing saga of Ando reading the scrolls sent to him in the hilt of the ancient Japanese sword from his friend Hiro, still back in 1671. Hiro and his new friend, legendary warrior Takezo Kensei, are preparing to attack the camp of White Beard along with Kensei’s girl Yaeko. Inside the camp, they find Yaeko’s father and try to rescue him only to find that he won’t leave until he destroys all of the guns he helped White Beard make. Hiro promises to take care of it, but when he does, in the midst of his getaway a bullet is fired at he and Yaeko and he has to teleport to avoid being hit, thus revealing his power to Yaeko. She realizes that he’s the one who’s been doing all of the amazing things she attributed to Kensei, kisses Hiro and in the process breaks the heart of Kensei, who sees the kiss. Kensei then pretends to forgive Hiro, only to knock him out and turn him over to White Beard. Another favorite hero, Peter Petrelli, is back in 2007 and off to Montreal. He and Kaitlin go to find the scene Peter painted of a street corner and building. They find the building, which looks to be a big empty space filled with old furniture and lots of boxes. Amidst the clutter is a note, taped to a mirror, telling Peter that “we” were right about the company, that the world is in danger. It’s signed by Adam, a person Peter doesn’t remember. It raises the question of who Adam is, a question furthered at company headquarters when Mohinder sees a file with the name Adam Monroe on a folder carried by Bob, the head of the company’s operations. At the time, Mohinder doesn’t have time to look into Adam Monroe further because he’s working with Monica, Micah’s cousin from New Orleans who is in Manhattan having her powers tested by Mohinder. When Bob turns the tables and asks him to inject Monica with a strain of the mysterious virus used to take away people’s powers, Mohinder refuses and the resulting confrontation ends up with Bob apologizing and assigning a partner to Mohinder to make sure this kind of problem doesn’t happen again. The problem is that this partner is the newly-cured Niki, who you have to figure will snap at some point. Monica returns to New Orleans, accompanied by Bob, who gives her an iPod loaded with new skills for her to learn with her muscle mimic ability to replicate anything she sees done. On the international front, Noah Bennett, a.k.a. H.R.G., and the Haitian, on the go in Odessa, Ukraine, where they meet and ultimately kill a Russian man, Ivan, who used to work with H.R.G. at the company. When Ivan refuses to tell H.R.G. where the rest of the Isaac Mendez paintings are that foretell the future, the Haitian begins taking Ivan’s memories one by one to threaten him into giving up the info. When he does, though, H.R.G. shoots him in the head, refusing an offer to return to the company and electing to go it on his own. Ivan warns him that, “You know that by killing me, you’re condemning yourself to hell.” To which H.R.G. cryptically, eerily replies, “I know.” The paintings themselves, located in a warehouse (of course, where else) appear erratic, random and not in a coherent order. Still, you know they’re a big part of the show’s story this season, so I’m sure we’ll be learning more about these paintings in episodes to come. Also on the international front, the trio of Maya, Sylar and Alejandro continued their drive to the U.S. border, making it across under difficult circumstances. Alejandro, wanting to get rid of Sylar, tells Maya they should ditch him but he disagrees, saying Sylar is “a gift from God.” At the border, Sylar talks Maya into driving across and using her powers to kill the border guards who stop their car. She does and they make it past, but when they stop to rest, a condescending Sylar tells Alejandro, who doesn’t speak English and thus can’t understand what’s being said, that he plans to kill both Alejandro and Maya and take their powers once he regains his own ability to rip others’ powers from them. At the least, he promises to use Maya’s powers to meet his own selfish ambitions. On a lighter note, Claire and new boyfriend West have some fun in the episode, exacting revenge on Debbie, the head cheerleader who denied Claire a spot on the squad. At a late night cheerleader gathering at the school, Claire pulls Debbie off to the side, asks for another tryout and when she’s rebuffed, West flies in, grabs Claire and drops her from 50 feet in the air, sending her crashing to the concrete stairs below, apparently dead. Debbie sees this and freaks out, especially when West chases her. Claire recovers, heals and when the police come, they find her in good health and pretending that nothing ever happened. Debbie, on the other hands, gets arrested when the cops find an empty bottle of alcohol nearby and blows a .13 on a breath test. Two AWOL heroes for the episode are Parkman and Nathan, along with the man they’re chasing, Parkman’s dad Maury. That being said, this episode was packed to the gills with action and it was the best of the season so far.

 

- I’m not a horror movie connoisseur, so I’m not the best person to judge Saw IV, but it did rake in a very respectable $32.1 million in its opening weekend this past weekend, so it’s off to a good start. High earnings dot mean it’s a good movie, but clearly the Saw franchise is established enough that a lot of fans want to see it simply because of its name value. Also, this film clearly benefited from a wisely chosen Halloween weekend release, which has to be the absolute best weekend of the year for a horror movie to come out. The movie itself has a twisted, convoluted, confusing plot, with the uber-creepy Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) back despite having supposedly been seen dead at the end of Saw III. We even see his creepy, disturbing autopsy for the first few minutes of this movie. Still, he manages to live on through flashbacks and weird microcassette recordings in which his voice speaks out of the freaky marionette dolls he’s placed in killing rooms throughout previous movies in the series. Characters from previous movies in the series are also woven into the plot of this installment, which muddies the waters even further. The story also tries to explain too many different things and tie up too many loose ends from prior movies, making it difficult to follow. The plot in this one centers on two cops who go missing, with a 90-minute deadline for finding them before they’re killed. Lots of deaths follow in dark, dank rooms with cryptic messages scrawled on the wall, messages such as, “See what I see,” or “Feel what I feel” and “Cherish your life.” What I happen to cherish is non-torture porn movies with good writing, so Saw IV doesn’t score well with me, but you might be a fan….

 

- If you’re going to try to extort millions of dollars from someone in a blackmail scheme, it’s always best to check beforehand to make sure that 1) you’re not a moron, and 2) you’re not attempting to blackmail the highest-profile, most heavily guarded and surveilled family in your entire country. Clearly these rules were not adhered to by two men who were just arrested for attempting to blackmail Britain’s royal family in September. The men claimed to have video of a member of the royal family having sex (hopefully not Queen Elizabeth, that would be disturbing)and evidence of that member of the family giving cocaine to an aide. The two idiot criminals were taken down in a sting operation in which they thought they were meeting with a member of the royal family member’s staff but instead were met by and taken into custody by the police. Well done, tools, clearly you are criminal masterminds who have a lot to offer the world.

 

- Nice crackdown on child labor in sweat shops, Gap. The fashion retailer has announced that it will convene a meeting with all of its Indian suppliers to “forcefully reiterate” its prohibition on child labor after children as young as 10 years old were found working in the sweat shop of a Gap supplier in New Delhi, India. According to the children, they were told that they’d been sold to the sweat shop by their families and couldn’t leave until they had repaid that debt. I have to ask, couldn’t we just promise the kids a 30-minute recess daily, give them extra juice boxes and fruit roll-ups and keep them working? Seriously, though, I don’t think a “forceful reiteration” of your policy is sufficient. Until you promise to immediately and permanently sever ties with any supplier whose sweat shops use child labor, your words will ring hollow and carry little to no weight.

 

-  Most of your constituents probably agree with you, Gover-nator, so just own your remarks to the British version of GQ magazine about marijuana not really being a drug and stop backpedaling. Ah-nold Schwarzenagger, California’s governor and the man with the heaviest Austrian accent since the Von Trapp family, is trying to pass off comments he made about the hippie lettuce to the British GQ as a joke. “It’s not a drug, it’s just a leaf,” he stated. He also told the magazine that he’s never taken drugs even though he’s on record as admitting to using steroids during his bodybuilding days. Clearly, his definition of drugs and whether he’s used them is sketchy and subjective, so maybe he and Bubba Clinton can form some sort of club. You know, a “depends on what your definition of is, is” club, named after the response Bubba gave when being questioned about his sexual escapades with one of the skanks he messed around with. If you’re going to make these kind of comments, Ah-nold, own it or else get smarter and stop saying things like this, your choice.

 

- Never have I hoped that international events aren’t predictive of future events in the United States as I do right now. Cristina Fernandez, the Argentina’s first lady, has been elected the country’s president. Her husband. Nestor Kirchner, is the current presidente, but he will be leaving office and his wife is replacing him. She’s a lawyer and current senator who has been by her husband’s side in his rise from small-state governor to president. Sound familiar? Fernandez may not have the menacing scowl, combative demeanor and angry lesbian haircut, but other than those minor details she sounds very much like a South American version of Hank Clinton. With a substantial lead in exit polls, it appears that Fernandez will have enough of a margin to avoid a runoff election with any of the 13 challengers in the race. She needs 40 percent of the vote with a 10 percent lead over her nearest challenger to avoid that, which she seems to have done. Let’s hope for our sake, America, that we don’t see this same story played out on our soil next fall.

No sponsors for the Golden Gate Bridge, why I hate Belichick and why Fred Thompson is no friend of immigrants

- Elect Fred Thompson as your next president and strike a blow at anyone who doesn’t look or talk like you or isn’t an American citizen. It may sound extreme, but it’s basically the immigration (anti-immigration, rather) platform of Thompson, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. Thompson basically wants to persecute illegal immigrants with every resource available and take every measure short of building a 75-foot-high fence around the entire country, wrapping it in razor wire and running 25,000 volts of electricity through that bad boy. That may actually be part of Thompson’s plan, he just hasn’t gotten around to announcing it yet. He wants to double the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, boost the border patrol to at least 25,000 agents, prosecute illegals and their employers (yeah, good waste of tax dollars there) and give illegals virtually no chance of ever becoming citizens. It’s a good thing this idiot has virtually no chance of being elected, because he might be the one candidate who’s actually meaner, angrier and more militant than Sen. Hank Clinton.

- Even if you can’t produce good music, interesting TV or anything else to keep me from calling you the worst innovation in the history of both television and music, you can still help people in this world. Take a lesson from the yahoos over at American Karaoke, whose Idol Gives Back campaign raised $75 million this year, including $30 million which went to six different charities in Africa in the amount of $5 million per charity, one of which is an AIDS prevention organization. Personally, my campaign would be called Give Idol Back, and it would offer the entire American Karaoke franchise and everyone who’s ever been associated with it to any country willing to take it off our hands. I really wish we could donate money to get this show off the air and keep it off the air, and to prevent people like that effeminate, whining waif Clay Aiken from ever making another album, because if that were the case, I and a lot of other fans of actual good music would be 100 percent behind that cause.

- I’m disappointed to hear that AT&T has scaled back plans to blanket all 62 square miles of the city of St. Louis, Mo. (inside city limits) with Wi-Fi signals as part of a new project. An entire city with Wi-Fi signals would have been cool and innovative, expanding the concept from its usual locales like airports and coffee shops and taking it to the masses. Instead, the company will launch a smaller pilot project in downtown St. Louis and see how it goes before deciding whether to take it to a grander scale. The scaled-down version of the project should be up and running by early next year, so keep your eyes and ears open to hear how it turns out. I know I’ll be watching….

- I’ve never felt any urge to watch the FX network’s plastic surgery drama Nip/Tuck, mostly because it seems like a gratuitous T&A session with little or no actual effort put into writing, plot strategy or intelligent dialogue. However, I’m willing to make a deal with the network and the show’s producers; if you all can us your Nip/Tuck magic to turn Rosie O’Donnell from the orca-fat, loudmouthed, stupid, fowl, bad-haircut-sporting loser she is into a semi-attractive, non-repulsive human being who I could stand to watch for more than five seconds without throwing up, I promise to be a devoted fan of your show for life and its biggest honk for the rest of my life. You see, O’Fat will be reprising her role on the show as the wealthy Dawn Budge this season, It can’t be a coincidence that her character’s last name is one letter away from being fudge, can it? Nor can it be coincidental that by changing one more letter, in her first name, it would read Down Fudge. To quote on Donald Trump: “Rosie is disgusting, both inside and out. Rosie is a loser.”

- My interest in the NFL is low this year for various reasons, but that hasn’t stopped me from seeing that Patriots coach Bill Belli-jerk is the most classless, arrogant, piece-of-crap a-hole in all of sports and loathing him for it. On the heels of the Spygate scandal in which he openly cheated and showed no remorse, Belli-jerk has developed a weekly habit of absolutely and deliberately humiliating whichever overmatched opponent his team has on its schedule. No game better illustrates this point than Sunday’s contest against the Washington Redskins. The Patriots were routing the ‘Skins, 24-0 at halftime, 38-0 after three quarters and yet there was New England’s first team offense and defense, going full bore to hammer the Redskins into the ground deep into the fourth quarter and keep on pounding them even after it was clear to even Stevie Wonder that the game was over. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady didn’t take a seat on the bench until the middle of the last quarter after his fifth touchdown of the day, this one putting his team up 45-0 after a drive in which they actually had the gall to go for it on fourth down despite being up by more than five touchdowns. First, that’s as classless and bush league as it gets, because if you’re up five touchdowns in the second half, there is no need to purposely embarrass your opponent and make no mistake, that’s exactly what this is. It shows no respect for the game or for your opponent. Second, it’s plain stupid, because you’re risking the health of your starters by playing them in a game you already have won, and as we’ve seen over and over, it only takes one play for a star like Brady to teat his ACL and be done for the year. Normally I would never this, because it’s bush league and no NFL coach would do it, but if I’m the coach of an opposing team and Belli-jerk pulled this kind of crap against my team, I’m ordering my guys to purposely play reckless and dirty and to try to hurt the Patriots’ stars and starters, because that would teach them a lesson and maybe then Belli-jerk would pull them out.

- Thank God that the board controlling the Golden Gate Bridge has more spine and soul than the sellout owners of pro sports franchises (and many colleges) across America. The board has rejected proposals to help finance the bridge’s operating budget with corporate sponsorship deals. You all know of places like Safeco Field in Seattle, Gillette Stadium in New England, Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland, the TD Waterhouse Center in Orlando, etc. The names of these venues sound lame and they are, but they are in place for one reason - $$$$$. Proponents of the sponsorship deals for the Golden Gate Bridge argued that they would raise $3-4 million annually toward the bridge’s $150 million budget and help ease the strain of its projected $81 million deficit for the next five years. The Golden Gate Bridge brought to you by Tostitos……just doesn’t sound right. Props to the board for proving that not everything in America is for sale to the highest bidder.

What to say to W., what A-Rod's opt out says and what will actually help the Tour de France

- I hope this isn’t an indication of how you’re going to be handling the rest of the 2008 Summer Olympics, China. Having Jackie Chan sing the official theme song for the Beijing Olympics is akin to the United States having an aging, past-his-prime action star like Don Johnson (looking for a…..heartbeat….) or David Hasselhoff belt out the Olympic theme for the Games in this country. The song, We Are Ready, doesn’t exactly scream Grammy, plus it raises the question of how ready the Chinese really are and how they got that way. Are you all ready because of that 8-year-old girl who ran more than 2,000 miles across the country, 39 miles per day, to “celebrate” the coming of the Games? Or are you ready because of the copious amounts of hookers that are reportedly going to be on hand for the Olympics? Also, the fact that Chan recorded the entire song in less than three hours in a visit to Beijing doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. He’s not exactly a musical legend like John Lennon, with the game to drop into the studio and hammer out a great song in a few hours. Stick to making bad action movies with Chris Tucker, Jackie, and leave the singing to professionals.

- Joe Francis, I can’t say that I feel at all sorry for you, bro. And that’s not just because you’ve seen more naked college and high school chicks than the rest of the American male population combined and probably had sex with many of those girls. No, I don’t feel sympathy for the founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise as he sits in a Nevada jail because he should probably have been in jail dozens of times before and he’s gotten off, so eventually he was going to run into legal trouble he couldn’t weasel out of. His undoing is the same as Al Capone’s, the same as Wesley Snipes’…..yup, tax fraud. Francis has been in jail since April, when he was initially jailed for contempt for yelling at attorneys during a mediation hearing in a federal lawsuit brought by women who were underage when Francis’ production company filmed them back in 2003, engaging in all sorts of raunchy activity. That lawsuit was eventually settled, but Francis had his bond revoked on criminal charges related to a 2003 arrest when he was charged with having $700 in cash as well as prescription and anti-anxiety drugs on his person while in the Bay County jail, all of this items being contraband behind bars. Federal officials then dropped in with tax evasion charges of their own and extradited Francis to Nevada, where he now sits awaiting trial. As he waits, he’s waging an impotent, lame campaign for his freedom, claiming that’s he’s being treated like a terrorist (No you’re not, Joe, not unless you’ve been subjected to water boarding, having electrodes strapped to your body, etc.). That’s a bad play, because trying to equate yourself with something like that just pisses people off even more. As part of his campaign, Francis is running ads on various websites showing pictures of him during a 2004 White House visit, which proves….I don’t know, not much. Bottom line for Francis is that he makes $29 million annually from his business ventures, so he can afford to pay his taxes and whatever fine the IRS wants to levy against him. Like I said, Joe, Capone learned it, Snipes learned it; you can commit all sorts of crimes, you can make criminally bad movies, but if you cheat on your taxes, you will go down.

- Make all the cosmetic changes to your event you want, Tour de France officials, just know that those changes don’t mean a damn thing as long as your sport remains as dirty and drug-ridden as it is. Tour officials announced yesterday that the race course will be altered for the first time since 1966 and will not begin with a full road stage instead of the individual time-trial race that had kicked things off for decades. The changes, which will also include less mountain terrain than in the past, are designed to rekindle interest in the race. However, what the Tour really needs to do if it hopes to regain fan interest is to start right now with drug testing every single rider who plans to participate in next year’s race and keep on testing them two or three times a week right up through the end of the race. With Floyd Landis, the Tour’s 2006 champion, making a mockery out of himself and his sport by continuing to fight the ruling that he cheated and must forfeit his title, and with dozens of riders and some entire teams booted from last year’s race due to positive drug tests, a clean race is the only thing that will really make a difference for fans – and even then, cycling is a fringe sport at best.

- Apparently 5 a.m. brawls at Waffle House restaurants maker for good album sales, because Kid Rock’s latest album, Rock N’ Roll Jesus, is currently second on the Billboard album charts. Granted, he’s sharing chart space with other musical luminaries and icons like Colbie Callat (who?) and Rascal Flatts, so it’s not really that noteworthy of an accomplishment. Also on the charts, in the top spot actually, is Bruce Springsteen, proving that is he and will forever be America’s working-class hero. The Boss’ album, Magic, holds down the top spot for now, although when you’ve got Colbie Callat breathing down your neck, you can never feel too secure. Meanwhile, on the New York Times bestseller list, two great books top the list: I Am America (And So Can You!) by satirist, comedian, TV host and South Carolina presidential candidate Stephen Colbert, and Clapton, the autobiography of legendary musician Eric Clapton. Pick one or both up, they’re great reads.

- Thanks, but F-you. That’s the message Alex Rodriguez and his agent, the abrasive and loathsome Scot Boras, are sending to the New York Yankees by exercising A-Rod’s opt-out clause in his contract without even sitting down to negotiate with the Yanks on a new contract or extension of his current deal. A secondary F-you goes out to the rest of baseball by the Rodriguez-Boras team announcing the opt out during the deciding game of the World Series, that shows a total lack of class as well. But with the Yankees prepared to offer him a deal reportedly in the $25-30 million range, A-Rod chose to walk away in search of his ultimate goal in life – more money. His flight is aided by Boras, a greedy, arrogant bastard of an agent who will lie, manipulate and do damn near anything else in search of the almighty dollar. That his biggest client is a total mercenary whose teams always improve once he leaves makes for a perfect match. Yes, the Yankees would have missed the playoffs without him this year, but he did nothing to help them win once they got there, and in the Apple, that’s what really matters. All that said, I still hope A-Rod breaks Bar-roid Bonds’ record, which only proves that Bonds is the most detestable athlete of our generation. But back to A-Fraud: He and Boras have to know, as does everyone else who follows baseball, that no team has ever won a World Series or even come close while paying one player as high of a percentage of the team’s salary dollars as the deal A-Rod wants would equate to. He’s showing that making the most money is what matters most to him, not being a champion. It would actually be fitting for him to sign with the Yankees’ arch nemesis, the Boston Red Sox, because at this point, the Sox have morphed into the Yankees, i.e. winning titles, outspending everyone else, having annoying, arrogant, omni-present fans, etc.). So chase your payday, A-Rod, just realize how little everyone thinks of you as you whore yourself out for a few extra bucks.

- No. Hell no. Those are the only two acceptable responses for Congress to give to W.’s request for $46 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq. With the current cost of the war running a tidy $10 billion per month and the total cost of this debacle at right around $455 billion for four-plus years of fighting, W. doesn’t deserve another dollar to finance his own Vietnam. And save it, Republican honks trying to say that if you oppose throwing more money away on this war that you’re unpatriotic because you’re not supporting our troops. I support our troops, namely I support them coming home right now and getting out of a dangerous place they never should have been to begin with. Don’t take my word, though, listen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: “The cost of this war grows every day – in terms of dollars, lives lost and our reputation around the world,” Pelosi stated. “The choice is between the Democrats’ plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan to waste another trillion dollars on this war. We must end this war.” Well put, Nancy, well put. Although I do think our national reputation is irrevocably f’d up by this point, but otherwise you’re right on the money. We must end this war…..now.

Amazing Race returns, college football's weekend and more crap from Dave Matthews Band

- So The Amazing Race is back next Sunday, Nov. 4, and I for one am pumped. Yes, the show does tend to cast according to some pre-set, scripted character types, just like The Real World, but it’s still the best reality series around, which is somewhat like being the tallest midget or the best karaoke singer on American Karaoke, i.e. there’s not much competition. Among the personality types we’ll see on display are the estranged parent and child looking to mend their relationship through the race (this time filled by an Asian-American father and daughter), a homosexual team (a pair of lesbian ministers), a pair of sarcastic a-holes who think they’re the smartest, dirtiest, savviest team to ever run the race (a pair of waiters whose male half sounds like he just down five tanks of helium), one or more angry young couples wherein the girl wants the guy to make a commitment and he refuses or the pair claims to be deciding whether to get married or call it quits (these are the teams that spend two-thirds of every episode yelling at each other at the top of their lungs, then hug at the end of each leg of the race and tell each other how much they love one another), and two hot (or in this case, were hot ten years ago) chicks who think they’re going to win using their looks. Yes, it’s poised to be another great season for the show, taking us to the far corners of the earth to experience things we might never see otherwise and for that reason alone, it’s worth watching and I’ll be tuning in Sunday night at 8 p.m.

- College football keeps on bringing the hits, and for one weekend at least, those hits didn’t take out the teams at the top of the BCS poll. Kansas, currently eighth in the poll but moving upward with each win and measure of respect earned, ground out a 19-11 win at Texas A&M, loading yet another bullet into the gun of those (i.e. everyone remotely associated with the A&M program) readying to fire coach Dennis Franchione once yet another disappointing season for the Aggies ends. Another unbeaten, besides Kansas, is Arizona State, which sent floundering Cal to its third straight loss. The Sun Devils fell behind 10-0 early but rallied for a 34-24 win. I honestly think Cal is taking this curse of the No. 2 team a bit far, because every team that has reached that spot in the past four weeks has lost, but Cal losing three straight is taking things to a new low. Speaking of promising seasons gone awry, the Washington Huskies started strong and had Jake Locker, the young quarterback that everyone was drooling over, then reality set in. A loss to #1 Ohio State started a six-game losing streak that continued with a 48-41 home loss to lowly Arizona Saturday. Meanwhile, the best of the one-loss team’s might be in Cal and Washington’s conference – the University of Oregon. Led by QB Dennis Dixon (similar to Vince Young except Dixon can throw worth a crap), the Ducks have lost only to Cal and now are posting ridiculous point totals every single week. Sorry LSU fans, but right now the Ducks look to be flying a whole lot higher than your Tigers. Oh, and thanks to all of the “experts” out there who keep trying to prop up Big Ten also-rans as “real tests” for Ohio State, ignoring the fact that these so-called challengers have built decent records playing a slate of cupcake games and electing to try to hype up games that are clearly not going to be close. Penn State is the latest in this mold, losing 37-17 at home to OSU, following in the footsteps of Purdue and Michigan State. Want to know OSU’s only real tests? Michigan in the last game of the regular season, then their bowl opponent. The list ends there. Elsewhere in the Big Ten, I know it’s not common practice to fire first-year head coaches, but I might make an exception for the University of Minnesota’s Tim Brewster. His team got out to a 10-0 lead at Michigan but then came from ahead to lose 34-10, barely bothering to show up for the final three quarters and dropping to 1-8 on the season, 0-5 in conference play. I know it’ the University of Minnesota, not a real football powerhouse, but you need to do better than losing every conference game no matter what, and UM is on its way to doing just that. And to the University of Georgia and University of Florida, nice act in your game, won 42-30 by UGA but marred by excessive celebration penalties on seemingly every score or big play the entire first quarter. Georgia went to far as to have their entire team run onto the field to celebrate their first TD, which they knew would be a penalty but did because coach Mark Richt actually threatened to give them extra running in practice if they didn’t get a penalty. Florida wasn’t much better, celebrating every big play like they’d just won the lottery. Both of you do realize you’ve lost three games and have no hope of even sniffing the national title game, right? Still, you’re doing better than Nebraska coach Bill Callahan, who looked lost, scared and confused on the sidelines as his team blew a 17-3 fourth-quarter lead at Texas, losing 28-25 and looking very much like a team that has given up on its coach and its season. Recruits who have committed to Nebraska are now withdrawing their commitments and going elsewhere, and I can’t say I blame them looking at this mess. Speaking of messes and spectacles….I know this isn’t big-time football, but how’s about a defensive stop in your game, Weber State and Portland State. One of you should not be defeating the other 73-68, and Weber State did Saturday, not unless the game is played on the hardwood with backboards, rims and nets. Lastly, the next to follow in Cal’s footsteps as former No. 2 teams who can’t stop losing, South Florida has now lost two in a row since making it to the second spot, dropping a 22-15 decision to Connecticut. Beware of falling USF Bulls….

- Georgia is going to be a dirtier, smellier place than usual for the next few weeks. Governor Sonny Perdue has instituted new water conservation laws to help combat the state’s water shortage as it faces its worst drought in decades. The measures ban the washing of state vehicles and limits inmates at state prisons to one quick shower per day. On a side note, can I ask where these inmates are supposed to find time to shiv one another with limited, reduced shower time? Everyone knows the shower is the best place to shiv someone, and now you’re hurrying these guys in and out so they don’t have time to take care of this kind of thing. And no, rural Georgia residents, these new rules don’t absolve you of having to shower or bathe every day – just kidding. I don’t mean any disrespect to my friends in Georgia, you all know I love you. Under Perdue’s orders, other banned activities include the power washing of state buildings and no new landscaping allowed on properties, which will be hard to enforce if only because you can’t patrol every inch of the state making sure that no one does any new landscaping. But perhaps it’s time for everyone in the state to brush up on their rain dancing technique, because at this point anything’s worth a try to get some rain…..

- For once, there’s a bureaucratic, official report I actually want to read, mainly because there’s no freaking way that the conclusions reached by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in this particular investigation are right. The agency investigated the use of Tasers on University of Florida student Andrew Meyer two months ago when Meyer got belligerent and refused to stop asking questions during a speech/Q&A session on the UF campus. All Meyer did was ask questions, yet instead of forcibly removing him from the microphone and escorting him out of the venue, security officers decided that even though five or six of them were pinning Meyer to the ground, they needed to break out their Tasers. Now, in an incredibly self-serving move, the state’s law enforcement department backs up its own? No way. Look, Meyer may be a goofball, he may be known for posting video clips of pranks he does on YouTube, but being verbally belligerent and annoying doesn’t necessitate the use of your Taser. Meyer is an average-sized guy, not some 6’8, 325 lb. behemoth on speed. He only refused to stop asking Kerry questions, he didn’t refuse to stop firing live rounds at him from his AK-47, so the cops should have kept their Tasers holstered.

- Seeing as it often gets above 90 degrees in Miami with insane 100 percent humidity, I’m seriously considering chalking this one up to the heat getting to a person and causing their brain to temporarily short circuit. How else do you explain Jeffrey Weinsier, a TV reporter for Miami’s ABC affiliate WPLG-TV, getting arrested for walking onto the grounds of Miami Central High School with a loaded gun despite repeated warnings from school officials and security not to do so? Weinsier was investigating a story on school violence (ironic, I know), but began carrying a gun several months ago after he began receiving threats because of a story he did on the unsanitary conditions at many local restaurants. Of all the things wrong with Weinsier’s decision making on this one, a few points come to mind. One, when you carry a loaded gun with you onto school property, you’re not investigating school violence, you’re creating it. Two, you’re telling me you cant possibly do your story without your 9mm on your hip? You’re that scared that you believe people are lying in wait for you where, in the restroom or the locker room for gym class, ready to attack you? If you’re looking to jump start your career, this is the wrong way to go about it. Just disarm yourself, leave the gun in the car and go inside to do your report. Every local affiliate has a tool like Jeffrey Weinsier – pushy, instigating, confrontational and abrasive investigative reporter looking to make waves and get under people’s skin to get a rise. Fortunately, most of them, with this exception, are smart enough not to walk into a school packin’ heat.

- You call this a prize? Are you sure that the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy (Army) won this contest, because their alleged reward is a free concert from those excrement-dumping (and excrement -sounding) losers in the Dave Matthews Band. To me, that sounds more like a punishment than a prize. The cadets at the academy allegedly won the contest by sending the best electronic invitations to contest sponsor AT&T and as a result will receive two free shows in November by Dave Matthews Band. They beat out entrants from more than 100 other colleges and universities, possibly because they have guns and weapons and threatened to invade and destroy anyone who beat them out – just kidding, cadets. “Congratulations! We’ll see you in November!” Dave Matthews himself excitedly declared to the cadets on a video message played in the mess hall at West Point. Personally if I’m a cadet, I’m either looking to visit home that weekend, find some other excuse to be off campus or buying the best ear plugs known to man, because the less DMB music you have to hear in your lifetime, the better off you are.

A monkey-induced death, a bad movie weekend and some crazy animal rights activists

- In one of the more bizarre deaths I’ve heard about in a while, New Delhi (India) Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa died when he was attacked by wild monkeys, fell from the balcony at his home and suffered fatal head injuries that led to his demise. He was simply out on the balcony, enjoying a nice day in New Delhi, when the Rhesus macaques came after him and he tried to fight them off. These wild monkeys are actually extremely common in the city, with many government buildings, temples and neighborhoods overrun by them. Still, you can’t help but laugh at least a few times when you get a mental picture of Bajwa standing on his balcony, then the monkeys attack and “GAAAAA!!!! AAAAHHHHHHH!!!! GET OFF OF ME, YOU ------ AAAAAAAHHHH!!!” Ok, I think I’ve gotten that out of my system…..moving on……..

- Maybe this coming weekend will be a stronger one at the box office than last one. I’m debating whether it’s a good or bad thing that I’d never heard of either one of last weekend’s top box-office earners prior to reading that they were last weekend’s top box-office earners, and I’m torn. On one hand, I make a point of knowing about what’s going on in the movie industry, but on the other hand, a clichéd vampire blood-and-gore fest like 30 Days of Night and a crappy comedy like Why Did I Get Married? aren’t exactly movies I’d be eager to know about. Even so, 30 Days of Night brought in $16 million to take the No. 1 spot for the weekend, with Why Did I Get Married? second and The Rock’s Disney comedy The Game Plan holding strong at third after several weeks in theaters. Unless I suddenly become a teenage girl and thus enamored with seeing Josh Hartnett on the big screen, I don’t see myself taking any further interest in 30 Days of Night, so this should be the last time I write about this movie.

- What a joyous outing it was for Britney Spears and the two kids unfortunate enough to be the demon spawn of Brit and K-Dirt, riding around in sunny southern California, a court-appointed monitor sitting in the passenger seat. I mean, who doesn’t think back fondly to their childhood memories, times spent with mom and the court-appointed parenting coach? Brit can’t visit her kids without that parenting coach present, at least not until she complies with a court order to clean up and get her life in order. You could look at it is a bad thing that she can’t be alone with her kids until she meets these conditions, but really Brit should be looking at it as a positive. Why? Because at least the judge didn’t include in the conditions for regaining custody that she has to lose those extra 40 lbs. she’s been carrying around, actually make a good album and establish herself as a legitimate musical artist…..

- Now this is what I call keeping your eye on the ball, Miami Dolphins. When you’re sailing along as smoothly as the ‘Fins are at 0-7, chugging along toward the reverse perfect season, it can be tempting to take your eyes off the ball and actually start trying and playing well. But the Dolphins aren’t letting up at all, following up the loss of starting quarterback Trent Green for the season with a severe concussion and the trading of top wide receiver Chris Chambers with the loss of two more key starters in Sunday’s loss to New England. Star running back Ronnie Brown, easily the team’s best player, tore his ACL and is out for the year. Also in that game, starting free safety Renaldo Hill tore the ACL in his right knee and he too will miss the remainder of the season. Hill is the first major personnel loss on the defensive side of the ball, so it’s good to see that it’s not just the offensive unit that is falling apart for Miami. The problems aren’t limited to the team itself; former Dolphin players are absolutely crushing this year’s team publicly, so hopefully that sniping will get into the heads of the current players and get them even less focused on winning football games. Combine all of those factors with the fact that this week the Dolphins are flying all the way to London to play arguably the hottest team in the NFL right now, the New York Giants, and 0-8 is all but assured at this point, which would (cue Bon Jovi) make it halfway there………..to 0-16.

- Ah, I love all you wacky animal rights activists out there. If you’re not out there spreading your “Meat is murder” message and sending snarky “You deserved it,” faxes to supposed animal oppressors like Sigfried and Roy when they’re attacked by their animals, you’re busy with your commando-style liberation missions of various critters and creatures. One such mission just took place in Denmark, where 5,000 minks escaped from a fur farm near the town of Asp during the night. Police suspect that the animals were freed by animal-rights activisits, although they currently have no suspects and are still investigating. The night raid on the farm has set thousands of minks loose in Asp and now the residents are busy trying to capture and get rid of them, although I’m sure the animal rights people who (allegedly) freed the minks couldn’t care less what problems their actions caused, just as long as the minks don’t end up in somebody’s fur coat. When it comes to agitators and troublemakers, there’s no one better at making a mess in the name of their cause than PETA and like-minded groups.

- How does an offensive lineman with any skill at all get cut from one of the worst teams in the NFL, a team whose current offensive line is being hailed as the worst in the league and possibly one of the worst of all time? Former St. Louis Rams offensive tackle Claude Terrell could answer that question: by being arrested for allegedly beating your wife in a suburban Houston hotel room. Terrell was arrested at a motel in the town of Webster early Tuesday morning after his wife called the police, saying he had beaten her. He was then found at a different motel nearby and arrested soon after. The team released him Wednesday and later in the day he made his first court appearance in the case. Claude, my man, based on the way that O-line is playing, if you’d been able to not go Ike Turner on your wife, you would have had a great chance to earn a permanent starting job and start to build a legitimate NFL career. As is, you’re heading to trial on domestic assault charges and with the new player conduct policy in the league, it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, for any other team to consider picking you, a marginal player, up and giving you another shot.

Alabam football players like textbooks too much, Kid Rock in a Waffle House brawl and To Catch a Predator catches a break

- Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but shouldn't the University of Alabama be pumped that some of its student-athletes are actually taking an interest in their textbooks? Sure, the reason they're getting more textbooks than they're allowed under NCAA rules is probably so they can turn around and sell those extra books for beer money or so they can give them to friends in the class so those friends don't have to buy their own books. But the university launching an investigation into the distribution of textbooks to scholarship athletes in all sports after five UA football players were suspended from the team for violating rules covering free books for course work just seems a little vindictive to me. The investigation is to determine whether any other athletes got more books for classes than they are permitted under NCAA rules. And to think that it only took a few months for Nick Saban to find himself knee-deep in the middle of his first scandal....of course, with Saban he usually only has a few months at any given stop before he starts getting ready to jump ship to his next coaching job. Still, it just strikes an incredibly ironic chord to hear that football players at a major Division 1-A football factory are in trouble not for ignoring their textbooks and classes but rather for getting too many textbooks.

- I can totally understand how Marie Osmond fainted this week on Dancing with the D-LIst Stars. After all, I nearly pass out from sheer boredom and disinterest any time I'm flipping through the channels and stumble across as little as 2-3 seconds of that spectacularly big waste of time, energy and bandwidth. And no, losers who double as fans of this show, I don't care who has been voted off the show this week, who's left, who Osmond's partner is or about your arguments that I shouldn't knock it because dancing is hard and I couldn't do what those people do. Know what? You're right, I can't do it, nor do I want to. But I also can't do brain surgery, engineer a skyscraper, fix a car engine or fly a jumbo jet, but that doesn't mean those things should have their own reality shows. Look, when the host of your show has also had stints as the host of Hollywood Squares (I'll take that fat-ass Bruce Vilanch for the block) and America's Funniest/Lamest Home Videos, suffice it to say that you're not exactly a quality program. Anyone who pays even one cent to call in and vote on any of these totally lame reality competition shows is nearly as big of a loser as the hacks who appear on them. Go away losers, you are a waste of everyone's time.

- Not too many things say white-trash redneck like getting your late-night grub on at the Waffle House, so it's no surprise that earlier this week, poseur rocker Kid Rock and several members of his posse were arrested at an Atlanta-area Waffle House restaurant. Kid and five members of his crew were arrested around 5 a.m. while out for a post-concert meal. An altercation broke out between Kid Rock, a.k.a. Bob Ritchie, and another patron. They exchanged words and things escalated to the point that the two of them went out to the parking lot to fight. At some point during the brawl, the other guy punched a hole through a restaurant window and soon enough, the cops were on the scene. Kid Rock and his five companions spent about 12 hours in jail before they were released. This whole thing got me to thinking, wondering exactly what got this whole mess started. I mean, did this other guy tell Kid Rock that his music sucked? Because if that's what happened, I hate to tell you this, Kid, but the guy is right. Your music is about as subtle, well-crafted and skillful as a truncheon to the back of the head and with about the same listenability. You need to take it easy, not go Fight Club on people at the Waffle House in the early hours of the morning and from now on, just hit up the nice dressing room spread they have for you at the show.

- Chris Hansen and his To Catch a Predator crew can breathe a little easier now that the courts have sided with them. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that law enforcement officers investigating sexual predators can in fact pose as children in order to help them catch their targets. In its decision, the court stated that the First Amendment does not protect a person in such cases. The specific case before the court was the case of Frank Gagliardi, a perv, er, defendant who was convicted of attempting to entice a child into prohibited sexual activity. His lawyers argued that the law required an actual child victim be present for their client to be guilty. I guess not, Frankie, because the court upheld your conviction and now you get to go directly to the bottom of the prison food chain along with guys who abuse women and all of the other child-molesting perverts. Hope you and your new cellmate Tiny are very happy together....

- Have you ever wondered what the biggest cog in the Italian economy is? Is it tourism, with all of the amazing historical and cultural sites to visit? Or maybe it's agriculture, with the country being the home of pasta, pizza, wine and much more....or it's organized crime. Yes, that's right, a new study has found that organized crime, a.k.a. the mafia, makes up the largest segment of the Italian economy. Organized crime brings in about $127 billion (yes, billion with a "b") annually, meaning it makes up 7 percent of the country's gross domestic product. So just what does the mafia do to earn so much money? Well, their earnings come from wholesome, morally-upright activities like extortion, drug trafficking, loan-sharking and prostitution - or as I call them, the four strong pillars of any great economy. If you've got your cash flow from extortion and loan-sharking, you can then afford to buy your blow and weed to do with the nice Italian hooker you arranged to have come to your place on a given night. Now some business lobbies in Italy are waging public campaigns to increase public awareness of the prevalence of organized crime and its supposed corrupting influence on the country, an influence these uptight lobbyists argue keeps foreigners from investing in the Italian economy. C'mon, people, if investors can't get behind loan sharks, drug dealers, extortionists and hookers, who can they get behind? Go with your strengths, be who you are, because clearly Italy has an identity - that of being run and dominated by the mafia and their schemes and plans.

- Speaking of playing to your strengths....props to the Sioux Falls Airport for sticking with an identity that it has tried to shake in the past and instead choosing to embrace that identity. One of Iowa's main airports has in the past fought to have its airport code, the three-letter moniker that goes on baggage tags, flight information and pretty much everything else in every airport, changed from the supposedly unflattering SUX to...well, anything else it could get from the Federal Aviation Administration. In both 1988 and 2002, officials at the Sioux Falls Airport petitioned the FAA to change their code and at one point, the FAA responded with several possible options: GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV or...wait for it....wait for it.....GAY. Yes, GAY, that wouldn't lead to very many jokes....GAY might be one of the four or five options worse than SUX. Thus, SUX elected to keep its code and now they've turned that perceived weakness into a strength. Their now slogan, "FLY SUX," will be printed on hats, t-shirts and other merchandise and will be the tagline for a new campaign. I actually like the idea and quite frankly, if I ever had a single reason or desire to travel to Iowa, SUX is the airport I would choose to fly into. As is, I plan to avoid Iowa like the plague for the rest of my life if possible, but I still like the slogan. Assuming those hats and shirts aren't some ridiculous amount like $20 apiece, I just might order one or both of them. Good job, SUX, maybe you don't actually SUX............

Hope Solo proven right, music done wrong and another stupid Simpson criminal

- So do you still think benching Hope Solo was a good idea, Greg Ryan? The soon-to-be-former coach of the U.S. women’s soccer team found out Monday that his contract will not be renewed when his contract expires at the end of this year, ending a 45-1-9 run as the head of the national team. That might seem like a great record and with the 53-match unbeaten streak that Ryan and his team had working to begin his tenure, you would wonder why he was being dumped….until you realize that he benched the goalie who was between the pipes for almost all of that streak in the biggest game of Ryan’s tenure, the World Cup semifinal against Brazil earlier this year. The 4-0 loss that came when Ryan put Solo on the bench in favor of aging veteran Brianna Scurry drew a lot of attention, more attention than women’s soccer usually gets in a decade, actually, mostly because after the game, Solo had her now-famous rant where she blew up Ryan for sitting her, saying there was no doubt in her mind that it was the wrong decision, that she would have made the saves on the goals Scurry allowed and that Ryan needed to stop living in the past. As harsh as the reaction was for Solo from most directions (not me, I applauded her), I guess U.S. Soccer agrees with her, even if it would never say so publicly. Thing is, they don’t have to say so, because their decision to fire Ryan says it for them. Why else would you fire a coach with only one loss if it wasn’t for the horrifically bad lineup decision he made in that loss, a decision that may have cost his team the match? Congrats on having your comments validated, Hope, and I hope (pun intended) that you get along better with whoever the next coach is.

- This next riot story is brought to you with a bit of regret, because although I love riots, especially ones involving the burning of law enforcement vehicles, this story also has a tragic slant to it. It comes to us from Rawathpora, India, where a local schoolteacher was shot and killed by an army patrol team after a simple dispute outside of the school where he taught. Abdul Rashid Mir was fatally shot by a soldier Saturday and the people of his village didn’t take too kindly to the incident. Hundreds of them took to the streets and they did so with bad intentions. The riot led to the burning and destruction of several police vehicles and the injuring of some 30 police officers, which I would have to qualify as a full-scale riot. I salute the villagers in Rawathpora for their enthusiasm and outrage, taking action against those who so senselessly killed one of their own in such brutal fashion. And no, they shouldn’t have waited for the legal system to address the matter, because that just wasn’t going to happen. No way does anyone in a position of authority take the side of those villagers and they knew it, so they rioted. Now, their cause will get some attention and maybe there will be some sort of investigation or scrutiny beyond the cursory glance from authorities it would have received otherwise. Well done riot and a great cause, two thumbs up to the villagers of Rawathpora.

- No f’ing way. That’s what I kept repeating to myself after hearing that the vapid, annoying waif Heidi Montag, she of the tired MTV reality series The Hills, is releasing an album. Predictably, it’s a heavily produced, sugary-sweet pop album, a la Hilary Duff or Britney Spears. What someone needs to do is to tell Montag, Paris Hilton and anyone else like them that being famous or quasi-famous doesn’t mean that you should be able to indulge your long-harbored ambitions to pursue a music career. Every kid wants to be a famous musician at some point, but most of us should never get the chance because we don’t have the talent and Montag is one of those without the talent. Let’s put it this way: if you wouldn’t have been given a recording contract if you were living in Topeka, Kan. and making $25,000 a year in some average job instead of living in L.A. and either rich and famous or married to someone rich and famous, then you shouldn’t get to make an album simply because you are rich and have the financing to make it happen. Having the money to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for you to do. Montag, who premiered her piece-of-crap single on the exact right place, the radio show of teeth-bleaching, tip-frosting, man-blouse wearing, effeminate loser Ryan Suck-crest, sounds like a 13-year-old girl singing into her hairbrush in her bedroom mirror, and not a talented 13-year-old. Plus, she’s got her tool of a boyfriend, Spencer, as her manager, and if this guy is as big an idiot and ass hat as he appears, this should end verrrrrry well for both of them. I find it hard to believe that he’s not as stupid as he comes off, so let’s just go ahead and assume that this whole musical career for Montag is just some sick practical joke and that it will be over soon when this album sells all of four copies.

- What is it with dumb criminals with the last name Simpson writing books are crimes they (allegedly) committed? Former gang member Colton Simpson has been sentenced to 126 years in prison in a Riverside, Calif. court after being convicted for a jewelry heist eerily similar to one he described in his memoirs. Simpson, no relation to double-murdered (allegedly) and memorabilia thief/burglar O.J. Simpson but making a weirdly similar mistake to the Juice (yes, you’re still the worst guy ever, Juice), declined to speak at his sentencing hearing. Hey Colton, the optimal time to keep your mouth shut was actually back before you wrote your memoirs and sketched out the details of a jewelry heist you committed but had never been prosecuted for. That’s when you should have kept quiet, because if you’d kept your words to yourself back then, you wouldn’t be set to spend the rest of your life plus about 75 additional years behind bars. As a former gang member you probably aren’t the smartest guy around, but even you should have been able to figure out that publishing a book with intricate details of a crime you thought you got away with was a bad idea.

- Thanks for nothing, government of Myanmar. The county’s ruling military junta has oh-so-magnanimously lifted the ban on public gatherings of more than five people and removed the 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for his citizens, this on the heels of an equally hollow gesture in restoring partial public Internet access. These three actions have been described as “cosmetic” by the White House and although it pains me to say this when it comes to anything coming from the White House these days, I agree. They’re empty gestures from a government that clearly feels it has broken the resistance movement and has a firm grasp on the control of its nation. The soldiers who had been patrolling the streets of Yangon have been removed, some of the activists who were detained or arrested during the riots and protest marches when this whole upheaval began have been released and Gen. Than Shwe and his administration are clearly feeling pretty good about themselves. I, for one, hope that they’re dead wrong and that the pro-democracy forces are simply waiting for the right time to strike again. Maybe it’s time for the country’s Buddhist monks to step up again and start somethin’……

Bill Maher doesn't tase, the ozone hole doesn't get bigger and why London is the wrong place for the NFL to go

- Props to Bill Maher for showing more tact and restraint in removing a disruptive protestor from his show than security at the University of Florida showed last month in dealing with the student who became only slightly belligerent in asking questions during a John Kerry speech. While UF security came with six or seven guards and used a Taser (“Don’t tase me bro, don’t tase me!”) to subdue a single knucklehead that one guard could have restrained sans Taser, Maher and security guards from his show showed much better strategy in dealing with a rowdy protestor who held up a smuggled-in sign proclaiming “9/11 is a cover-up fraud” and shouted out similar comments during a panel discussion about science. Maher helped security escort the man from the studio, with the incident shown live on the East Coast and unedited in its taped version on the West Coast. There was minor resistance from this tool, but no Tasers were broken out and there were no yelps of pain and hundreds of volts of electricity shot through the body of a man who was already on the ground and in the custody of multiple security officers. Classy show you run there on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher, classy show indeed.

- Happy days are here for Comedy Central, home of the best fake news shows in the world. Last week, satirist and host of The Colbert Report Stephen Colbert announced that he’ll run in the presidential primary in his home state of South Carolina. The announcement was the capper on a running joke on the show about the coyness and beat-around-the-bush nature of many candidates in this current race when it comes to announcing whether or not they plan to run for president. Now comes news that Jon Stewart host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the show where Colbert got his start as a fake news correspondent, has signed a two-year contract extension that will keep him on the air until at least 2010. Also, Comedy Central has created a stand-alone website for the show that will feature video clips from every episode Stewart has hosted dating back to his debut in 1999. You can visit www.thedailyshow.com and see for yourself how the fake news business has changed over the past eight years or so, it’s truly amazing to see………..

- Do you want the good news or the bad news for the world’s environmental system? Heck, who am I kidding, it’s pretty much all bad news for the environment nowadays, it’s just a matter of what degree of bad-ness. This would fall under the heading of lower on the bad-ness scale, as the Antarctic ozone hole has shrunk back to its average size, reaching a maximum size of 9.7 million square miles in September, down from its peak size of 11.5 million square miles last year. This news should fly well in the White House….well, that is if W. and his stool pigeons even admit that a hole in the ozone layer exists at all. It’s a slippery slope when you refuse to admit that global warming exists, because then you get into the habit of denying all sorts of clearly existing environmental phenomena that everyone else in the world believe in.

- London Calling….and the NFL should have let it go to voice mail and then deleted the message. That brief homage to legendary punk rockers The Clash notwithstanding, the NFL’s decision to hold a regular season game in jolly old England is questionable at best and a dumb decision no matter what. The game is next Sunday, with the New York Giants facing the team surging toward my dream of a reverse perfect season (0-16). I know that the NFL wants to mimic the NBA in expanding its game globally and in gaining fans around the world, but has anyone been paying attention to that whole NFL Europa folding deal? The league tried to ram American football down the throats of Euros for nearly two decades and earlier this year was finally forced to admit that the experiment wasn’t working. I realize that NFL Europe, as it was also called, was the lower echelon of American football, a developmental league with B-list talent, but I don’t think that’s the main reason Euros rejected it. The sport simply does not have a base in Europe like it does in America because it’s not played from youth on up there and it’s the same dynamic that soccer has here in America, only in reverse. Soccer will never catch on here as a major sport, just as American football will never be huge in Europe. But you have the Giants and Dolphins in Week 8, smack dab in the middle of the season, hopping on a plane to fly halfway across the world to play a game in London. The Giants are 5-2 and a playoff contender, while the Dolphins are chasing that reverse perfecto that is my dream season. Can’t the NFL see that the ‘Fins have found a comfort zone at home, where they have developed a routine that allows them to show up, lose games and not even break a sweat (which is saying something in Miami)? One game in London isn’t going to create millions of new NFL fans in Europe, and if the league is hoping this is a prelude to eventually having a team in Europe, they need to sack that idea immediately, because as bad of an idea as this game is, having a Euro team is a worse one. No, the time differential isn’t an issue because with London five hours ahead, the game can begin at 6 p.m. local time and still be a 1 p.m. kickoff here in the States, but that’s about the only part of this whole mess that isn’t a terrible idea. But hey, it won’t be the worst idea for an international game that the NFL has had for too long, because within the next 2-3 years, a game will be played in China. Great thinking NFL, just make sure to not bring any lead-paint laden toys back with you when you send two teams to the world’s largest Communist nation in 2009 or 2010, and keep up the stellar planning and scheduling, idiots…..

- Never a good sign when your government decides that it needs to borrow ideas and governing strategies from its Communist days. Yet that’s what Russian citizens are facing with the prices of food product and other important items skyrocketing and parliamentary and presidential elections looming. With the prices of items like diary products (up 9.4 percent) and cooking oil (up 13 percent) going up in disturbingly quick fashion, the Russian government has hearkened back to the 1970s and 1980s be slamming price control on staple items and targeting what it says is widespread corruption in the business world due to sleazy middlemen who are driving up the prices of these products. There is no shortage of food, as there was mid-20th century when store shelves were nearly bare and organized crime controlled much of the flow of good and services, but with the sky-high prices on basic necessities, many Russians are finding it difficult to survive. With parliamentary elections set for Dec. 2 and the vote for the country’s next president three months later, the government faces the challenge of solving this problem or seeing the voters make their voice heard by ushering in new leadership, preferably one that won't continue steering them back in the direction of Communism.

Heroes struggles, Prison Break thrives and Sam Brownback (who) is out of the presidential race....whatever

- Sorry to hear that you’ve dropped out of the 2008 presidential race, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback…..at least I might be if I knew you were in the race in the first place. With about 475 candidates vying for the nominations of both parties, it was nigh impossible to keep track of all the yahoos in the race, especially when those yahoos didn’t have any money or any real support. If an irrelevant presidential candidate drops out of the race and no one is there to hear it, does it matter? “My yellow brick road just came short of the White House this time,” a disappointed Brownback announced. This time and any other time you try to run for president, Sammy. When your name is consistently omitted from any serious talk about the race you’re your party’s nomination no one wants you in their debates or forums, your hopes to win are less than zero. When those factors are compounded by a near-total lack of financial support, you might as well go ahead and get back to your work in the Senate. You know, things like bickering with W., passing lots of bills he promises to veto, churning out lots of pork-barrel legislation, wasting taxpayer dollars, that sort of thing. Get back to that, promise never to run for president again and we can all agree to forget that this debacle ever happened.

- We’re going to the perimeter fence, then we’re going to the tarmac, and we’re going to the main terminal, and on to baggage claim and THEN WE’RE GONNA TAKE BACK THE AIRPORT…..HEEEEYAAAAAHHHH!!!! Sorry, I had a bit of a Howard Dean moment there. Nonetheless, the residents of the Santa Cruz province in Bolivia have done just that, seizing control of the Viru Viru Airport, located in their province, from troops sent in the previous day by President Evo Morales. This follows a protest Thursday in which demonstrators blocked an American Airlines plane on the runway, forcing police to break out the tear gas to disperse the crowd. On Friday, those demonstrators were back en masse, armed with clubs and waving provincial flags, to take back control of the airport. The funny thing is that this is the country’s wealthiest province, yet these rich people aren’t about a little social dissidence and clashes with The Man. The seizure of the airport was seen as a major victory for the leaders of the Santa Cruz province in their fight for greater autonomy from Bolivia’s socialist central government. If I were planning on flying into the Viru Viru Airport ever I might have a small issue with this situation, but seeing as my Bolivian travel plans are a solid few years away, carry on, rioters and airport seizers, keep sticking it to The Man.

- You raise gas prices high enough, this is what you get. A tanker truck containing 7,100 gallons of diesel fuel was stolen at gunpoint from a city fuel depot in Baltimore early Friday. The tanker was found later the same day in nearby Washington, D.C., but with prices creeping up to $3.00 per gallon or more in nearly every state, you can't be too surprised when people start hijacking fuel trucks, whether it’s to get gas for themselves or in the hope of pawning that fuel off on others to get a piece of the fuel-gouging pie for themselves. Still, this truck-jacking wasn’t that much worse of an idea than that moronic Internet-led “protest” that encouraged everyone to cripple the major gas companies a few months ago by boycotting gas stations on a specific day.

- She makes bad Spanish-language albums, she produces terrible movies, but is that enough for Jennifer Lopez? No, she feels the need to come back with an atrocious album in English, the aptly-titled Brave. I say it’s aptly titled because to put out an album this abysmal and do it with a straight face requires a ton of intestinal fortitude. The album contains the same predictable, over-produced, synthesized, vocally and lyrically-weak garbage you can find on any album Lopez has ever produced. Lyrical gems such as, “Heartbreaks are overrated; Stay together, that’s the new trend,” show…..um, nothing. Thanks for the insight into what the newest trend is, J. As long as you continue to combine two of the absolute worst genres of music known to man, pop and dance, and do so with vocal abilities somewhere in between those of a duck being strangled and Carl Lewis singing the National Anthem, my trend will be to stay as far away from any project you’re involved in as possible. Maybe it’s self-defense, maybe it’s just this wacky preference for music and movies that don’t blow, but if J-Lo’s name is on it, I’m keeping my distance.

- Transitioning to a musician who actually has musical talent, guitarist/singer/songwriter Eric Clapton, he of the many solo albums and formerly of bands like Creem and Derek and the Dominoes, has released his autobiography and if you’re a music fan or specifically a Clapton fan, it’s an interesting read. One of the book’s major subjects is Clapton’s controversial romance with Pattie Boyd, a woman Clapton pursued even though she was the wife of his good friend George Harrison. Clapton’s version of their relationship in Clapton: The Autobiography stands in direct contradiction to many details of the relationship that Boyd spelled out in her book Wonderful Tonight. The book also spends time on Clapton’s many musical endeavors, including the aforementioned bands, as well as the Yardbirds and his solo work. It’s the life and times of a man who is considered by most to be one of the top five guitarists in the world, and although much of his music is a bit too mellow and laid back for my tastes, there’s no denying Eric Clapton’s immense talent with a guitar in his hands. Give this book a read if you enjoy reading about the lives of great musicians and are concerned with more than just what’s on the radio when it comes to those musicians.

- Great comeback by Allan Houston. The former-NBA-star-turned-TV-analyst decided that at age 36, he wanted to make a comeback in the Association and so he began seriously working out towards the end of last season with the goal of making a roster this coming season. He settled on one of his former teams, the New York Knicks, as the place for him and headed to training camp earlier this month. Now, before the exhibition season even hits the halfway point, Houston has called it quits again. Why he thought that the chronic knee pain that caused him to retire initially would have magically disappeared just because he hadn’t played competitively for a few years, I don’t know. How he thought he was going to be better able to compete with younger, stronger, faster players that he couldn’t compete with when he retired several years back, I have no idea. His on again/off again comeback doesn’t really hurt anyone because it’s not as if the Knicks were counting on him to play a vital role for them or even to be a serious contributor off the bench. They’re not out any money and because Houston stepped away of his own accord, coach Isaiah “The Sexual Harasser” Thomas and the team’s front office don’t face any backlash they would have gotten if they had cut a player who was among their franchise’s most popular during his time in New York. Guess A. Houston will have to get his kicks from playing rec league ball from now on…..

- The pressure is ratcheting up on Prison Break, while the second season of Heroes is struggling and wandering a bit to this point. On PB, a mysterious new prison arrived Monday night, a Brit who seems to know James Whistler but whom Whistler pretends not to know when the man confronts him with Michael Scofield and Mahone nearby. This new prisoner arrives right as Michael and Whistler are preparing to execute their escape plan, with the Company’s deadline for getting out of SONA now less than a day away. Michael decides that the escape, ironically, has to be done during the day because of the presence of military jeeps randomly patrolling around the perimeter of the prison during the night. However, during reconnaissance work for the escape, a guard spots Michael watching him through the lens of half of a pair of binoculars that Michael broke in two so he and Whistler could each have something to scout the guards with as they kept watch atop the guard towers on the fence around the prison. This causes the guards to storm into SONA, search for the offending item and put a lock on the door of Michael’s cell, throwing a major wrench into the escape plan. That escape plan also includes sending out an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) to jam the TV of one of the guards, distracting him so he won't see Scofield, Whistler and possibly Mahone escape. The other guard, Michael believes, will be distracted by the glare of the sun that hits him at the same time, 3:13, each afternoon and causes him to turn his head in the other direction for six minutes. Caught up in the mini-raid when the guards enter the prison is T-Bag, who Lechero charges with hiding the mistress/hooker who visits the prison regularly to provide her, um, services to Lechero. In hiding the woman in a closet as the guards search the prison, there are clearly sparks between T-Bag and the woman, but the question is whether T-Bag is dumb and daring enough to ever try anything with Lechero’s woman. On the outside of the prison walls, Lincoln and Whistler’s girlfriend, Sofia, are busy with their end of the plan, with the Company breathing down their necks. They purchase some items from a dive shop on the coast and try to drive close to SONA on a jungle road to do some recon of their own, but military guards stop them and angrily tell them to turn around. This leads them to the beach, where Linc buries a cooler he bought from the surf shop and something inside of it, what he calls their getaway vehicle. My guess is that it’s a raft, but with this show you never know. Orbiting around the goings on for now is Sucre, who has managed to get himself caught up with a skeezy criminal who approaches him after learning that he’s the new gravedigger at SONA and asks him to continue the arrangement the man had with Sucre’s predecessor of smuggling items into the prison. Sucre gives in and agrees ot take $5,000 for the first smuggle, then realizes that this isn’t a one-time deal. He keeps doing it, which causes some trouble with his superiors and you can be sure it will cause a lot more trouble in the shows ahead, maybe even getting him fired and preventing him from doing his part in the escape plan or holding it up some other way. The impending deadline from the Company has definitely ramped up the intensity in recent episodes, and the result has been one great show after another. The same can’t be said for Heroes, which is struggling a bit in its second season. Keep in mind that the show is still so much better than most anything else on TV that even when it’s struggling, it’s still way better than other shows, save a select few. But last night’s episode was a prime example of the show’s problems this season. Kristen Bell was supposed to make her big debut as a prickly, spoiled brat of a hero searching for Peter Petrelli, but her debut was a dud and it really wasn’t her fault. Her screen time was so limited that she had no chance to make an impact. She can shoot electrical charges from her hands and uses the power to kill Kaitlin’s brother when he won't tell her where Peter is, but a call from Bell’s character’s father, someone with the Company, beckons her home when her murderous activity is revealed. Peter was also supposed to be a prominent part of this week’s show, but his screen time was also far too limited. Aside from a scene or two making out with Kaitlin, it took until the end of the episode for P. Petrelli to get into the show. He finally opened the box containing his personal items and found nothing that really helped, just a passport telling him his real name, a plane ticket to Montreal and a picture with his brother Nathan, who he doesn’t recognize. It’s at this point that the trance-like painting ability he inherited from Isaac Mendez surfaces and he paints a weird picture of a building and street corner in Montreal while hiding from Bell’s character in Kaitlin’s flat. Across the pond, as the Brits say, in New York, Molly Walker remains in a coma and Mohinder, out of options, takes her to the Company for help despite the protestations of H.R.G., on a trip with the Haitian. Matt Parkman is AWOL from New York as Molly is taken in, because he and Nathan Petrelli have gone to Philadelphia to confront Parkman’s father, a.k.a. The Nightmare Man, whom Molly located last week. The elder Parkman, clearly cagey and in possession of the same power as his son, reading minds, only his power has graduated to a whole other level, tricks his son and Nathan, promising to tell them what he knows about the photo featuring the original 12 heroes and who is hunting them, then trapping both Matt and Nathan inside their own worst nightmare and escaping the apartment. Both Matt and Parkman are able to escape their nightmares, but find only an empty apartment and are about to leave when they discover another piece of the photograph in question with the same bizarre symbol painted on it that was on the pictures sent to Takito Nakamura and Angela Petrelli. This picture is of Bob, the man who hired Mohinder into the Company and is now running its main lab. Parkman’s father is apparently headed to kill Bob, but it can't be that clear cut, can it? Speaking of Mohinder, he’s on his way to New Orleans to a place that further highlights a big problem with this season of Heroes. He’s there to visit Monica, cousin of Micah, who is starting to realize her powers as a “muscle mimic” thanks to Micah. This is a problem because this episode devoted substantial time to Monica, still a peripheral and not-that-interesting character, and barely showed Hiro Nakamura (still in 1671, helping Takezo Kensei and Yaeko, preparing to fight the legendary White Beard and his army and sending messages to the future to his friend Ando). With Hiro and Peter getting minimal screen time and Sylar, Claire and other prominent parts of the show not even in this episode, we spend major time seeing Monica learn to play double Dutch, learning martial arts moves from an old movie on TV and learning how to play the piano from Micah. It was absolutely the weakest episode so far this season and the show clearly needs to find a balance where more characters, especially the prominent ones, are on screen more often. The episode ends with Peter saying he can't hide anymore, so what that means for next week, who knows. I’d like to think it means he’ll be a main part of the episode, but as we’ve just learned this week, that’s no sure thing. Tune in next Monday and see for yourself…..

Philly screws the Boy Scouts, the Dolphins can make my dreams come true and the FBI wants to talk to D. Copperfield

- A very nice “screw you” from the city of Philadelphia to the Boy Scouts, with the city forcing the organization to pay what is deemed a fair-market value of $200,000 annual rent instead of the $1 a year the group had been paying. The decision is based on the Boy Scouts’ refusal to allow openly-gay scouts, causing city officials to say that they cannot legally rent taxpayer-owned property for such a minimal sum to a private organization that discriminates. Yes, for having principles and being willing to stand behind them no matter what, you, non-profit organization designed to better the lives of thousands of boys across the country, can see your rent hiked to $200,000 a year. Well done, city of Philadelphia, hiding behind politically-correct BS and using it to squeeze more money out of a non-profit group into your own coffers.

- The Miami Dolphins set an NFL record in 1972 by going 17-0, winning the Super Bowl and recording the last perfect season in NFL history. The 2007 edition of the Fightin’ Porpoises is poised to run the table as well…..in the other direction and I couldn’t be more excited about it. With a 49-28 loss to New England Sunday that was nowhere near as close at the final score would indicate, the ‘Fins dropped to 0-7 and showed that they clearly have what it takes to go 0-16. Unlike previous teams that have dangled the carrot of an 0-fer only to snatch it away at the last possible moment, the 2007 Dolphins have the right combination of qualities to make it happen. They lost their starting quarterback for the season to injury last week and this week their star running back went out with an injury as well. They have an aging, crappy defense that can’t stop anyone and an impotent, lackluster offense that can’t score enough points to compensate for the porous defense. They have broken-down, over-the-hill veterans and raw young players who aren’t in stride yet, with a bevy of underachievers to boot. They have the one of the two best teams in football, New England, in their division, which is two guaranteed losses right there. Their NFC crossover division is the NFC East, which produced three playoff teams last season, meaning that should be four more losses for Miami right there. Yes, they have everything they need to go 0-16, including a rookie head coach who already looks thoroughly overmatched. I should also point out that the St. Louis Rams are 0-7 just like Miami, but I have a bad feeling that the Rams have just enough talent and experience that when their key players get healthy, they’ll win a couple of games. But the Dolphins, they have the look of a team that can go wire to wire for the reverse perfect season.

- There’s always been an air of mystery around David Copperfield, and not just because of the way he used former girlfriend Claudia Schiffer to make questions about his sexuality disappear. No, the magician who was the forerunner to Criss Angel and others like him has always been an odd cat and an object of intrigue for many, but that many has grown to include the FBI, which doesn’t bode well for Copperfield. Agents were seen snooping around a warehouse he keeps in Las Vegas, a facility Copperfield has dubbed the International Museum & Library of the Conjuring Arts. In other words, he stores his fake collapsible swords, trick coffins, magic disappearing chambers and other stuff there. The FBI isn't saying much about why they were searching at the facility, only that the search is related to an ongoing case in Seattle. “I can say that there was investigative activity yesterday and yesterday evening in Las Vegas,” FBI agent Robbie Burroughs said Thursday. He declined to comment on the specifics of the “investigative activity,” but usually the FBI doesn’t waste that many men and that much time looking into things that aren’t a big deal. Copperfield may want to pull a disappearing act for a while, because the feds have also contacted him and expressed a desire to talk to him about the case. He has to have enough money stashed away to disappear, maybe even enough to pull another supermodel girlfriend. Hit the road, D. Copperfield, don’t want too long…..

- I don’t want to belabor the point because it’s depressing enough as is, but what a colossal, team-wide choke job by the Cleveland Indians. Up 3-1 in the American League Championship Series against Boston, the Tribe not only choked away the series, they barely bothered to show up at all for any of the final three games. Shoddy pitching, atrocious hitting and subpar defense led to three routs for Boston. culminating with Sunday night’s Game 7 win. I literally may stab anyone who tries to defend the Indians as anything other than colossal chokers right in the temple with a rusty ice pick. This season is not a success or a moral victory because they nearly made the World Series. It’s a unanimous failure because they had three chances to punch their ticket to the Fall Classic and they flamed in horrific fashion. Their two supposed ace pitchers were God-awful, with Fausto Carmona not even able to make it out of the third inning in Game 6. What a choke job, what a disappointment. You all should be thoroughly disappointed in yourselves and not the least bit proud of your season, Indians, because what you did in C-H-O-K-I-N-G away this series all abut invalidates everything you did prior to the ALCS. You all have depressed me even more than my pathetic Chicago Cubs and their lackluster playoff effort in getting swept by Arizona. At least the Cubs didn’t give any false pretenses of winning the series only to choke it away. Good riddance, 2007 Indians, you sicken me thoroughly.

- It’s been said that you should never cry at work. Likewise, you should never miss a day of work after suffering an emotional breakdown on national TV due to a dog kennel repossessing a puppy that you had given to your hairdresser’s family. Yet there’s Ellen Degeneres, canceling shows she was supposed to tape on Thursday, shows that would air Friday and Monday, but as a spokesman for Telepictures Productions said, “It’s been a long week and a tough week and we decided to take a long weekend and be back on Tuesday.” Not that I or anyone else with any sort of viewing standards watches that crap-hole of a show, but unless a loved one dies or is seriously ill or you yourself are in a similar state, you show up and you churn out those crap-tacular episodes of your talk show, E. Your little crying session inspired hundreds of your idiot viewers to phone and email in death and arson threats to the kennel, the least you could do it go on the air and tell everyone to stop harassing those kennel owners. Now if you want to scrap your show altogether and agree never to appear on TV or in movies for any reason ever again, I’m down with that, but not with your staying home for a day because your emotional boo-boos are just too much for you to handle.

- In the least surprising pot-related arrest since Willie Nelson’s tour bus was pulled over last year, British pop tart and gravelly-voiced crooner Amy Winehouse, she of the Bottom 5 Song of the Year-worthy Rehab, has been arrested and released in Bergen, Norway, along with two other members of her traveling party on marijuana-possession charges. One of those arrested with Winehouse was husband Blake Fielder-Civil, which by the way is the most arrogant sounding name this side of golfer Charles Howell III and a name that should just be changed to “Gravy Trainer Off of My Wife.” Fielder-Civil, Winehouse and another person were arrested at a hotel in Bergen shortly after 6 p.m. Friday and held overnight. They were released the next morning around 7 a.m. after paying $715 in fines, which is, as any stoner will tell you, a small price to pay to be able to get high. Next time, schedule more tour stops in the Netherlands, Amy, they tend to look more kindly on druggies like yourself.

I love riots like Ron Burgundy loves Scotch, college football fund and Jack Bauer is a lush

- One of the many reasons I love riots, outside of the rampant property destruction, indiscriminate violence and clashes with authority figures, is that you can thoroughly enjoy them even if you have no real stake in the conflict itself. Take the protests in northern Iraq, where thousands of Kurds and their supporters took to the streets to take a stand against the Turkish Parliament’s decision to authorize the government to send Turkish troops across the border to root out Kurdish rebels who have been conducting attacks across the border into Turkey. It’s a tricky situation any time a border is involved and you’re going into another country to attack rebels who are crossing the border into your country. You can argue that a nation should not intrude on the border of its neighbor in this way for any reason or you could argue that if this is the best way the Turks can get after these militants, then they should do it. I prefer option #3, taking joy in the fact that thousands of average citizens banded together, took to the streets and took a stand against a government action they considered unfair and unjust. While I regret that no cars were set on fire or overturned and there were no violent clashes with police, I salute the spirit of rebellion wherever it lives, and so I salute the Kurds and their protest against the Turkish government, good work all of you.

- All good things must end, even for the Ol’ Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier. In his entire career, spanning stops at Duke, Florida and now South Carolina, the O.B.C. had never, ever lost a game to Vanderbilt – until yesterday. With his South Carolina Gamecocks ranked sixth in the most recent BCS poll (you still suck, BCS), Spurrier and his team welcomed Vandy to Columbia, S.C. and wound up on the wrong end of a 19-7 whuppin’. The loss throws South Carolina back into a mess of teams tied with two conference losses in the SEC East, but for all you O.B.C. haters out there, you just got plenty more ammo. Elsewhere in college football, a #1 team finally survived a week at the top of the heap, albeit with a late scare. Ohio State rushed out to an early 24-0 lead over Michigan State, then surrendered two late defensive touchdowns to MSU and a field goal that narrowed the gap to 24-17. Still, the Buckeyes survived and at this point, they’re doing a lot better than most teams who preceded them at the top of the polls this year. One of the teams chasing them and trying to overcome a loss, LSU, won in dramatic late-game fashion, beating a pesky Auburn team 30-24. The team that handed LSU its loss last week, Kentucky, saw its quarterback, Andre Woodson, throw for 415 yards and five touchdowns – and still lost at home to Florida 45-37. Also losing to end its national title hopes was California, which dropped a second straight game, 30-21 to a disappointing UCLA team that came from behind to down the Golden Bears. In-state rival USC had an easier time, handing Notre Dame its worst home loss ever, 38-0. It’s funny, back when I hated Notre Dame and rooted against them every week, they were great. Now, since I ran a marathon in South Bend that finished in Notre Dame Stadium and stopped hating the Irish after seeing their campus and feeling the great vibe on it firsthand, they totally suck and drop to 1-7. But back to the theme of teams losing for the second straight week after a long undefeated run to start the season….props to Cincinnati for showing why it’s still a long way from being a legit top program by dropping a 24-17 decision to a Pittsburgh Panthers team that had lost four in a row and had its coach, Dave Wannstedt, coaching from the press box instead of the sidelines after tearing an ACL this week and having surgery on it. A worse loss, though, was Nebraska and its 36-14 defeat to Texas A&M, a loss that came a week after the Cornhuskers’ worst-ever home loss and the same week that NU fired its athletic director, Steve Pedersen, and brought back NU legend Dr. Tom Osborne, the man who built the team into a national power, to be its new AD. Legend or not, it’s going to take a lot more than that to resuscitate a program that has fallen very far, very fast. Coach Beau Bridges, er, Bill Callahan, is set to be fired once the season ends and he clearly knows it. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Miami and Florida State did play this week, although with both teams unranked and uninteresting, the game that once was a bitterly heated rivalry that demanded the nation’s attention came and went with barely a whimper. The Hurricanes won by a 30-24 count, which should be yet another sign to FSU coach Bobby Bowden that it’s time for him to hang it up and give the program a chance to have a new voice and vision at the top. All in all, it was the most uneventful Saturday of college football in several weeks, which should mean that next weekend will be twice as tumultuous.

- Does Kiefer Sutherland need to be the next celeb to go to rehab several times, for varying lengths of time, before relapsing and going back again and again? If you believe reports that the diminutive star of 24 is a huge binge drinker, then the answer may be yes. Last month he got popped for a D.U.I., yet was spotted out on the town, ordering drinks two days later. Maybe he’s trying to chase away the fact that his show is dramatically behind its production schedule and that the new season has been thrown into chaos due to the repeated production delays. Or maybe his lush-like behavior and penchant for driving drunk are contributing to the show’s problems. Either way, it’s awfully hard for your star to make it to makeup in time and to learn his lines if you have to consistently bail him out of the drunk tank, so maybe try to keep it together for at least a few months, K., then you can go on one massive bender after the season wraps.

- Ah, bet you thought I was done with the social dissidence segment of this posting, but you would be wrong. I love all things riot and protest, so I had to send a shout-out to my peeps in Bolivia, a group of angry residents who stormed the country’s largest airport Thursday after the facility became a focal point of a battle between the federal government and the country’s largest province. About 220 air force troops and military police rushed to the Viru Viru (loose translation: Yes, your flight is delayed and no, you don’t get anything more to eat than a tiny bag containing five mini pretzels) Airport and fired tear gas at a group of rioters that included airport workers as they blocked an American Airlines plane on the runway and demanded that the company pay them landing fees in cash. Sure, people, the pilot will just break out the suitcase full of $100 bills he carries with him in the cockpit and peel off a few C-notes for you. Or maybe he can dip into the petty cash jar in the pilot’s break room to pay you. Regardless of the rightness of your claim, though, kudos for stepping in front of a plane weighing many, many tons and blocking it from moving at part of your demonstration. Also, bonus points for forcing the police to bust out the tear gas, that’s always a nice touch. Two major protests in a single day, I am a very happy person…….

- How very French of you, Nikolas Sarkozy. Following in a long line of Frenchmen (and women) who specialize in surrendering and waving the white flag, Sarkozy and wife Cecilia have filed for divorce. It’s the first divorce for a French president while in office, and if the history of his country is any indication, Sarkozy will accede to any demands his wife makes in the divorce settlement and will surrender all of his assets and possessions if she so much as threatens to raise her voice at him. Relax, Frenchies, I’m just tweaking you, I know you all are a smidge sensitive about being seen as a bunch of soft, wimpy surrender-ers.

Bad news for anyone who likes music, worse news for Joey Harrington and bad times for traveling Greenpeace activists

- Did I not just say at the beginning of this week that college football coaches should strongly consider asking not to be ranked in the Top 5 in any of the polls? Before this current weekend began, that advice was proven sage when for the third consecutive week, the second-ranked team in the country lost and saw its national title hopes dashed. The University of South Florida hadn’t even spent a full week as the #2 team in the country when they traveled to Piscataway, N.J. and saw their undefeated season go up in flames after a 30-27 loss to unranked Rutgers thanks to a handful of special teams trick plays. Their chance to crash the BCS party and beat out some powerhouse programs for a title shot ended when the Bulls couldn’t stop the passing game of the Knights – check that, the passing game of the field goal holder and punter for the Knights. Those two threw passes on trick plays, one leading directly to a Rutgers field goal and the other resulting in a Rutgers touchdown. That loss opens the door for Boston College to slide up into the second spot in the polls, something the Eagles can’t f’up simply because they’re on a bye this week. Not playing may be the only way to ensure that the curse of the #2 spot doesn’t get you, although the way this season is going, even a bye might not be enough to outrun that jinx.

- Kudos to you, angry loggers and citizens in Castelos dos Sonhos, Brazil, for your verrry enlightened and not at all angry mob-like response to eight Greenpeace members who tried to leave your town with a scorched tree trunk to use in an exhibit on global warming. Really, hats off to all of you for surrounding these eight environmental activists en masse and refusing the let them leave. Plus, bonus points for forcing them to have police and army soldiers protect them and keep them secure at the makeshift headquarters of the federal environmental agency. Look, I know that their mission and the expressed purpose of their organization runs contrary to your way of life, especially the loggers, but you can’t surround them and threaten to do really bad things to them just because they want to take a single scorched tree trunk with them from your town. Unless one of you owns that tree trunk and has a legal claim to it, I don’t think you can prevent them from taking it, especially if your government doesn’t have a problem with it, which they apparently don’t. Nice restraint, though, on leaving your torches, pitchforks, tar and feathers at home for this little demonstration. By the way, you do know that everyone else in the civilized world (well, everyone outside of W. and his cadre of dimwits in his administration) already know that global warming exists and that excess logging is a big contributor to the problem, right? These Greenpeace activists aren’t going to suddenly expose this shocking new problem and finger you as the chief culprit. So cease and desist on blocking their way out of town, turn around and return to your homes. You’re not going to prevent anything here, other than preventing everyone else from thinking of you as something other than a bunch of small-minded, enraged lunatics who can’t handle a little environmental activism.

- I don’t blame Ellen Degeneres for crying, I just don’t think it’s having a dog she gave to her hairdresser’s family repossessed by the kennel she bought it from that should make her weepy. Crying because of that hideous, mannish, looks-like-it-was-cut-with-a-lawnmower do? Sure. Crying because she will go down in history as the title character in one of the worst sitcoms of all time? Yeah. Crying because your former girlfriend, Anne Heche, left you and decided to start playing for the other team, i.e. dating men? Why not. But Degeneres’ act on her talk show when detailing how she bought a puppy from the Mutts and Moms kennel, kept it for two weeks and then gave it away after deciding she couldn’t care for it was just pathetic. You shouldn’t be that broken up about anything dog-related unless your pet is seriously injured, gravely ill or passes away. This dog is still alive and well, so stop crying on national TV about how it’s not fair to the family and to the kids that this dog was taken away. Compounding the pathetic-ness is the response from the viewers of Degeneres’ show, which was surprisingly University of Florida football fan-like. Just as UF fans phoned in bomb and death threats to the owner of an impound lot who called the cops on Florida football player Tony Joiner after an incident in which Joiner broke into the lot to steal back his girlfriend’s car, viewers of Ellen Degenerate’s show are now calling in bomb threats to the owners of the kennel that she bought the dog from. Marina Batkis and Vanessa Chekroun, owners of the kennel, have received deathand arson threats via email and voice mail and have come under such intense scrutiny that they’re having a hard time conducting the business of their volunteer, nonprofit rescue agency. Hey losers watching the Ellen show, just because you inexplicably worship and hang on the every word of some loser talk show host with a bad haircut and a predilection for public weeping doesn’t mean it’s ok for you to track down the contact information for a volunteer animal rescue agency and besiege it with death and arson threats just because they acted according to their policies and took back a dog when the person who purchased it violated that contract. You may not like what they did and it may seem heartless to you, but that doesn’t give you license to turn the lives of the volunteers who run that agency into a living hell. Back off, losers, you are pathetic.

- It was a short ride for you in Atlanta, Joey Harrington, but I just want you to know that I was pulling for you. The oft-maligned quarterback, a man who was the third overall pick in the 2002 NFL Draft but failed miserably in X seasons with the Detroit Lions and then spent X seasons toiling fruitlessly for the Miami Dolphins, has now lost another starting job, this one with the hapless Atlanta Falcons. Initially brought in to serve as the backup to dog murderer and compulsive gambler Michael Vick, Harrington was thrust into the starter’s role once Vick was suspended for the year by the NFL and plead guilty to federal felony charges. Knowing that they had a journeyman, mediocre quarterback who was totally new to their team under center, the Falcons and new coach Bobby Petrino couldn’t have had too high of hopes for this season. But however low those hopes, Harrington clearly failed to reach them because six games into the season, he’s been yanked as the starter….in favor of a player who didn’t even join the team until four weeks ago and was released before the season by the Jacksonville Jaguars, Byron Leftwich. Harrington and his 63.1 percent completion rate, 1,279 yards, four touchdowns and four interceptions go to the bench and Leftwich replaces him at QB. I feel bad for Harrington (not too bad, he’s still made millions in the NFL) because he seems like a genuinely good guy, a high-character individual who has never been in trouble with the law, never violated the league’s substance-abuse policy and been a good teammate at all three of his stops. In spite of that, my man Joey has not lived up to expectations in the NFL and at this point, I have a hard time seeing him getting another starting spot in the NFL. Sure, he can hang on as a career backup, but when you come into a situation where a team loses its franchise quarterback, probably for good, hands you the starting job and does so with remarkably low expectations for the season and you still can’t get it done, that doesn’t say anything remotely good about you. Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am, but Joey, it looks like you just wasted your last opportunity to be a starting, productive NFL quarterback. Petrino has already stated that he intends to keep Leftwich as the starter for the remainder of the season, so Harrington should get comfortable carrying a clipboard and relaying signals from the sideline, because that’s where he’ll be spending his time during games from now on.

- If ever there was a group that shouldn’t have a greatest hits album, it’s the Spice Girls. They have less hits than web pages offering free nude photos of Rosie O’Donnell and William “The Refrigerator” Perry yet here they are trying to rip people off by taking 11 of their hack songs from previous albums, mixing in two new musical atrocities, and trying to pawn the whole shabby collection off as their “re-entry” into the music world. The Spice Girls: Greatest Hits will be available in Victoria’s Secret stores beginning Nov. 13 and will also be offered on the store’s website at that time. Its date for dispersal on the rest of us is Jan. 15, meaning there’s still time to organize a top-secret mission to find all those discs, destroy them and destroy all original recordings and files from this debacle. Also, guys may have always felt a little uncomfortable walking into a Victoria’s Secret with their wife or girlfriend, but now we have a legitimate excuse to not want to go in that place. Heck, all you women might want to do all your Victoria’s Secret shopping online for the next few months, because starting Nov. 13, when you walk into one of their stores, you risk having your ears assailed with one of the 13 crappy concoctions from this CD. You just know that since V.S. is in bed, corporately speaking, with the Spice Hacks, that they’re going to be pumping this CD in all of their stores the instant it goes on sale. For those of you wishing to enlist for that secret mission to destroy all materials involved in this horrific album before it gets into anyone’s hands, drop me an email and we’ll talk strategy.

Insulting Joe Torre, disciplining Myanmar and last night's Smallville episode

- Of all the ways to get the message through to the government of Myanmar that their current reign of terror and oppression isn't acceptable, attacking the regime financially is the best option at this point. Nations like the United States, Britain, Canada and Japan can’t go declaring war on Myanmar and dropping bombs (no, W., you really can’t, I know you’re itching to start unnecessary, bloody wars wherever you can, but you can't do that here), so imposing severe financial sanctions and doing what Japan has announced it will do, withholding aid, are the right choice. Japan is the largest aid donor for Myanmar, but the Japanese have canceled a multimillion-dollar grant in protest of Gen. Than Shwe’s brutal, bloody crusade against pro-democracy forces within his country. The announcement came in support of a U.N. envoy led by Ibrahim Gambari as it pressures neighboring countries to stand up against Gen. Shwe and his regime. The Chinese, viewed as a key factor in the battle because of its history as Myanmar’s biggest ally and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, offered only lip service Wednesday, saying it supports Gambari’s mission but declining to actually take any action. What, you can’t contribute some toys covered in lead paint or toothpaste laced with a lethal chemical normally found in antifreeze, China? The citizens of Myanmar need every major country to continue tightening that financial noose around the neck of their fascist government, because unless someone takes a stand to help them, their hopes for freedom from this repressive reign are slim.

- Nice move by the Cleveland Indians, having Danielle Peck, the ex-girlfriend of Boston Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett, sing the national anthem and “God Bless America” at last night’s ALCS Game 5 when Beckett was the starting pitcher for the Sox. The Indians maintain that it’s a mere coincidence, that Peck is an Ohio resident and Indians fan and that’s why she sang at the game. Both of those things may be true, that she’s an Ohioan and Indians fan, but don’t expect me to believe that it was a total coincidence that in the biggest game of the season to this point, you just happened to have the ex-girlfriend of your opponent’s ace on hand to sing the national anthem. I don’t have a problem with it, even if the Indians did it intentionally, because it’s a savvy bit of gamesmanship and it’s not breaking any rules. I just don’t need to be lied to about it, although to be fair, it’s not like this is something you could ever admit to if you’re the Indians or any other
team. I just wonder if the Tribe already has a call out to the ex-girlfriends of Colorado Rockies pitcher Josh Fogg to see if any of them would like to come and sing the anthem before one of Fogg’s starts should the
Indians make the World Series, where Colorado awaits.

- If I had been in your shoes, I would have gladly made the same trade, Linda Darby. Darby, a fugitive who escaped from an Indiana prison back in 1972, was finally captured after a 35-year search, taken in by police in Pulaski, Tenn. She was convicted of murdering her husband in the early ‘70s but escaped from jail, fled the state and created a new life for herself. She had remarried and raised a family under the name Linda Joe McElroy. As I said, if I’d been in her shoes once she was sentenced to prison, I would have gladly traded spending the latter years of her life in prison with no chance for parole in order to have 35 more years of freedom in the prime of her life. If you can make that trade, you do it in a heartbeat. Maybe I would have had the good sense to go ahead and change my entire name and my appearance, but other than that I don’t know that I would have done it any differently. She got to experience a nearly normal existence despite having been convicted of murder. While you can’t admire or give respect to someone like that, you can certainly understand her actions. That being said, hope you enjoyed the heck out of your life in Tennessee as a “normal” member of society, Linda, because that’s the last dose of freedom you’ll ever see on this earth. Plus, I think it’s going to be much more difficult to escape now that you’re a senior citizen and the guards will be keeping a much closer eye on you, given your history.

- Talk about being under the gun in a big, big way…..Green Bay Packers wide receiver Koren Robinson, a multiple-time offender of the NFL’s substance abuse policy, has been reinstated to the league after serving a one-year suspension following his most recent violation, a drunk driving charge that led to a minor police chase. Robinson is back in the NFL, but he’s on the ultimate short leash. If he has one more violation of the substance-abuse policy, he’ll be banned from the league for life. I don’t feel sorry for him because he put himself in this position with repeated bad choices, but it has to be an intense feeling for him, knowing that he can’t make even one minor mistake in this area or his NFL career is over, no questions asked. “I know this is my last chance,” Robinson said. “If I do anything to jeopardize that, I didn’t deserve it in the first place.”
Agreed, Koren, and I hope you do keep your life going in the right direction, although it’s more so because of the rest of your life after football than it is because I want you to stay in the NFL. If you don’t get your alcohol addiction under control, losing your chance to play professional football will be among the least of
your worries. Keep it between the lines, my man, don’t blow this opportunity.

- It was a night of flip flops on Smallville, one that featured former Superman Dean Cain as an unsavory neurosurgeon with an “eternal” secret. Cain guest starred as Dr. Curtis Warren, who posed as a doctor helping meteor-infected people be “cured” of their abilities while also removing all their memories from the past few years. That last twist was to protect Lex Luthor, who hired the good doctor to treat his 33.1 patients and allow them to return to normal lives. Dr. Warren had other ideas; he picked out meteor-infected people with high concentrations of the green stuff in particular organs, killed them and harvested their supercharged organs to transplant into the body of the woman he loved. Why, you ask? As it turns out, Dr. Curtis Warren is immortal and has been alive for centuries, meaning he can’t be killed but is forced to constantly watch the people he loves die when their mortality catches up with them. His attempt to create his own synthetically-engineered, Frankenstein-like bride also brings him in touch with Chloe, who wants to be rid of her meteor powers. Another flip flop in this episode is the fact that unlike most every other Smallville episode, this one was Chloe-centric, not built around the Man of Steel. Chloe goes in for a procedure to cure her of her abilities after running into a cured Sasha, the girl from Season One who controlled bees with her meteor power. Clark learns of Chloe’s plans and tries to talk her out of it but fails. However, when Lana reveals that her own research has turned up disturbing details about Dr. Warren, Clark starts digging and gets help from an unlikely source: Lex. After saving Lex from an attack by Dr. Warren, Clark talks to Lana, finds out about Warren and goes to Jimmy Olsen to find out where Chloe is. After realizing that she’s gone to have the operation, Clark searches for her with help from Lex and that’s when he learns about Warren’s immortality. Having Clark working with Lex and trusting him for help is a definite flip flop from last season, when it was Lana looking to Lex and Clark looking to take him down. Needless to say, Clark saves Chloe just as she’s about to be killed, leaving Warren in tears. He then falls into the hands of the Martian Manhunter, who gets rid of him in mysterious fashion that he won't even share with Clark. Warren isn't the only one to disappear courtesy of the Manhunter; after two confrontations that reveal a hostile history back on Krypton, Kara appeals to Clark to believe her version of things over the Martian Manhunter’s, and when he doesn’t, she becomes very angry and flies away. The allegation that on Krypton, her father tried to murder his brother, Clark’s father Jor-El, is disconcerting, as is the Manhunter’s warning that if Clark doesn’t find Kara’s crystal before she does, he could be in great danger. The search for the crystal also leads Kara to Jimmy in the hopes that he can analyze the video Lois shot of Kara’s spaceship in the warehouse. After finding that the Flintrock Corporation is involved and they’re a government contractor, which means the government is Kara’s next target to find her crystal, Chloe finds Kara and Jimmy eating Chinese food and hanging out while watching the video. She isn't happy and when she’s unable to share her secret of being a “meteor freak” with Jimmy at night’s end, the pair breaks up. Meanwhile, Lana ends her night at a mysterious office/loft where she has a bank of video monitors showing footage from surveillance cameras hidden throughout the Luthor mansion. She’s spying on Lex, looking in on his activities and finding out about projects he’s working on, presumably because she wants to help the former 33.1 patients using the $10 million she embezzled from Lex. When Clark asks about the money, she lies and says it was part of the divorce settlement, showing the “other” Lana that show creator Al Gough has been hinting about since the season began. Next week, we’re apparently in store for a feature film being shot in Smallville, so that should be interesting, to say the least. It’s been a season of twists and role reversals on Smallville, where once again nothing is as it seems. I can’t wait to see where this is going, it’s a great ride.

- If the New York Yankees didn’t want Joe Torre back as their manager, they should have just said so.
Instead, the team’s front office offered Torre a hollow, insulting one-year contract that shouldn’t be viewed as anything other than a PR ploy to try and save face. A one-year deal, especially for a manager of Torre’s credentials, is a joke. This is a man who won four world titles for the franchise, the second-winningest manager in Yankee history and a man who is immensely respected by his players. A one-year contract essentially puts him on a tryout basis next season at a reduced salary, forcing him to deal with all of the same scrutiny and speculation he faced this year when he was in the last year of his contract. Not only that, the team took its sweet time holding organizational meetings and left Torre to twist in the wind as they debated. He had the media camping out in his front yard, making his life miserable. Had he accepted this sham of a contract proposal, he wouldn’t even been guaranteed to still be around in 2009, when the Yankees move into their brand new stadium. This was an offer they know Torre would reject, so making it is an incredibly meaningless, classless gesture. Randy Levine, the team’s president, wanted Torre gone, and this offer was the best way to do it without having to actually have the balls to stand up and say that you don’t want Joe Torre to be your manager anymore. I already hated the Yankees more than any team in any sport, but this debacle multiples my despisal of that franchise tenfold.

More trouble for the Juice, a heart-stopping burrito and Man Ram talking

- It’s not looking good for the Juice. Yet another co-defendant in the Las Vegas burglary case against O.J. Simpson has rolled on the former Heisman Trophy winner and double murderer (allegedly), meaning that two of the cohorts the Juice recruited at that wedding reception have turned on him. Hard to believe that guys he just met at that reception and talked into committing a crime with him aren’t showing more loyalty. Of course, with the Juice, you never want to count him out when it comes to criminal charges against him. The prosecution may have two of his co-defendants ready to testify against him, they may have several other witnesses also ready to finger O.J., they may have an audio tape of the alleged burglary wherein the Juice is threatening people and barking out orders and they may have O.J. himself admitting that he was in the room and took items from the people in that room, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to convict the man. Personally, I think he’s made some Robert Johnson-like deal with the devil wherein he can be the worst guy ever, act like a totally classless, arrogant jerk, commit as many crimes as he wants but never suffer any consequences here on Earth. The prosecutors in his murder case had all kinds of physical and circumstantial evidence against him as well as his slow-speed freeway escape attempt to present to jurors and they still couldn’t secure a conviction. Maybe this time will be different because the case won't take place in front of the idiotic, surgically-enhanced, vapid group of morons that you usually get for criminal trials in southern California, but I doubt it. The Juice is the new Teflon Don, so until he’s formally convicted and locked behind bars for 5-7 years in one of those snazzy orange prison jumpsuits, I refuse to believe that he’s in real trouble.

- The Hardee’s chain of restaurants clearly has one main goal, namely finding new ways to jam as many calories and as much unhealthy crap into their food as humanly possible without having to offer a free angioplasty and quadruple-bypass surgery with each meal purchase. Hence we have the new heart-stopping Hardee’s breakfast burrito, a 920-calorie, cholesterol-laced monster that contains two egg omelets filled with sausage, bacon, diced ham, cheddar cheese, hash browns and sausage gravy, all wrapped in a flour tortilla. I actually think my cholesterol count just jumped 90 points just writing that last sentence. The Country Breakfast Burrito, which should probably be called the Heart Attack-Inducing Burrito instead, is now available at your local Hardee’s, although if you plan on eating it, you should plan on walking, running or biking to the restaurant and back to help offset the calories and also eating nothing but carrots, celery, rice cakes, apples and tofu for the next two months to balance out the fat and cholesterol you’ll be ingesting. Happy eating, everyone. Yeah, but it’s such a big mystery why so many Americans are so grossly obese and out of shape……

- And another one bites the dust. Led Zeppelin, long one of the only major artist in music for the past half-century or so not to make their catalog available digitally, will finally relent and join the rest of us in the 21st century. While you can already get Zep’s music on CD and thus rip, er, um, listen to the tracks that way, their music has, up to this point, not been available through online music retailers like iTunes. That will change as of Nov. 13, thus leaving the Beatles as one of the only remaining legends in the business not to have their work available digitally. Again, you can always borrow, er, buy a CD and rip your own digital copies, so it’s not a big deal from where I sit. Of course, among current acts, Radiohead still refuses to get in bed with iTunes, but even they have their latest album, In Rainbows, available for download from their website, www.radiohead.com. As for the Beatles, who remain in analog-land, their catalog is partially owned by that pervy pedophile Michael Jackson, so it’s hard to tell if or when Beatles music will find its way to the digital realm, perhaps the next time Jack-O is accused of child molestation and needs to sell off some of his assets to pay for his legal fees.

- So Larry Craig is now trying to take back his guilty plea in the lewd behavior case against him in Minnesota. Sorry to have to point this out, L., but that’s not really how it works, my man. You can’t just slam everything in reverse and erase every single part of this utterly regrettable saga, then go back to how things were before you signaled an undercover cop in an airport restroom for some sexual freakery. First you plead guilty and promise to resign from the Senate, then you renege on that promise to quit. Now, you’re asking a the Minnesota Court of Appeals to overturn a ruling by a county judge who said that you cannot withdraw your guilty plea. Did you not understand when you plead guilty and promised to resign from the Seante that those were things you needed to follow through on? The guilty plea especially is something you really can't take back. It’s as if Craig thinks he was not in his right mind and reflexively entered that guilty plea and promised to quit, then regained his wits and in a panicked state tried to reverse everything he’d just done. What’s next, L., are you going to try and talk that undercover cop into believing that you didn’t really signal him for some lewd sexual activity in that airport restroom? Sorry, but no matter how many interviews you give with your wife by your side and how much you continue to insist that this is all some sort of mistake, you can’t change what you did or how you handled it. You are where you are and you need to stop trying to tell us that the sky isn't blue, water isn't wet and that you didn’t really mean to plead guilty.

- I’m not going to bite on Blender magazine releasing its list of the 40 worst pop lyricists of all time, mostly because those lists are totally arbitrary, subjective and designed to get attention and create controversy. Why do I care what some a-holes at Blender think, anyhow? Can’t I listen to the music for myself and decide what’s good and what’s bad? This isn't some foreign language or intricately complicated subject that I can’t possibly understand on my own, so I need the “experts” to decode it for me. Besides, any list that contains such a contradictory group of artists as Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Alanis Morrissette, Jim Morrison and Common isn't worth much. Some of those artists are good, some are terrible, but Blender feels that Sting is the worst of them all when it comes to lyrics. Personally his grating, breathy voice irritates me more, but whatever. Either way, just know that your list is completely irrelevant and totally pointless, Blender.

- Fans and pundits who are in an uproar over Manny Ramirez latest comments need to check themselves, because there’s absolutely no reason to be that upset about anything a professional athlete has to say, short of them dropping a racial, ethnic or sexual slur or saying something like Hitler was right and the Jews deserved it. Other than those takes, nothing that flies out of the mouth of your average pro athlete should carry that much weight with anyone. Asked about his team’s challenge in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, Man Ram responded, in typical Man Ram fashion, “If we don’t win, it’s not a big deal. It’s not like it’s the end of the world, there’s always next year.” Keep in mind that this is a guy who never, ever speaks to the media during the season, so when he does, people listen up, even if the odds are that he doesn’t have much of value to say. Those who are looking to vilify Man Ram are using these comments as ammo to say that he doesn’t care about winning and that he’s not giving his best, but if you look at his numbers, you’ll see otherwise. He’s hitting .462 for the series, he’s gone deep twice and three times he’d driven in runs with bases-loaded walks. Not only that, his defense and base running have been unusually solid, so regardless of what he says, he’s clearly playing hard. Too many fans and critics expect every player to be a maniacal, bloodthirsty psychopath, hell-bent on winning and thinking of nothing else. They want players’ worlds to begin and end with their sport, forgetting that these players are people just like they are and that their lives don’t end when they leave the stadium or arena and that the players have families, friends, interests and passions outside of their sport too. Man Ram is right, if the Red Sox don’t win the series, the world will not end and there are a million things that could happen, both positive and negative, to any of the players in this or any other series before their next game that would remind them how totally inconsequential sports truly are in the big picture. They’re only words, people, and they’re not even racist, sexist, heinous, degrading of anyone, bigoted, obscene, explicit or otherwise over any line. Man Ram is not belittling anyone, he’s not slandering anyone and you all need to relax.

Divas and their agents, coaches urinating on bars and the WNBA expands, prompting wild enthusiasm from no one

- Am I supposed to be outraged that Don Imus back on the air? If so, I’m missing the boat because when I heard that the controversial, loudmouth radio personality had landed a new gig, I wondered what’s the big deal? To the best of my knowledge, Imus didn’t use any racial slurs, especially not the “n” word. He didn’t advocate lynching, hanging or otherwise killing people of a different race simply based on their skin color. He said something moronic while trying to be funny and while the term “nappy-headed hos” is neither clever nor funny and should have gotten Imus suspended and/or fired, it definitely shouldn’t prevent him from getting another opportunity to host a show. He didn’t commit a crime, he committed an act of extreme stupidity and insensitivity. Reports have him returning to the airwaves as early as December, most likely on WABC-FM in New York. Among the many who are in a tizzy over Imus’ impending return to broadcasting is Kim Gandy, president of NOW, the National Organization for Women. She likened Imus being given a second chance in radio to “a bad dream.” citadel Broadcasting CEO Farid Suleman, on the other hand, agrees with me and his opinion carries more weight than Gandy’s because Suleman’s company owns WABC and he’ll be the one giving Imus that second chance. “He didn’t break the law,” Suleman said, stating the obvious. To be fair, I’ve never been an Imus listener and I don’t plan on listening to him if and when he returns, but there is no reason to deny him this opportunity. If he screws this one up, then that’s on him and he probably won't make another comeback.

- I love Manny Ramirez. I had to say that before I said what I’m about to say, because right now I can’t be too kind to the man that many have glossed as Man Ram. Man Ram is a masher, a legendary power hitter with an almost savant-like ability to hit even though he seems like the biggest doofus in baseball. He has long, dangling dreadlocks that go down past his shoulders, he’s famous for using other players’ bats, batting gloves and mitts, wearing other players’ uniforms shirts and pants and has done things like wearing sunglasses with a built-in MP3 player during a game. While with the Cleveland Indians in the mid-1990s, he once told a clubhouse attendant to go have his car wash and that there was money in the glove compartment to pay for it. The attendant opened the glove box and found literally tens of thousands of dollars in $100 bills inside, left there by Man Ram. As much as I love all of those things and many other things Man Ram, I can’t get with Manny’s act Tuesday night in the American League Championship Series Game Four. Now with the Boston Red Sox, Manny was facing his former team, the Indians, and his Sox were behind 7-2 when Man Ram came to the plate and launched a massive home run. However, in spite of his prodigious blast, with his team way behind on the scoreboard and behind in the best-of-seven series by a 2-1 count, you’d think Manny wouldn’t do much showboating over his home run. You, of course, would be wrong. He raised his arms to the sky, stood in the batter’s box and admired his handiwork – well, after that epic bat flip. The funny thing is that I’m not one of those people who bashes guys for styling and profiling after they hit home runs. Most of the time, I have no problem with it. But when your team is that far behind and you hit a home run, you should keep it to a minimum so you can get back to the dugout and celebrate with your teammates, because the goal is to come back and win, not to celebrate your own greatness. If your team is ahead or if your home run ties or wins the game or even pulls your team within a run or two, feel free to flip your bat, to stand and admire your shot or to take your time circling the bases. When you’re down by five runs, though, keep the antics to a minimum, Man Ram. Even you, in all your wacky greatness, should not be profiling that much after a home run in that situation. Your team is on the verge of elimination and even you aren’t dumb enough not to realize that.

- When you think of dignity and class, how can you not think of Baylor University football? What’s that? You’re saying that having one of your football coaches urinating on a bar and getting arrested is neither dignified nor classy? Well that’s an awfully cynical way to look at it. Yes, Baylor offensive line/tight ends coach Eric Schnupp was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and reckless exposure after taking a leak on the bar early Sunday morning at a Waco-area bar called Scruffy Murphy’s. The citation will garner Schnupp a $258 fine on a Class C misdemeanor charge, according to the Waco Municipal Court. It will also earn him an indefinite suspension from his job by the university, with head coach Guy Morriss saying that the suspension is indefinite and will last “until this situation is resolved.” Asked to elaborate, Morriss declined, and really you can’t blame him. One of his coaches acted like a total lush, a drunken idiot who is supposed to be somewhat of a leader and mentor for the college kids he coaches. Although most of the players on the team probably drink anyhow, having an authority figure getting so hammered that he’s taking a leak on a bar doesn’t help matters. The police didn’t even have to make a special stop at the bar to arrest Schnupp, as they were already there to help a woman who had passed out in a restroom stall. A bar employee had the misfortune of seeing Schnupp drop trou and do his business, so the employee alerted the police, who cuffed the intoxicated coach and hauled him off. Call me crazy, but don’t most guys roll with a wing man or two when they go to a bar? If you have a wing man, shouldn’t he take care of things like getting you out of a bar before you piss on it and get arrested? Either Schnupp has no real friends or they just like seeing him make a fool of himself. Either way, coach, you need to find a better way to take the edge off after a hard week, perhaps drinking at home. Whatever keeps you from urinating on any more bars, my man…..

- Michelle Wie and Joss Stone used to be promising, fast-rising talents in their respective professions, golf and music. They were talented teenagers with impressive skill sets, achieving great success before they even became legal adults and seemingly on their way to big things. Somewhere along the way, both of their careers got sidetracked and they went from prodigies to spoiled, self-important brats who are such a pain in the a** that they can’t even keep an agent. Both women are now in search of new agents after their relationships with their previous agents went sour. Greg Nared, a former Nike business manager who the William Morris Agency hired to shepherd Wie’s wayward career, resigned Monday at the end of the LPGA season, ending a year I’m sure he’ll be desperately trying to forget. "After careful consideration for my future, I have resigned effective immediately," Nared said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. "I'm very grateful to the William Morris Agency for the opportunity to work with world-class athletes. It has been an invaluable experience and I'll forever cherish (it)." Reading between the lines, you can see that what Nared was really saying was, “This year was a hellacious nightmare, I can’t take one more minute of dealing with this spoiled brat and her overbearing parents and I’d rather manage on the World Badminton Tour for $25 a week than to continue working with Michelle Wie.” Nared actually replaced Ross Berlin, a former PGA Tour executive hired by the William Morris Agency as Wie's agent. Berlin had disagreements with Wie's parents on her schedule, particularly in late 2006 when Wie was taken out of her senior year at Punahou School in Honolulu to play a European Tour men's event in Switzerland, then the following week outside Pittsburgh on the PGA Tour at the 84 Lumber Classic. She finished last in both events. This year wasn’t much better, with Wie ending her season with a 76.7 scoring average, breaking par only twice, failing to record a single round in the 60s and making only three cuts. Nared was in the middle of Wie’s big controversy of the year at the Ginn Tribute in South Carolina in the spring, conferring with her on the 16th tee moments before she withdrew. Wie was 14 over par through 16 holes when she quit, and it appeared as though she was trying to avoid the LPGA's "Rule 88," in which nonmembers are ineligible for one year if they shoot 88 or higher. Wie then showed up two days later at the McDonald’s LPGA Championship to compete, apparently healed from her injury in miraculous fashion. Event host and LPGA legend Annika Sorenstam labeled the move disrespectful, which pretty much sums up Wie’s entire act right now. As for Joss Stone, she’s also parted ways with her most recent manager, deciding that she’s better off acting as her own representation. She’s gone through four managers in five years and two or her former associates believe that she’s headed for trouble. Keeping in mind that these are people Stone has fired and thus they have an ax to grind with her, one of them said in an interview that, “Joss wants to manage herself, but you have to consider her lack of understanding of the challenges in front of her…..when it comes to her career, she’s convinced that she’s right and everyone else is wrong.” Sounds like Stone and Wie have a lot in common; both are about the same age, enormously talented yet failing to accomplish nearly as much as their talents would seem to dictate. They both think that they know what’s best and won't listen to anyone else, so their agents keep quitting or getting fired. Both of them are developing reputations as divas, prima donnas and b*tches who can’t be dealt with. The thing to watch will be which of them, if either, can pull out of their nosedive first. Stay tuned…..

- The sports world is abuzz today because of a franchise announcement that is sure to revolutionize the basketball world. The titan of a sports league that is the WNBA has responded to pressure from its tens and tens of fans and added a new franchise in Atlanta. Forget for a minute that the only reason the WNBA exists is that for all of its ten-plus years in existence, the NBA has pumped money into it to keep it afloat out of some misguided sense of fairness to women’s sports or just plain charity. Forget that WNBA attendance is more pathetic than attendance at a Pauly Shore film festival, just rejoice in the fact that Atlanta now has a shot at having an actual legitimate professional basketball team. After being subjected for years on end to the perpetual nightmare and abortion of an NBA team that is the Atlanta Hawks, the city might actually have a winning pro basketball team on its hands. For the Hawks’ sake and for the sake of their beleaguered, inept GM Billy Knight, just hope that the new WNBA franchise doesn’t challenge the Hawks to a game, because the Hawks would probably lose that contest. And no, WNBA, my taking the time to write about you here doesn’t mean you’re an actual legit league, I just needed a quick, easy joke to finish this thing off.

Heroes flies solo, Madonna gets something she doesn't deserve and lacrosse fans suffer a devastating blow - both of them

- With the baseball playoffs preempting Prison Break last night, it was a night for Heroes to shine, which the show did with a really strong episode, a good, gripping, dramatic show that introduced some new heroes but unfortunately it also completely excluded two of the show’s best characters, Peter Petrelli and Hiro Nakamura, along with Hiro’s sidekick Ando and his new friend, Japanese legend Takezo Kensei. That the previews for next week’s episode promise a big dose of my man P. Petrelli only makes up for last night’s exclusion partially. But the characters who were on screen delivered great performances, including a new hero. Down in New Orleans, Micah, he of the ability to manipulate machines with a simple touch, is having a bit of a tough time adjusting to life with his cousins and grandma. His cousin Monica is more like Micah than either of them know, though, because she has the power to “download” and replicate things she sees done on TV, things like making a tomato rose or duplicating the “619” wrestling maneuver of WWE superstar Rey Mysterio. She does these things almost as a reflex, but this is the first time she’s really recognized her ability. She uses it to foil a robbery, knocking the would-be robber through a glass pane and sending him running. Micah, despite being warned by mom Niki not to use his powers before she left for New York to be “cured” of her own powers, uses his way with machines to hack into his cousin’s TV and allow them both to watch a wrestling pay-per-view that they don’t have the money to buy. Out in sunny Southern California, the Bennet family is back to its old habits of lying to one another, keeping secrets and hatching schemes. Claire doesn’t want to stop seeing Wes, the boy with the power to fly, whom she has become fast friends with, so she lies to her dad about what she’s spending her time on. She doesn’t want Wes coming face-to-face with the man who once abducted him and took him in for the Company for testing, and her father is that man. So she uses an offer to join the cheerleading squad as a diversion and talks her father into allowing her to be a cheerleader once again, something he’d expressly forbidden, except she’s not really going to cheerleading practice – she’s out with Wes. Noah Bennet, a.k.a. H.R.G., has secrets of his own. His plot to take down the company takes an international turn when the Haitian comes to his door and announces a new lead on the location of one of the eight mythical paintings by the late Isaac Mendez (or, as Hiro called him, Mr. Is-sock) that foretell the future. The Haitian and H.R.G. will be heading to Odessa – but not Odessa, Texas, where the Bennet family just left, but Odessa, Ukraine. Also on the international front, felons on the run Maya and Alejandro continued their run for the border, with their new friend Derek driving them. When the trio stops to check on an injured man lying in the road, it turns out to be a fatally wrong decision, although none of them realize it yet. Somehow, Sylar is that man laying in the middle of a rural dirt road in the wilderness of Mexico. They give him a ride, but at their next stop to get gas, Derek sees wanted posters for Maya and Alejandro and wants to turn them in. He tells Sylar what he wants to do and goes to call the police, but that’s the last mistake he’ll ever make. When Sylar reveals Derek’s betrayal to Maya, she begins crying, unleashing her powers to kill and make blood flow from the eyes of anyone in her vicinity. Alejandro calms her down, but Sylar realizes they have powers of their own and clearly he has plans to take those powers. Derek is killed in the incident and left behind as Maya, Alejandro and Sylar flee, headed for New York to find Dr. Suresh. Maya and Alejandro don’t know that Dr. Suresh is dead, but his son Mohinder is alive and well, continuing his work with Molly, the little girl with the ability to locate others with powers, and for the Company as part of H.R.G.’s plan. Molly’s other guardian, Matt Parkman, needs her help when he realizes that his own father was one of the 12 original heroes, a group that includes Mrs. Petrelli, Hiro’s father, Linderman and Bob, the strange man who hired Mohinder to work for the Company, among others. These people are being picked off one by one, and when Nathan Petrelli, shorn of his shaggy beard and having vowed to get clean and sober, finds a picture of the group of twelve and shows it to Parkman, Matt recognizes his father and asks Molly to help him find his dad. Despite Mohinder’s protestations and Molly’s initial reluctance to find the “nightmare man,” she agrees to help Matt and tracks his father in her mind to an apartment building in Philadelphia, right down to the third floor of the building and room No. 9, but then she gasps, “He knows I’m here!” and lapses into some sort of coma, apparently held there by the powers of Matt’s father. That’s where the episode ends, in about as dramatic a fashion as you can get. Given the fact that so many of the usual characters weren’t in this episode (Peter, Hiro, Ando, Niki), it was still s fantastic show. Next week’s episode is being billed as “a place where nothing is as it seems,” and with one or more characters having the ability to mentally project alternate realities into the minds of others and make them believe that they are real, almost anything is possible. Stay tuned…..

- Signing Madonna to a record contract at any point in time is something I’d rather shove my head into a running blender full of razor blades than do. However, looking Madonna’s new 10-year, $120 million recording contract she signed with Live Nation, I have to say that it’s an epically horrible waste of money on an aging performer in the twilight of his or her career, on par with the New York Yankees paying Roger Clemens a $28 million prorated salary this season for a few months of work and getting a 6-6 record, a 4.18 E.R.A. and less than six innings a start, plus one miserable playoff start in which he lasted 2 1/3 innings and gave up three runs and a home run. Madge’s former record company, Warner Bros., agrees with my assessment, and the company has released a “study” entitled For $120 Million, She’s All Yours. The study concludes, among other things, that Madonna’s declining popularity and marketability, combined with the fact that she’ll be 60 when the deal ends, make Live Nation’s investment a bad one. I’d add that Madonna is a no-talent hack with bad teeth who makes crappy music, gains attention by doing and saying controversial things for the specific purpose of gaining attention and changes her look and gimmick every year or so to try and stay relevant, which she’s never quite succeeded at. Currently she’s going with the Kabbalah shtick and the adopt/kidnap-a-small-African-child gimmick, and although I don’t know if she’s released a new album lately (I have an aversion to terrible music that will make me nauseous within the first five seconds of the first song on the album), I can say with absolute certainty that if she has put out (well, she always seems to put out, but I digress) a new album lately, it sucked. How can I say that? Simple. Every album and every song the woman has ever put out has sucked. She’s jumped from style to style within the über-crappy genre that is sugary-sweet pop music and has sounded ear-assaultingly awful at each stop. She’s shown no inclination to improve or capability to do so, so why would she suddenly figure out at age 50 how to make good music? Hope you don’t mind wasting $120 million, Live Nation, because you’ve just committed to do so in spectacular fashion.

- Brace yourself, sports fans; I have some devastating news that affects us all. The National Lacrosse League, clearly the foremost, preeminent professional sports league in this country, if not the world, has canceled its 2008 season after the league and the Professional Lacrosse Players Association failed to reach terms on a new collective bargaining agreement despite prolonged negotiations. I’m sure that all of you, like me, have been hanging onto every detail you could get about the status of negotiations. How ESPN hasn’t sent every reporter it has out to cover this story I don’t know……wait, I do know. It’s because it’s f’ing lacrosse and it might have the distinction as one of the only sports in this country that people care less about than Major League Soccer or professional bowling. Hey Major League Lacrosse players and league officials, you all do know that you are Major League Lacrosse, right? Who among you benefits when your extremely peripheral, eighth-tier sport, already totally bereft of any public interest or following, goes away for a year? All of the ones and ones of people who watch more than two minutes of the occasional game ESPN broadcasts when it runs out of old poker tournaments and spelling bees will forget all about you when you fail to play your 2008 season and if you ever return to the field, they won't be coming back to watch. Not that you were ever going to become a legitimate, major pro sport in America, but your 0.0005 percent chance to do so just went to -150 percent with your decision to have a strike/lockout. The best thing that all of you can do is remember who you are and realize that your best move is swallowing your pride, reaching an agreement that neither of you like and getting back out there on the field next season before you lose both of your fans.

- So does this mean that if I’m visiting Yangon, I can access YouTube or not? Gen. Than Shwe, the ruling military junta of Myanmar, restored public Internet access Sunday shortly after a U.N. envoy arrived in nearby Thailand to attempt to rally neighboring governments to action in the political showdown between the ruling military and the increasingly vocal pro-democracy forces in Myanmar. The junta’s ruling restored access to most sites, but foreign news sites are still off limits for the citizens of Myanmar, because heaven knows we don’t want any outside information or viewpoints reaching them. As long as they can only hear the news and views that the junta wants and as he sees things, then the citizens will just fall right in line with what he wants….sure they will. Restricting access to information and trying to limit the viewpoints and opinions people hear has never been an effective strategy for any other ruler trying to restrain dissident forces in his or her country, but feel free to give it another shot, Gen. Shwe. Just know that no one views your “concessions” as carrying much weight or as real signs that you are willing to change how you do things in your country. So far you haven’t conceded much of anything, just a few very minor issues that don’t do diddly to change what really matters – the brutally oppressive, restrictive, human rights-violating government that your people want to end.

- Congrats to ABC on doing what no player in this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs has been able to do: bat 1.000. For a baseball player, that would mean getting a hit in every at bat, but for ABC it means something else entirely. The network has managed to swing and miss on every freaking one of its new “comedies,” and I use the quotation marks because these shows are supposed to be funny but have produced about as many laughs as a root canal. The most obvious example is the über-retarded Cavemen, and my problems (and everyone else’s, really) with this show have been well-documented. It’s a lame piece of crap based on a series of tired, played car insurance commercials with an awful premise: cavemen living in 2007. Nearly as bad is that show’s Tuesday night partner, Carpoolers. Jerry O’Connell is the star of the show, which should tell you all you need to know about it. The man might be a decent complimentary actor in a project filled with A-listers, but a leading man who can carry a show he ain’t. However, ABC wasn’t content to keep the catastrophically bad comedies to a single night. No, the network mixed in its newest stink bomb, Samantha Who? last night. The show stars Christina Applegate as a woman who lost her memory in an accident (a la Jim Carey in The Majestic, only not nearly as entertaining) and is struggling to get it back. As she does, she discovers that her pre-accident self was too nice. She tries to correct her past mistakes as she gradually regains her memory, which is supposed to provide plenty of funny moments….and ultimately produces none. It pains me to see Gilmore Girls alum Melissa McCarthy as part of such a terrible show, but there’s nothing I can do about it. The premature cancellation of GG by the CW and its chief idiot, Dawn Ostroff, forced the show’s cast into new endeavors and this is where McCarthy ended up. The only interesting thing about these three abominations of a TV show will be seeing which one of them is canceled first. Well done, ABC, you’ve taken sucking to a whole new level.

Maria Sharapova is letting me down, Kelvin Sampson is a lowlife and Drew Carey finds the perfect woman for him

- Maria Sharapova, say it ain’t so. The Russian beauty, with those amazing legs and perfect smile, had been doing so well in proving that she was a legitimate athlete and not the next Anna Kournikova, but more and more it seems that Ms. Sharapova is trending downward on the tennis court and is succumbing to the same trend of injuries and subpar play that drove Kournikova from the sport. With multiple endorsement deals and omnipresent commercials, Sharapova has established herself as a corporate presence, but she is also withdrawing from tournaments and losing matches at an alarming rate. The latest event she will miss due to a lingering shoulder injury is the Munich Open, which began today. She will also miss the Generali Ladies event in Linz, Austria, which begins on Oct. 22. For the sake of everyone out there, men especially, who appreciates all of the, um, talents that Sharapova brings to the court, I hope that she can beat the injury bug that she’s fighting and regain the form that allowed her to become a winner of multiple majors. She seems like a nice enough girl, not nearly as arrogant and self-important as Kournikova, and she has the added bonus, unlike Anna, of never having starred in a music video for that hack, vocally-bankrupt, mole-sporting loser Enrique Iglesias. Plus, if she still aspires to be a Bond girl, Maria is going to need to win tournaments because let’s face it, James Bond doesn’t date losers. No, he prefers stunningly beautiful nuclear physicists with perfect bodies who also just happen to have PhD’s from prestigious universities. Get well and come back strong, Maria, a lot is riding on it for you and for me as well…..

- Damn. My holiday shopping just got a whole lot harder, thanks to the police in Mexico City and their decision to crack down on vendors selling bootleg items in the city’s busy downtown historic center. More than 1,000 police in full riot gear blocked vendors from setting up their stands selling knockoff purses and bootleg movies Friday, meaning that I’m going to have to go elsewhere if I want to find that copy of The Heartbreak Kid before Christmas. It’s the first crackdown of this nature in a decade, but the removal of 87 vendors from the streets was mostly peaceful, although it certainly wouldn’t have been if I were there. Where else can you find a good bootleg DVD of Disturbia and a nice knockoff Gucci purse at two adjoining stands? And where is your anger and indignation, Mexican bootleg/knockoff vendors? Why was there no rioting, clashes with police or burning and overturning of cars? Knowing those people, though, they’ve already found a new place to set up shop and are back in business. In the meantime, until I find out where this new location is, does anyone have a bootleg copy of Superbad that I can borrow? Anyone?

- Rarely has there been such a perfect match for marriage. Drew Carey, the portly, crass comic now charged with hosting The Price is Right, has gotten engaged to Nicole Jaracz, a recent graduate of culinary school. Carey has clearly never met a meal he didn’t like, and while I don’t think Jaracz’s culinary degree will allow her to make Carey’s favorite thing to consume, beer, she should be able to assist him in keeping up his rotund appearance. He kicks off his stint as host of The Price is Right this week, meaning he’d better having been brushing up un his groping, fondling and sexual harassment techniques if he truly hopes to follow in the legendarily lecherous footsteps of Bob Barker. Best wishes to you on that, Drew, and best wishes for the future Mrs. Carey in keeping up with the 4,000-calorie per-day diet that the Drew-ster appears to be on.

- Not a good sign for you, Indiana University, when your men’s basketball coach, Kelvin Sampson, already in the NCAA’s crosshairs for recruiting violations while in the same capacity at the University of Oklahoma, spent his first year at IU violating the very restrictions the NCAA placed on him for those infractions while at OU. Not only that, but Sampson’s rules violations appear to be extremely intentional and an obvious attempt to circumvent the rules. Because Sampson was banned from off-campus recruiting for his first year at IU, his only direct method of recruiting was via the phone, although he was also limited in the number of calls he could make to recruits and their families. To try and get around that roadblock, on at least 10 occasions an IU assistant coach placed a call to a recruit or the family of a recruit and then once the call was started, added Sampson in on a three-way call. As much as you’d like to pretend that those calls didn’t count, Kelvin, the NCAA says they do. The university’s self-imposed penalties include taking one scholarship from the men’s basketball program for this next year and withholding a $500,000 that Sampson was supposed to receive, assuming he did what is clearly impossible for him and abided by the rules. The hope with these self-imposed sanctions is always that the NCAA will see them, believe that the university is serious about cleaning up its act and policing itself and will thus go easier on it. In this case, I hope the NCAA says a big “Screw you” to IU and hits the university and Sampson with some stiff punishment, because nothing else seems to get through to him. Up the penalties until he’s left with no scholarships and can’t so much as think about thinking about sending a postcard to a recruit. Clean it up, Kelvin, or someone else will clean it up for you and you won’t like the result.

- Memo to W.: when the civilian death total in Iraq drops to four on a given day, like Saturday, a total that is the lowest for a single day in recent memory, and that’s something you’re celebrating, that’s a bad sign. When four civilians are killed as a result of the national conflict you’ve created and that’s a positive, feel free to view that as a clear indication that you are failing and failing miserably in your attempt to instill democracy, law and order in a country. This isn't a country the size of the United States, it’s a relatively modest-sized nation with a whole lotta desert, i.e. uninhabitable land. When four people are killed due to the violence you’ve paved the way for and facilitated, there’s really no way you should feel good about it, regardless of whether or not it’s an improvement from the day before. It’s like saying you only got into one fender bender today, which is less than the two you got in the day before and the three you got into the day before that. Any number higher than zero isn't acceptable. What we can celebrate is the fact that none of those four civilian deaths were people killed by Blackwater personnel, which has proven to be a problem in the past. But let’s stop trying to score a day of four civilian deaths as some sort of victory, because that’s the most delusional, misguided and asinine thinking I’ve heard since….well, when was the last time W. opened his mouth? ‘Nuff said……

- Social dissidence takes a hit over the weekend, and of course I’m all over it. In Yemen, a country not exactly known for its freedom of expression and lasseiz-faire attitude toward governing, police fired into a group of protestors assembling to prepare for a Sunday rally to mark the 44th anniversary of Yemeni uprising against British occupation of their country. The police blasted away at a group of retired army officers, killing four people even though the gathering was neither violent nor dangerous to anyone. Props to the Yemeni police for their total overreaction and quick-trigger syndrome in a benign, harmless situation. You dare to assemble, we kill you, what a motto for a police force to abide by. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Myanmar’s military junta arrested four more prominent political activists, continuing his crazed crusade against anyone and everyone who might have the spine to stand up against him. Amnesty International reported the arrests, which included one individual who went into hiding a few weeks ago after the anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks began. The United Nations has sent an envoy to the area, but at this point Gen. Than Shwe and his army are so out of control, paranoid and hell-bent on reigning with an iron fist that no U.N. envoy is going to talk them down from their position. Now, having reported those two disturbing incidents, I have faith that social dissidence and resistance will survive and live to protest another day, because these repressive leaders and authority figures can arrest and kill people, but that can’t kill the anti-establishment spirit. The Man can’t keep you down unless you allow him to, and I don’t think that the people in either of these situations are going to allow it. Fight the good fight, people, refuse to give in.

College football chaos, French pervs busted and Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner

- This might be the right time for college football coaches to ask pollsters not to rank their team in the Top 5 or Top 10. Normally coaches want their team to be highly ranked and respected, even if they insist publicly that the rankings don’t mean much to them. They want high rankings for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it shows their team is respected and recognized. However, given the fate of the alleged top teams in college football so far this season, the Top 5 doesn’t seem like a safe place for teams to reside. Another weekend of action, another #1 team goes down. This time it was LSU, losers of a heartbreaking 43-37 3OT contest at Kentucky. It was a back and forth affair that finally ended in the third overtime when Kentucky got a huge fourth-down stop to secure the win. That loss would have opened the door for #2 Cal to take over the top spot in the polls, including the first BCS poll of the year (released today), and it did…..for all of an hour or two. That’s because shortly after LSU lost, Cal suffered a loss of its own, 31-28 to the unranked Oregon State Beavers. OSU eked out the win and ended Cal’s national title dreams, opening the door for another OSU, Ohio State, to grab the top spot in all the polls. The Buckeyes did just that with a 48-3 thrashing of in-state rival Kent State, a game that wasn’t even as close as the 45-point margin indicates. Oh, and props to KSU coach Doug Martin for kicking a field goal when trailing 48-0 with 2:35 left in the game, glad to narrowed that margin from 48 to 45, that really made a difference, you tool. Joining Ohio State at the top of college football for now are two unlikely teams, South Florida and Boston College. While I still can't figure out why a school located in Tampa is called South Florida, my beefs with the upstart Bulls end there. USF has beaten Auburn at Auburn and also taken down West Virginia, so they’re gaining legitimacy and respect bit by bit. Still, they and Boston College could have a hard time fending off one-loss teams like LSU, Oklahoma and even USC simply because the often-undeserved yet always present genuflection of poll voters and computer rankings to those big-name schools and their power conferences could well vault them ahead of a team from a lesser conference like the Big East or ACC, even if those Big East and ACC teams are unbeaten. Some of the off-the-map games on Saturday were great as well, including Northwestern playing a 40-plus-point, overtime game for the second consecutive week and winning once again, this time 48-42 over Minnesota. The lone Sunday night game of the weekend was even more of a shootout, with the 69-67 4OT win by Boise State over Nevada tying a record for the most points even scored in an NCAA Division I football game. Also of note on Saturday was Nebraska getting flat-out embarrassed on its home field in a 45-14 loss to lowly Oklahoma State. That the loss happened with legendary NU coach and current Sen. Tom Osborne on the sidelines with members of the 1997 Nebraska national championship team further compounded the embarrassment, as did losing to the ranting, raving, mentally-unstable lunatic that is Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy. Elsewhere in the Big 12, Kansas remained one of the most unlikely unbeatens in college football by thrashing Baylor 58-10. Staying with them in the ranks of the unbeaten was Arizona State, which annihilated Washington by a 44-20 count. I doubt very seriously that either KU or ASU will finish the season unbeaten, but the more unbeaten teams there are at year’s end and thus the more unbeaten teams shut out of the national championship game, the more foolish the BCS looks, and that’s good for everyone who wants what college football truly needs – a playoff system. Here’s hoping…..

- So does this mean that global warming exists and that it’s not just some mystical theoretical concoction cooked up by liberal scientists or a figment in the collective imagination of trees huggers and environmentalists? Former Vice President Al Gore, a man who invented the Internet but after such a prodigious accomplishment refused to rest on his laurels, has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his relentless crusade against global warming. While our stupid-as-a-box-of-rocks leader W. tries to pretend that global warming isn't real and pressures government scientists into changing their findings to get in line with this ignorant point of view, Gore has been tirelessly circling the world, campaigning for countries to take steps to halt global warming and mitigate its growing effects. For those efforts, he’s won this award along with a United Nations-sponsored scientific group on climate change. In addition to his film An Inconvenient Truth (200X), the Al-ster has also founded the Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization to which he will donate his half of the $1.5 million award that goes along with the Nobel Prize. He’s still ducking the question of whether he intends to use this positive momentum to propel him into the 2008 presidential election, but I would use the same rule for evaluating his potential candidacy that I’m using for any Democrat wishing to run for the White House in this or any other year: Anyone other than Sen. Hank Clinton is aces in my book. Congrats on winning just about the most prestigious award you can win in this world, Al, whether or not you choose to run for president. Since our current Idiot-in-Chief has his head in the sand on global warming, we need you to keep pushing this issue as much as possible.

- For residents of Myanmar looking to topple their nation’s fascist regime, the biggest problem could well be India and North Korea. That may seem odd, but those two nations are happily continuing to supply weapons to the 400,000-man army in Myanmar, even as most of the world condemns a regime with a despicable human rights record and a blatant disregard for its citizens. Economic sanctions and trade embargos have been dropped on Myanmar by the United States and many other nations, but as long as countries like India and North Korea are willing to keep selling them weapons, the military regime that has killed protestors, arrested Buddhist monks and instituted a suffocating martial law-type environment in the capital city of Yangon, the problems in Myanmar aren’t like to be solved any time soon. Most of the arms transfers to the country are perfectly legal and some are even reported to the United Nations. In light of the restrictions by the U.S. and most European countries, Gen. Than Shwe, the ruling military junta in Myanmar, has sought out the nations that are willing to stock his military and become a regular client. Since the embargoes on selling equipment to Myanmar are self-imposed, there aren’t many available avenues to pursue in trying to totally cut off the sale of arms to the country. Even then, there are lots of black market weapons to be had for the right amount of money, and if you’re looking to maintain a brutally oppressive regime and its near-total control over a country, there ain’t a price too high to pay for your guns, tanks, missiles and rockets.

- Amsterdam used to be the cool place to go for potheads, stoners, tweakers, etc. Drugs of all shapes, sizes and uses were legal and the liberal drug policies of the Netherlands drew druggies of all nationalities. However, those liberal policies that made the country such a great place to visit are now becoming stricter as a result of the fallout from the death of an intoxicated teenage girl. In response to the tragedy, the Netherlands will ban the sale of hallucinogenic mushrooms, although if you want to B.Y.O.H.M., you might be able to sneak them across the border. It was bound to happen eventually because if you allow that liberal of drug usage to so many people, you’re bound to have a few troubled individuals (as with this girl) or people who are just plain idiots (not including this girl in this category) who are going to f’up things for everyone. However, if you’re looking for a good business venture, the black market for ‘shrooms in the Netherlands is about to go through the roof. Of course, a pot and cocaine have been illegal here in the United States for a long time and a whole lot of people still use them, so I don’t know that this ban on ‘shrooms in Holland (pick one name or the other, dammit, either Holland or the Netherlands) is going to have that much of an impact.

- I’m never sure whether to cheer massive crackdowns on kiddie porn freaks or be horrified that there are so many twisted, perverted freaks in the world. This past Monday, a massive crackdown on child pornography in France netted 310 pervs, with the effort netting more than 2 million photographs and 28,000 videos. By the time the week ended, nearly half of the pieces of crap arrested in the crackdown had confessed to being kiddie porn freaks. Although confessing to a crime and not fighting the charges normally leads to more lenient sentences for criminals, I think kiddie porn is one offense that we can all agree doesn’t deserve anything less than the maximum sentence allowable under the law. Not that the French have ever been renowned for their toughness and brutality, but just taking away these losers’ croissants and smelly cheeses isn't enough. Bring down the iron fist of justice on these pervs, Frenchies, if you have it in you.

W. vs. Congress again, Atlantic City with mayoral trouble and Michelle Wie with all kinds of trouble

- In an unsurprising bit of news from our nation’s capital, Congress and W. are set for yet another showdown over a bill that has been passed by the House and could soon be on its way to the president for approval. This particular showdown will be over a new surveillance bill passed by the House, one that will, among other things, not give retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped the government conduct electronic surveillance without court orders. The bill would also establish a higher threshold for what the government has to provide to get a court order to listen in on the communications of American citizens with foreigners. W.’s main objection seems to be the lack of that retroactive immunity clause, in other words his wanting to provide protection form future prosecution for cronies and friends who helped his administration conduct illegal activities. Maybe you’d like a retroactive immunity clause for your friends at Blackwater, eh, W.? I’m all for anything that helps the average American keep Big Brother out of his private business, so hopefully Congress can muscle up with enough votes to override the promised presidential veto on this one. W. and the tools in his administration may argue that this bill would bog down intelligence agencies with administrative burdens, but what they call administrative burdens I call due process and respecting the f’ing laws of this country that prevent exactly the sort of illegal behavior that this administration is so fond of subjecting its citizenry to.

- Remember when Michelle Wie used to be a good golfer and was actually worth paying attention to when she teed it up in an event? It wasn’t that long ago, was it? She was a precocious teenager, able to bomb it 300 yards and threaten to make the cut in the occasional men’s event when she got a sponsor’s exemption to play. She was still an amateur but played in the occasional event on the PGA or LPGA tours, mostly as a novelty act but with enough game and competitiveness to make her a viable inclusion in a field. Then her gravy-training father B.J. got his way and steered his daughter into turning pro, a decision that has proved to be one of the worst ever in the history of acclaimed sports prodigies. Since she turned pro, Michelle Wie has been a mess, missing cuts nonstop and threatening to finish dead last in every tournament she plays in. She’s doing her thing this weekend at the Samsung World Championships in Palm Desert, Calif., where she took all of one round to station herself at the very bottom of the leaderboard. In a tournament where there are only 20 competitors, she’s 20th, having shot a 7-over 79 in her first round and followed that up with another 79 in the second round. Not a good sign when you’re 14 shots over par after two rounds. The problem now is that she’s turned pro and she can’t go back, so although she has millions and millions in endorsement money and should be set for life, her golfing career could be wrecked for good because of the greed and overzealousness of her father. Tournaments out there need to do for her what she and her father refuse to do, namely keep her out of their events by not giving her the sponsor’s exemptions that allow her to continue making a fool of herself weekend after weekend. She’s no longer a draw, she’s no longer a compelling figure and maybe right now she should just focus on being a college student.

- Could it be a case of art imitating life imitating art? Mechele Linehan, a former stripper-turned-soccer mom living in Anchorage, Alaska, currently finds herself on trial on charges that she masterminded the 1997 murder of then-fiancé Kent Leppink killed and based the murder on the plot of the 1994 movie The Last Seduction. At the time, she was known as Mechele Hughes and worked as a stripper at the Great Alaska Bush Co. Her tips must not have been that good, because she decided to knock off Leppink in the hopes of getting $1 million in life insurance on him. Using that oh-so-abundant and legendary stripper intellect, Linehan/Hughes mirrored the plot of the movie so closely that prosecutors in her case actually wanted to show the movie to the jury, a move the judge in the case has rejected. And who did this woman get to kill Leppink? Well since she apparently has no shortage of former fiancés, she got John Carlin III, yet another man she once promised to marry, to pull the trigger. By the way, this woman now is actually married, although Colin Linehan should probably get used to the idea of seeing his wife for only an occasional conjugal visit, because she’s headed to the hole if the evidence against her is any indication. Good rule of thumb, though, if you aren’t smart enough to formulate your own murder plot and feel the need to use one of your favorite movies as the blueprint for your crime because you’re not clever enough to make one up on your own, you should probably avoid committing the crime altogether.

- Congressional Democrats, I’m extremely disappointed in you, or at least I would be if I were naïve enough to have any sort of expectations that you would follow through on your promises and have some sort of honor and integrity. As it is, I count on my congressmen lying, deceiving, misleading, embezzling, engaging in lewd acts in public restrooms, etc., so I’m not all that stunned at things like the Democrats wussing out on their goal of passing legislation ordering American troops home from Iraq. Instead, the Dems are focusing on other war-related bills that they believe have a better chance of passing, measures addressing issues like rumors that the military is buying $100 million in equipment from China. Whether this uproar has to do with the prospect of buying equipment possibly laced with lead paint or just dealing with a hostile Communist nation I don’t know, but either way it shows a considerable lack of spine from a Democratic-led Congress that surged to power in the last elections on the strength of promises to start bringing the war in Iraq to a close and to bring our fighting men and women home.

- Caught one of ABC’s new fall shows Friday night, Women’s Murder Club. The short version is that it’s about a group of middle-aged women working in varying capacities in the police and forensics departments in the city of San Francisco, solving murders together and sharing the trials and tribulations of their personal lives with one another. Setting aside the fact that I’m still bitter that ABC canceled a great show like Traveler to put mediocre shows like this on the air, I was underwhelmed and unimpressed by the show as a whole. Angie Harmon is still pretty hot, but the so-called dramatic elements of this show were anything but intense. Harmon’s character is the main character in the series, with Rob Estes playing her ex-husband who is now her boss, and although I like Estes as an actor, the dialogue and writing in this show are subpar at best. At episode’s end, there was a revelation that some bizarre serial killer is stalking the city and is a thron in the side of Harmon and her friends, a serial killer who stitches the mouth of his victims shut in brutal fashion. I would guess that this killer is supposed to be a running plot line throughout the season, but with the show in the unenviable 9 p.m. Friday time slot and being so underwhelming in its first episode, it may not get enough episodes to tell the entire story of this killer before it’s canceled.

- Just a thought, but if you’re someone who has a problem with alcohol and pain pills, Atlantic City might not be the best place for you to live. The city’s mayor, Robert Levy, found that out when he landed in rehab for two weeks and then decided to resign after leaving rehab because for some reason, the city’s residents weren’t down with having an addict as mayor. “Mr. Levy has concluded that public confidence is so eroded by these circumstances that the only responsible action is to step down,” said his attorney, Edwin Jacobs. Yes, counselor, having a mayor whose primary objective is popping pills and chasing his next high would erode my confidence in his ability to run my city. Also problematic is when the mayor disappears for two weeks in his city-issued vehicle, as Levy did on Sept. 26, and secretly checks into rehab without anyone knowing where he is. Then, once city officials knew his locale, they would only say that he was hospitalized somewhere and refused to disclose his condition. Not a good feeling when your city’s mayor goes AWOL, that’s for sure. Jacobs may want to call his client’s situation a “detox situation” and not an addiction, but that’s just semantics. By the way, detox is what people go through when they have an addiction and receive treatment. Either way, probably a good idea to step down, both for you and for the people of your city. If you were the mayor of Hollywood, you would probably fit in a lot better going to rehab because you could mingle with a lot of your constituents there, but for now, get out of the public eye and get your life together.

Cowboys-Patriots overload, Smallville goes old school and the AMA's become an even bigger joke

- We’re rapidly approaching the time when the men carrying giant butterfly nets and wearing white jumpsuits need to come and take Joe Paterno away, because clearly Joe Pa is becoming more senile by the day. You can debate whether he’s actually already dead and the Penn State athletic department has been pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s with him for years, but you can’t deny that the old man is not right in the head. Presiding over a team that is increasingly delinquent and out of control, Paterno decided to set another bad example for his players to follow by going road rage-er on the streets of the Penn State campus last week. After being involved in a near-fender bender with another car, Joe Pa got out of his car, wagged his finger at the woman driving the other car and told her that she’d better watch it, because he had her license plate number and that he would call the cops on her. When the woman’s husband, sitting in the passenger’s seat, got out and said to Joe Pa, “Hey, that’s my wife you’re talking to!”, Paterno shot back, “That’s your problem.” When the woman threatened to call the cops on Paterno, he egged her on to do just that and she obliged. Way to go, Joe Pa, turning a simple traffic snafu into a full-blown road-rage incident involving the police. Great example for your players, coach. That’ll show them how to keep their anger in check and act responsibly, by acting like a ginormous ass hat who can’t keep his own temper under control. I’m actually amazed that with those four-inch-thick, tri-focal Coke-bottle glasses you wear that you’re even allowed to have a driver’s license, but if you’re going to have one and operate anything larger than a motorized scooter, you need to learn how to keep yourself under control. People are funny like that; they don’t care if you are college football’s all-time winningest coach or not when you start road raging on them. Act like a grown-up, Joe Pa, maybe worry about coach a football team whose season started out so well but is now nose-diving into another disappointing campaign.

- So South Africa is apparently the bizarro United States of America. No, they don’t have an über-competent president who doesn’t needlessly start major wars foreign countries, who has a firm grasp of the English language and who has more than four working brain cells – well, maybe they do, but that’s not where I’m going with this. Actually, it’s the bizarro U.S. because in South Africa, the government is actually giving valuable land back to native tribes instead of ripping that land from the tribes and cramming them onto crowded reservations. The Nama tribe, which had its land taken by a diamond-mining company more than 80 years ago, won the nation’s longest-running court case this week and has been given back possession of its land. The tribe lodged their claim to the section of coastal land back in 1997, when South Africa’s decades of whites-only rule ended. The court ruling reversed the 1927 decision to award control of the land in and around the town of Alexander Bay to Alexkor Ltd., a state-owned mining operation which used the land for a work program for poor white citizens. Now, the land is returning to its rightful owners, which is actually a lot quicker than any reparations to the many Indian tribes that we here in the U.S. robbed of their land a century and a half ago. No word on whether the Nama tribe will be putting up a casino on their regained land, but all the Indian tribes here in the United States should in no way view this as a hopeful sign that they too will be given back their original land. This is America, and we’re in no hurry to make things right with the native tribes we’ve screwed over.

- Could this be the year that the American Music Awards stop being a joke and gain some legitimacy, separating themselves from the pack of self-congratulatory awards shows and contributing something worthwhile to the entertainment industry? Don’t be ridiculous, that’s not happening this year or any year in the near future. Yes, the show is still more than a month away, but a quick perusal of the list of nominees clearly shows that there is no credibility to be found for the AMA’s. When your nominees include not one but two former American Karaoke contestants (Carrie Underwood and Daughtry), a hack pop warbler like Fergie, a faux hip hopper/dancing pop diva like Beyonce, the most fraudulent bunch of pansy poseurs in music in the form of Maroon 5, a cross between Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue and Tiffany in Avril Lavigne, the weasel-on-helium-voiced, unoriginal Michael Jackson rip-off (Justin Timberlake) and the Latina Britney (Jennifer Lopez), your show is not only illegitimate, it’s the biggest collection of terrible music this side of a New Kids on the Block reunion tour. Nice of the AMA’s to pigeonhole the White Stripes into the Best Alternative Artists category as their only nomination, because heaven knows that Linkin Park, Maroon 5 and Nickelback deserve to be nominated in the Best Rock Group category above the Stripes – no, wait, they don’t. The hilarious part of all of this is that you, the general public, can go online to http://www.abc.com/primetime/ama/index and vote on the three finalists in each category, now that the actual good artists have mostly been weeded out and the run-of-the-mill, same-old same-old nominees that are so mainstream and blasé that they make you want to puke are all that’s left. This is worse than a presidential ballot with W. and Hank Clinton as the only two choices. How about you let me have a write-in choice for each award, or maybe allow me to vote for the dissolution of the American Music Awards because they’re the biggest freaking joke in the entire music industry, either one would be acceptable.

- Smallville goes old school and I like it. For the first time in what seems forever, nearly the entire episode of the series took place inside the city limits of Smallville. There were even old show staples like small town festivals, meteor freaks, Clark and Lana together and a prototypical Smallville heist gone wrong. Most of the action was due to three visitors whose meteor powers allowed them to control, alter and create weather, skills that came in handy as they came to town looking to steal a treasure map buried in a time capsule and recover some legendary buried gold bars. Posing as contestants in the Miss Sweet Corn pageant, the trio of beauties trimmed their number to two by freezing one of their group to death when she wanted to bail on their plan. Clark’s cousin Kara, wanting to fit in on Earth, also decided to enter the pageant. That this led to several minutes of Ms. Ira Vandervoort on screen in a skimpy bikini was a nice fringe benefit, to say the least. Not that she’s going to supplant my all-time favorite TV hottie, Kristin Kreuk, atop the Smallville beauties list, but Vandervoort is at least making a race of it. It was also funny to see Clark in the role of teaching his cousin how to use her abilities and remember back to early episodes in the series when Clark and his father went through the same things. Speaking of going through the same things, Lana’s return to Smallville felt like old times, not only because she’s left and returned before (Paris, Metropolis), but because she and Clark in intense scenes in the Kent barn is a staple of most every season of the show. Conveniently, through the magic of TV, her return is made easier when Lex Luthor convinces the district attorney to drop all charges against Lana for faking her own death, meaning that no one will ever be held accountable for anything that happened with that fake death, not Lana, Lex or the LuthorCorp employee who falsely confessed to the crime because Lionel Luthor paid him to. Speaking of Lionel, he’s still AWOL, but he’ll be back, bet on it. With Lana staying at the farm with Clark and Kara, life is definitely interesting, although Kara threw a curveball at Clark by reminding him that no matter how much he wants to be, he’ll never be human and that living on the farm with Lana and growing old together just isn't realistic. That Lana confesses at show’s end that this is exactly what she wants certainly puts Clark in an interesting spot. Also in an interesting spot is the returning Jimmy Olsen, who for some reason is jones-ing after Kara even though he has a girlfriend, Chloe Sullivan. But there were definitely sparks between Ms. Kara Kent and Jimmy, so stay tuned on that. Jimmy also unknowingly stuck foot in mouth by vowing that he and Chloe would hunt down all the meteor freaks in Smallville, which apparently sets up next week’s episode in which Chloe seeks out a radical, rogue doctor, played by Dean Cain of 1990s Superman fame, to “cure” her of her meteor powers. A showdown between Kara and Lex appears to be imminent as well, because Lex knows it was Kara who saved him from drowning after the dam burst and he wants to know how. In the end of this episode, the meteor freak beauties were stopped by the Clark-Kara tandem, but they both have a long way to go when it comes to co-existing and understanding one another. They also have to try to understand the buried treasure they found where the gold was supposed to be buried, because that treasure is a crystal/key of Kryptonian origin and it doesn’t belong to either of them. Kara believes the owner of the mysterious piece of alien metal is still on Earth, so who is this stranger? That and more to be revealed as the season goes on, but for one night at least it was good to take a trip back in time, at least metaphorically, to earlier times in this series.

- Normally I wait until after Sundays to crack all things NFL in a given week because once the games are played, there’s more clarity to situations, but oh my freaking gawd, would ESPN and the NFL Network stop treating the f’ing Cowboys-Patriots game like it’s the f’ing Super Bowl, World Series and NBA Finals all rolled into one? Good grief, guys, leading off every SportsCenter or NFL Total Access with four or five stories about the game is insane. I don’t need daily reports from both teams’ practice facilities like this is World War III or breakdowns of each individual unit or position on each team. Believe it or not, the team that wins this game is not the champion of the NFL for 2007. In fact, although both teams are near slam dunks to make the playoffs, winning this game will not clinch a playoff berth for either one of them, nor will it clinch a conference or division title. Roger Goodell will not be handing out the Lombardi Trophy to the winner at game’s end. Stop reporting breathlessly every minute development in regards to this game and shoving a microphone in the face of every player from either team that you can corner in the locker room. Bill Belichick is irritating enough normally, I don’t need your blowout coverage to magnify his presence on screen ten times to ratchet up the level of irritation. Amazingly enough, there’s even another undefeated team in the NFL, the Indianapolis Colts, and with a bye this week, they are the only team assured of being undefeated when this week ends, not the Cowboys or Patriots. This was going to be a great game for me to watch, but thanks to these two networks going so far overboard, I’m literally sick of the game and it hasn’t even been played yet. I don’t care to watch more than a few minutes of it now and plan on doing so with the sound muted when I do watch so as to avoid the absurd hyperbole that the in-game coverage will surely be. This is a prime, prime example of ESPN and NFL Network not knowing when to pull back, to rein themselves in and tone done their intense focus a bit so as to not burn everyone out on a big game before it actually happens. Heck, there are several other great matchups this week, including Redskins (3-1) vs. Packers (5-0), Jaguars (3-1) vs. Texans (3-2), the first place (yes, first place) Oakland Raiders (2-2) vs. the possibly resurgent San Diego Chargers (2-3) and the first place (yes, again, first place) Arizona Cardinals (3-2) vs. the first-place Carolina Panthers (3-2). Yet if you were counting on ESPN or the NFL Network for your news, you would hardly know that these other games were taking place because they’re so focused on Cowboys-Patriots. Bad news for these two networks, but at least one of these two teams won't even be in the Super Bowl, I guarantee it. Heck, I don’t think either of them will make it, but I’d get shot at ESPN if I uttered such blasphemy. But you heard it here first, the Super Bowl teams will come from places like Indianapolis, Green Bay, Seattle, Pittsburgh or Washington…..

Iranian students protest, dumb crimes involving smelly feet and Mariano Rivera isn't quite as relevant as he used to be

- Floyd Landis, you’re not too bright, are you? Every single governing and authoritative body that has rendered any sort of decision on your doping case in the 2006 Tour de France has come to the decision that you are guilty of using performance enhancers, yet you continue to insist that you are innocent and that everyone else is just wrong. Yet there’s Floyd, vowing to appeal the most recent decision against him and the one that officially forced him to forfeit his Tour win. He explained to ESPN.com on Wednesday that his decision to appeal an arbitration panel's split vote against him in his doping case was easy "once I got myself together and made sure I had the energy to do it.” Let’s hope that he didn’t get the energy to appeal the same way he got the “energy” to win the Tour de France. On his Floyd Fairness Fund (try not to laugh uncontrollably while reading that site name) website, he stated his intention to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to overturn the ruling of a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency arbitration panel that upheld his positive steroid test and stripped him of his 2006 Tour de France title. “Knowing that the accusations against me are simply wrong, and having risked all my energy and resources -- including those of my family, friends and supporters -- to show clearly that I won the 2006 Tour de France fair and square, I will continue to fight for what I know is right,” Landis wrote on his site. “Doping in sport seems to continue to get worse under the current anti-doping system, and this is only a part of the huge amount of proof that the WADA/USADA system needs a total overhaul. I will continue to work to clear my name and fight for change in the name of fairness and justice. No matter the final outcome of my case, there must be change in the current system if athletes can ever hope to compete on a level playing field and return to the joy and inspiration that sport can bring all of us.” Oh, I see, you’re fighting for all athletes in the sport of cycling, Floyd. That’s why you keep appealing and appealing, because you want to ensure fairness for all your fellow cyclists. It’s a shame you didn’t think of that before you cheated them and the sport of cycling by competing while on performance enhancers. Also, props for trying to do an advance spin job on your appeal to the CAS by saying that you have only “a little bit of hope” that the CAS, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland and the last resort for accused athletes in the anti-doping appeals process, will overturn the ruling that Landis has labeled as "contradictory and nonsensical.” In other words, “I’m going to appeal but don’t be surprised if I lose because those meanies on the court are biased against me. Just because I lose this appeal and have lost every other appeal to this point and had multiple tests come up positive for performance enhancers, that doesn’t mean I’m dirty.” Sure thing, Floyd, sure thing……

- Bob Barker might be gone from the airwaves, but the residual effect from his decades at the helm of The Price is Right is far from over. Barker has once again been sued by a former Price is Right model, although this time it isn't for the same sexual harassment allegations that have been levied against the silver-haired octogenarian in years gone by. This time, the charges against Barker are discrimination, which if you read between the lines and do a little digging means that Bob-O made some unwanted advances toward XXXXX, the woman filing the lawsuit, and when she rejected him, he discriminated against her, allegedly. I know that a lot of fans of Barker and of the show will side with him automatically on this because they think of him as the warm, friendly old guy who was entertaining to watch and seems like such a great guy, but you’ll have to excuse me for leaning toward believing the plaintiff in this one instead of Bob Barker. Just because he had a successful run as the host of a popular show doesn’t mean he wasn’t a lecherous, perverted dude who groped, fondled, hit on and slept with the models who worked alongside him all those years. There are so many stories, lawsuits and allegations claiming the same sort of behavior claimed in this new lawsuit for there not to be some factual basis. To what degree Bob Barker was hands on, so to speak, with the showcase models I don’t know, but they didn’t have blond bombshells on the show just for ratings purposes, if you catch my drift. I would say B. Barker had some input into the type of women who were chosen to be models on the show and he probably took advantage of having so many hot girls around him day in, day out. Drew Carey needs to be sure he doesn’t try to mimic Barker’s act, though, because I don’t think women are that eager to be hit on and felt up by a bespectacled, overweight, crude, crass, soccer-loving C-list comedian.

- If this were five or six years ago, a threat by Mariano Rivera that he might not re-sign with the Yankees if manager Joe Torre is not brought back as the team’s manager would be a big concern for the entire franchise. That same threat made in 2007, when Rivera is nearing his 38th birthday and doesn’t have the same gas on his fastball that he used to, is still something to consider but not a decisive factor in the debate on Torre’s future with the Yanks. Rivera is a beloved legend in the Bronx, but he’s not the sort of dominant superstar whose wishes can save a manager in peril of losing his job. Personally, I think he re-signs with New York regardless of who the manager is, because who really wants to spend the last two or three years of their career grinding it out with a franchise they have no history with and no connection to just to chase those law few millions? Do you really want to go out like Joe Montana with the Chiefs, Joe Namath with the Rams or Johnny Unitas with the Chargers? The fans in a new city will take all of two seconds to turn on Rivera if he falters because they don’t have any memories of him as the dominant, lights-out closer winning world titles with their team. In sharing his feelings about Torre’s probable dismissal, Rivera stated that, "I don't feel good about it. I don't see why they're even thinking [about letting Torre go]. I wish he's back, definitely. If you ask me what I would want, I want him back." Umm, but no one did ask your opinion, Mo. As for why they want to let him go, you should know better than anyone that George Steinbrenner expects, unrealistically, world titles every year and to fail to win one for seven years running is really going to piss him off. Whether it’s realistic or not, he expects his hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries paid to players to net him five or six titles per decade and if the manager he has can't bring that result, he believes he can find someone else who will. As for your leaving if Torre doesn’t return, Mo, do what you want but you are going to be making that decision because Torre is not coming back. "It might do a lot of it," Rivera said when speaking of Torre’s possible departure. "I mean, I've been with Joe for so many years, and the kind of person he has been for me and for my teammates, it's been great. The thing is that I don't see why they have to put him in this position." When asked about how he would handle his impending free agency, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to automatically resign with New York. “I'm going to be open to hear all offers,” said Rivera, who wants a multiyear contract. “The Yankees had the opportunity and didn't do nothing with it.” Wherever you go, Mariano, here’s hoping you use some of your new contract money to take a few English lessons. Aside from that, know that nowhere else will you be as beloved as you are in New York, so chase the big money with the knowledge that if you make a bad decision, that money might be about the only positive thing you end up with from the next 2-3 years.

- Some of the most heinous, inexcusable crimes are committed for the dumbest reasons, that’s just a fact. Just a few years ago, a Yankee fan fatally stabbed his brother because he wouldn’t give him his Yankee hat. At the beginning of the current semester at the University of Arizona, one freshman girl beat her new roommate, a girl she had known for less than a week, to death because she thought the roommate had been stealing from her. As pointless and unjustified as those things are, though, it’s hard to argue that they are as moronic as the story of William Antonio Serrano, 22, who stabbed his roommate to death because he told Serrano that he had smelly feet. The two of them were drinking and apparently the mixture of alcohol and the insinuation that his feet had a foul odor was enough to set Serrano off. He grabbed a knife and stabbed his roomie several times. The roommate, who was not identified by police, died shortly and now Serrano sits in a Houston prison facing murder charges. Yeah, because that’s a reason to go, someone saying that your feet stink. Good thing he didn’t say you have bad breath too, eh Serrano? Had he done that, you probably would have skipped the knife and gone straight for the garage to get a sledgehammer to cave his head in with. Granted, guys who are fueled up and pushing the legal limit don’t make the best decisions, but how do you go from zero to murder in less than a minute just because your roommate, someone you know and presumably like at least a little bit, says your feet smell bad? Was punching him in the face not an option? How about throwing some of his clothes in the dumpster or pouring his beer down the drain? Now he’s dead, his family has lost their son and brother and you’re headed for a long stint in prison because you couldn’t stomach an insult about your foot odor. As always, hope that was worth it.

- What, Gen. Than Shwe, you can’t make time in your busy schedule of brutal oppression and abuse of your citizens to meet with imprisoned democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi personally? Appointing a Cabinet official to “coordinate contacts” with her seems like, I don’t know, a chicken sh*t move. It looks a lot like you not wanting to waste your time meeting with the woman and sending a flunkie to do your work. It says to everyone that it’s really not important and nothing is going to result from you meeting with San Suu Kyi, so why bother doing it yourself? Oh, but you’re taking the threats, sanctions and reprimands from the rest of the world seriously and are open to possible changes in how you govern, sure you are. Meanwhile, the troops patrolling the streets of Yangon, enforcing the rule that no more than five people can gather together and making sure that anyone who shows the slightest inclination to protest is shot or beaten down, those troops are still being harassed and bothered by members of the anti-government movement, according to student activists in the country. Still, it feels like there needs to be a major spark or instigator to restart the dissidence in Myanmar, because right now, scattered harassment of the military notwithstanding, this conflict has bogged down and any change to the state of the government in the country still seems a ways off.

- It’s ironic that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can come to the United States and speak at Columbia University without much more than mild unrest in the auditorium, yet he can speak at Tehran University in his own country and a brawl breaks out in the audience. The brawl came courtesy of 100 students who staged a protest during the president’s speech, calling him a dictator and fighting with students loyal to the man for whom “dictator” might be too kind of a description. Hats off to the 100 students with the testicular fortitude to stand up and speak out against a man who would have no problem with making them “disappear” for daring to oppose him publicly. The other pervasive irony in this situation is the topic of Ahmadinejad’s speech, which was the pitfalls of Western-style democracy. How a man who is a brutal dictator hailed by many as this generation’s Hitler or Mussolini can speak out about a form of government with which he has no direct experience, I don’t know. It would be like W. speaking out against the pitfalls of an honest, responsible, forthright government or the problems with making sure you have actual justification and evidence to back you up when you decide to start a major war. Anyhow, someone needs to check on those students who staged the protest during Ahmadinejad’s speech, just to make sure they’re not lying in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in the back of their head.

The Bengals are back, a cheating marathon runner and Lil Wayne busted in Idaho

- You can come down hard on player misconduct in the NFL, but you can’t take the spirit of a felon out of the Cincinnati Bengals. Just when you thought that maybe Commissioner Roger Goodell’s strict player conduct policies might have taken the criminal element out of the league’s most prolific law-breaking squad, the Bengals fire back. Cornerback Jonathan Joseph, a member of the league’s most porous defense, has stepped up big and earned himself a one-game suspension for this Sunday’s game against Kansas City as a result of a marijuana-possession charge stemming from a January arrest. The case has wound its way through the legal system and so Goodell has decided that the appropriate discipline for Joseph is to miss this week’s game. You could argue that as bad as Bengal defensive players have been that losing one of them could be considered a plus, but that’s neither here nor there. What truly matters is that the tradition of law-breakers like Chris Henry, Eric Steinbach and Odell Thurman does not die and that the Bengals keep tallying those arrests, criminal charges, convictions and suspensions. Well done, Jonathan, and don’t you let anyone tell you any differently. People might try to convince you that you let yourself and your team down and that you’ve done something wrong here, but you hold your head high and be proud of your effort.

- Memo to all Democrats, talking heads and political pundits out there who are OUTRAGED that Barack Obama refuses to wear an American flag pin on his lapel: Get over it! It’s an f’ing pin, people. He’s not openly advocating shooting our troops in the head, forcing them to jump out of planes without parachutes or saying that were deserved the attacks of 9/11. To hear most of the ass hats on MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News and other news channels, Obama is guilty of a personal affront to every American, living, dead or yet to be born, because he refuses to wear the flag pin on his lapel. Obama sees it as a statement against the war in Iraq and also has stated that he will continue to show his support for America through the message he sends out to the American people. I’m behind him on this one, and quite frankly I think everyone needs to be more concerned with a far bigger issue of concern to our nation: Sen. Hank Clinton and the lead that dude has in the early polls for the Democratic presidential nomination. Aside from four more years of W., which isn't possible (unless that tool and his stool pigeon Cheney have found a way to subvert the Constitution once again to allow themselves four more years), Hank Clinton as our country’s leader is the biggest political nightmare our country has ever faced. Sporting the worst angry-lesbian haircut (it’s true, the ‘do is disturbingly similar to the one Rosie O’Donnell is rocking), with a frightening, man-hating persona and all the warmth and personable-ness of a giant ball of rusty steak knives, Hank would have a real shot at surpassing W. as the worst leader in our nation’s history. I’m not saying this because I’m against us having a female president; I’d have no problem with that, just as long as that female president isn't Hank Clinton. Yet here we are, subjected to hours of debate about the great calamity that is Barack Obama and his decision not to wear an f’ing flag pin on his lapel. Yes, this election is off on the right foot already, this should be great…..

- Ah, you have to love the poetic justice of athletes having to give back money instead of extorting teams and organizations for it. First Marion Jones has to give back all of her winnings from races dating back to Sept. 2001, now an arbitrator has sided with the Atlanta Falcons and ruled that mediocre quarterback and skilled dog murderer Michael Vick must give back $19.9 million in contract bonuses to the team because he violated his contract by establishing, funding and operating the dogfighting ring and the gambling that went along with it. Special Master Stephen B. Burbank, arbitrating the case and clearly no fan of Ron Mexico, ruled that the Falcons are entitled to recoup $19.9 million in bonuses paid to Vick even as Vick is in the midst of fighting legal battles on both the state and federal levels. Of course, good luck trying to get that money back if you’re the Falcons, because I have a strong suspicion that my boy Mike Vick isn't the kind of guy who socked all of his earnings away in a nice mutual fund, 401(k) or passbook savings account. How do I know this? Well for one, dude founded and ran a dogfighting ring and readily admits (ok, so he admits under threat of a federal conviction) that he put up money to finance bets on those dogfights. That $19.9 million is probably gone or nearly gone, blown on bets, those designer marijuana carriers, er, designer water bottles that Vick likes to rock and gone up in smoke, literally, with the weed that Vick feels the need to smoke even when he knows he’s going to be drug tested by the feds. I’d also say that this officially ends Vick’s career with the Falcons, not that they wanted him back anyhow, but awfully hard to go and play for a team where everyone resents you and where the owner ripped $20 million of your signing bonus. At this point, I would say that things can’t get much worse for Vick, but I’ve said that before and things have done nothing but get worse for him ever since those federal charges were levied against him. Nice knowing you, Mike, but life as you know it is now over with an exclamation point.

- Y’know what’s been missing from the whole Michael Vick case? Some good old-fashioned jokes about animal cruelty and murder. I mean, Mike Vick and two of his co-defendants brutally murdered dogs that wouldn’t fight by strangling them, drowning them, electrocuting them or slamming them to the pavement repeatedly, so why hasn’t anyone capitalized on the obvious comedic value of these dog murders yet? Thankfully, someone has stepped up to fill that void, and that someone is Texas Tech University student Geoffrey Candia. Candia seized on his school’s upcoming game with rival Texas A&M to make a rather unique t-shirt that combines crass humor, a lack of class, a total lack of dignity, a dearth of sensitivity and a healthy dash of ass-hatted-ness to mark the occasion. The red and black shirt has text that says, "VICK 'EM" in an apparent reference to the Texas A&M Aggies slogan "Gig 'em.” The back of the shirt shows a football player wearing the number seven Vick jersey holding a rope with an image of the Texas A&M mascot "Reveille" at the end of a noose. Officials say Candia was attempting to sell the shirts, although anyone who would buy one would be just as big a tool as Candia is.

- I’ve run multiple marathons, I’ve seen elite marathon runners in action and you, Roberto Madrazo, are no elite marathon runner. Of course, to pull off what Madrazo tried to pull off at the Berlin Marathon a couple of weeks ago, you wouldn’t have to be an elite runner, you would have to be a supernatural freak on steroids. Competing in the same marathon where Haile Gebrselassie set a new world marathon record of 2 hours, 4 minutes and 26 seconds, Madrazo, a former Mexican politician decided that it would be a good idea to cheat and allegedly run nine mines in 21 minutes. Predictably, he was busted for cheating after race officials, for some odd reason, suspected something wasn’t right when a guy ran nine consecutive miles at a pace of 2:20 per mile. Hmm, think that might draw some suspicion, Roberto? When your pace is less than half that of a guy who set the world record in the same race, people are going to start asking questions. Apparently ol’ Robby took a shortcut to the finish line, shaving substantial time off the end of his race and crossing the finish line with a final time of 2 hours, 40 minutes, which was good enough for a first-place finish in the age division for the 55-year-old runner. Photos and video showed him crossing the finish line in a jacket and long running tights but barely sweating, which was the first giveaway. In every marathon I’ve ever run in, I’ve produced enough sweat to fill a small lake, so someone who is hardly sweating at all is someone who just might have cheated. The lie Madrazo is selling to cover his tracks is that he never intended to finish the race and was only going to the finish line to pick up his belongings. Yeah, that’s exactly what it looked like to me, Roberto. You just thought that while you were picking up your gear, why not go ahead and cross the finish line, celebrating like you had won and having your timing chip register your winning time. Good joke, Robby, I got a kick out of it – or I would if you weren’t clearly lying and trying to cover your own a**. Finishing in third place in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico as the candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party might be embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as cheating to win your age group at a major international marathon and then trying to pretend that’s not what you did. Rosie Ruiz and her cab ride to win the XXXXXXX Boston Marathon think you’re a lowlife, Roberto. You may claim that you stopped running after the 21st kilometer because of an injury and headed to the start/finish line to pick up your clothing and participatory medal, but let’s just call it what it is, cheating to try and win. The website for the Berlin Marathon says all runners receive participatory medals, and that certificates with time and placing are sent out automatically by mail but race director Mark Milde said Madrazo would be receiving a disqualification letter instead. Oh, and next time you’re “injured” during a race, Roberto, go along the outside of the course to pick up your participatory medal and your gear, not onto the course itself and across the finish line.

- I have no doubt that you, like me, are flat-out stunned that the new Ben Stiller romantic “comedy” The Heartbreak Kid had a flop of an opening weekend at the box office. The film only brought in $14 million despite being in 3,200 theaters, the most of any current film, and even though the overzealous, overboard advertising campaign was about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead. It wasn’t even the top-earning film of the weekend, because that honor went to a movie that had already been out a week, The Game Plan, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. So yes, Ben Stiller, your movie couldn’t beat out a week-old movie on your opening weekend, a Disney family comedy to boot. This might be a good indicator that people no longer have an interest in seeing you make and remake the same lame romantic comedy with the same gags and jokes over and over again, with slight changes in setting and plot to try and spice things up. Maybe you want to try extending yourself a bit and trying a drama, an action film or even a silent film, because even going back to the black and white, no-dialogue style of the 1920s couldn’t be any worse than the absolute crap-ola you’re churning out these days.

- One of the pitfalls of being famous is that if you’re wanted for a crime, it’s a whole lot easier for the police to find you. Tracking down someone like rapper Lil Wayne and arresting him because of an outstanding drug possession warrant in Georgia is substantially easier than trying to find John Q. Public, an anonymous everyman who could disappear in plain sight and show up most anywhere in the country without anyone recognizing him. Lil Wayne, on the other hand, is currently on a tour and is playing shows across the U.S., which helped police in Idaho know exactly where he was so they could track him down and arrest him after a show in their fine state. Why Wayne was in Idaho, I don’t know, because I didn’t know Idaho was a hotbed of hip hop, but nonetheless, Wayne was there and after a concert last week, the cops were there backstage to meet and arrest him. There’s a long history of rappers trying to avoid arrests at shows, a la Snoop Dogg ducking the cops at the MTV Music Awards a few years back, but Lil Wayne wasn’t able to evade the law and so off to jail he went. When news of his arrest spread, people were obviously happy that a person wanted for a drug-related crime had been apprehended – wait, no they weren’t. The jail where Lil Wayne was taken was subsequently flooded with calls from concerned fans, wanting to know if the rapper would make it to his next concert. Glad for your concern, Lil Wayne fans, way to keep your eyes on the prize. At least we can take solace in the fact that Lil Wayne fans, unlike University of Florida football fans, don’t call and issue bomb threats if the charges against their boy aren’t dropped. Next time, Wayne, go ahead and cross Idaho off your list of tour stops and you can avoid this kind of trouble. Either that or you need to stop smoking weed, although I’m guessing that’s a much less appealing alternative for you.

A night of Heroes and Prison Break, a 13-year odyssey and Marion Jones wants forgiveness

- I think we can all agree that everyone hates paddleboats. They look like they’d be a lot of fun, right up to the moment you actually get out on the water in one of them and start spinning around and veering in all different directions because you can’t control them. Five minutes in one of those things is more than enough for me in a decade, so I’m flat-out amazed at the13-year paddleboat odyssey just completed by British adventurer Jason Lewis. Lewis circumnavigated the globe in a 26-foot pedal boat, traveling 46,000 miles with only the strength of his legs to power him. Aside from seeing the world and having an amazing adventure that most of us can only dream about having, Lewis can also take from this experience some of the most chiseled calf muscles this side of the workout room at the BALCO labs. To be fair, he didn’t use the paddleboat exclusively; he mixed in a bike, a kayak and some roller blades as well, but however you break it down, it’s an amazing trek. The trip, like the cruise for the crew from Gilligan’s Island, wasn’t supposed to take that long, but accidents, illnesses and border problems prolonged the journey. The original plan was for 3 ½ years, but what’s an extra decade when you’re circumnavigating the globe? Lewis finished his journey by paddling his boat across the Meridian Line in Greenwich, England, on the River Thames. I would try to cover some of what’s changed from the time he began his journey to the time it ended, but it might be easier to focus on what hasn’t changed. When Lewis began his voyage, Michael Jackson was a bizarre, freakish pedophile who made awful music, and that’s still true today. When Lewis began his trip, the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series since 1908, and that’s also still true. And in 1994, when Lewis was setting out on his trek, Pauly Shore still had not made a single watchable movie, and that too is still true today. Welcome back, J. Lewis, I’m looking forward to what you have planned next.

- It’s common knowledge that O.J. Simpson is the biggest piece of trash known to man, but now we’re learning that in addition to being a murderer (allegedly), a bad husband, a bad father, a memorabilia thief, a burglar, the worst criminal plotter of the decade and the most despicable life form currently inhabiting the Earth, the Juice is also a total fraud. The family of Ronald Goldman, the waiter and friend of Nicole Brown Simpson whom the Juice turned into a human Pez dispenser, tried to collect part of the $33.5 million wrongful death civil judgment against O.J. for knifing their son to death by selling off O.J.’s Rolex watch. The family thought the watch was a genuine Rolex worth $22,000, but found out when they had it appraised that it was a knockoff worth $100. Nice, Juice, everything about you is sleazy and low class, so why wouldn’t you be rocking a fake Rolex. Do you have the fake gold chain to match? Just don’t tell me that your search for the real killer is fake, because I just don’t think I could take that kind of disappointment. Since the watch is of virtually no value in the face of what is owed to the Goldman family, it will be returned to O.J. What use it will be to him in the hole, I don’t know, but that’s where he’s headed once this memorabilia sting operation case against him goes to trial. I see the Goldman’s working here, though. With their nemesis (actually, the Juice is a nemesis to all mankind, he’s not exclusive to the Goldman’s), they’re even less likely to see any of the money they’re owed, so why not try to pawn the watch off? If it’s me, I’m forgetting about selling off any more of the Juice’s stuff, because 1) he’s liable to come bursting through the door of whoever possesses it and threatening them at gunpoint to get his stuff back, and 2) anything this guy touches is cursed, so I want no part of it. Take a sigh of relief, Juice, you’re still the worst guy ever and no, it’s not even a close race.

- There just isn't a better night of television right now than Monday nights with Heroes and Prison Break. Of course, the fact that the other nights of the week are abysmal wastelands of unwatchable shows helps, but it doesn’t lessen the awesomeness of these two shows. Last night’s episodes were stellar, with Prison Break kicking things off with an episode that reminded me why I love watching this show. All of the smarts, cleverness and drama that make PB so great to watch were on display as the pressure was ratcheted up a notch on the characters inside of SONA as well as those on the outside. The most obvious place to start is where last week’s episode ended, namely the mystery box in the corner of the hotel parking garage that Lincoln found from the Company. Based on his reaction in opening the box, you knew it was something horrific, and that’s exactly what it was. The head of Dr. Sarah Tancredi was a warning sign to Linc and Michael to play ball with the Company, although Linc elected to keep the news from Michael because he knew what it would do to his brother. Killing off Sarah wasn’t a surprise because if you’ve been following entertainment news at all, you knew that Sara Wayne Callies wasn’t with the show any more and they weren’t going to recast the role, so killing her off was the only real option. Also on the outside, Sucre’s lazy ass finally decided to do something, namely migrate to Colombia to do some farming work and earn money to send back home to Maricruz. He never made it to Colombia, though, but more on that in a minute. Whistler’s girlfriend also continues her orbit around the Lincoln-Michael-SONA saga, wanting to get involved but not knowing how. She’s a bit whiny and needy at this point, but hopefully that will change as the season progresses. Inside SONA, things were heating up, or more aptly put, shutting down. In order to further his escape plan, Michael Scofield temporarily shorted out the power by placing a cheap metal cross necklace in the circuitry for SONA’s electricity, a move he knew would force Lechero (Robert Wisdom), the de facto leader of the prison, to come and ask for his help in restoring power. That gave Michael a chance to get outside the prison walls and fix wiring that would make the dormant electrical fence surrounding the prison live again. Why was that important? Well, another part of the escape plan calls for a chemical that is sprayed on dead bodies of SONA prisoners to prevent them from smelling as they decompose to be sprayed on the fence. When the chemical reaches a certain temperature, it also melts metal, which is where the live fence comes in. Who’s spraying that chemical on the fence? It’s Sucre, who Lincoln and the company have helped to get a job on the body disposal crew. The dynamics inside the prison are in play as well, with Mahone insisting on being involved in the escape plan and Michael stringing him along, making him think he’s part of the plan by giving him tasks to do, such as securing a black felt tip pen. Mahone wises up and figures out he’s being played, leading him to threaten Scofield to stop jerking with him. The fact that Mahone is being haunted by the ghost of Haywire, the mentally ill inmate who he forced into committing suicide for the Company last year, is disturbing, so hopefully that will stop. Bellick also wants in on the escape plan, but Scofield resists him as well, which leads Bellick to try and rat Michael out to Lechero, a move that backfires when Michael is able to convince Lechero that Bellick’s allegations of an escape plan are fabricated. That earns Bellick a severe burn to the back with a cup full of hot coffee, although you know he’s not giving up that easily. Sadly, it looks like PB will be pre-empted next week by the Major League Baseball playoffs, so we may have to wait an extra week for the story to continue. I’m pissed because as much as I want to see Indians v. Red Sox, I would rather be watching Prison Break. Still, that should be the only time this scheduling conflict happens this year, which is better than most years. And of course, we’ll still have Heroes on next Monday, so the night won't be a total TV loss. This week, my favorite hero, Peter Petrelli, threw a wrench in the process of his return to New York by deciding that maybe life isn't so bad in Cork, Ireland after all. As with so many distractions and downfalls of great men, Peter’s diversion involves a woman – Kaitlin. After pulling an armored car robbery with and her brothers and thus earning back the box containing his belongings and personal property that will help him remember who he was, Peter decides that maybe he doesn’t want to remember and maybe that life in that box isn't one he wants. He likes where he is now, with Kaitlin, gradually rediscovering his powers. Speaking of regaining powers, our old friend Sylar is back, just as devious and manipulative as ever but in some trouble. He was rescued by the mesomorph Candace, who continues her ways of changing her appearance and making other people see whatever she wants them to see and makes Sylar think the two of them are on the beach in Maui. Instead, it turns out that they’re in the middle of the Amazon jungle in a dilapidated metal building. Sylar pretends to be struggling to get back to good health and not having his powers, but once Candace lets her guard down, Sylar reveals that he has all his powers back, killing Candace and trying to take her power. That leaves her in her actual form – as a fat, pasty chick – and leaves Sylar falling to the floor, clutching his stomach and groaning in pain as he realizes he hasn’t actually been able to co-opt Candace’s power and has instead become very ill. Mohinder Suresh is still in the practice of helping ill people with powers, but he’s having a hard time coping with the constant monitoring by his new friends at the company. He and H.R.G. are still seeking the paintings by the late Isaac Mendez that tell the future, which becomes easier when the Company buys Isaac’s old loft and converts it into a lab for Mohinder. That allows him to discover a disturbing painting, the last in a series of eight, that shows H.R.G. as a victim of the mysterious individual hunting down the original heroes, which began with the murder of Hiro’s father last week. Speaking of Hiro, he’s still back in 1671, helping his friend, Japanese legend Takezo Kensei, find his own way as a hero. This week’s challenges included convincing Kensei that his healing and regenerative powers are a gift, not a curse, and starting him on the way to accomplishing the heroic feats that history remembers him for. Hiro finds a way to link to his old life in the future by slipping notes inside the heel of the sword of Kensei that he and old pal Ando stole back in the 21st century and Hiro is about to go back to that life but decides to stay in 1671 for now, partly because like Peter Petrelli, he’s in love with a girl, except she’s Kensei’s girl. And what about H.R.G. the Bennet family, living their normal lives in California? Well, Claire’s new friend West confronts her about her abilities and reveals that he has his own ability, the power to fly. The story takes an unsavory turn when Claire sees the two black marks on his shoulder that indicate tagging and tracking by the Company. She is horrified to learn that it was her father, when he was with the Company, who kidnapped West and brought him in to be experimented on by the Company, although West doesn’t know this – yet. Niki and Micah are also back on the radar, popping up long enough for Micah to be left by his mother in New Orleans with his grandmother, who clearly has powers of her own that we’ll find out about soon enough. But Niki is on her way to New York to see the mysterious man from the Company that Mohinder is working with because he’s promised her that he can “cure” her and eliminate her powers. Lastly, new faces Maya and Alejandro continue their quest to reach New York as they race through Mexico, stopping only when Alejandro is arrested for trying to steal a car and Maya uses her power to cry and somehow cause blood to flow from the eyes of others as they die to free her brother. A fellow escapee from the prison offers them a ride in his car and off they go. There’s almost too much going on to process it all, but the first three episodes of this season have been so amazing that I’m tempted to say this season could be better than Season One, but there’s still a long way to go…….

- After Heroes and Prison Break were over and while I was partially concentrating on the Indians dispatching the Yankees from the postseason, there was still time to catch a Monday Night Football thriller between the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills that proved you don’t need to play a great game or be a good team to put on one of the most dramatic contests of the season. The person not playing a great game was Cowboys quarterback and perennial chaser of B-list celebrity tail Tony Romo, who had six freaking turnovers but still managed to rally his team to a win over a team they should have beaten for three touchdowns. The 25-24 margin shouldn’t deceive Buffalo fans or distract them from the fact that they have one of the two or three worst teams in the NFL. Romo’s six turnovers, including two interceptions returned for touchdowns, kept Buffalo in the game, along with a kickoff return for a touchdown by Terrence McGee, but in the end Buffalo proved why they really are a bargain basement team by throwing a costly interception when they were about to put up a clinching score, then failing to recover an onside kick that the Cowboys secured and then used to propel them into field goal range where rookie kicker Nick Folk sealed the win.

- You want forgiveness, Marion Jones? Fine, as long as you realize that forgiving you doesn’t mean that I don’t still think of you as a lying, thieving cheater with no ethics and no credibility. As long as you’re cool with me thinking of you in the same vein as Bar-roid Bonds, Ben Johnson, Mark McGwire and others of their ilk, then consider yourself forgiven. You’re a fraud, a phony and a cheater who built one of the most successful careers in the history of women’s track and field on the back of steroid use. You can give back the five medals you won at the 2000 Summer Olympics, forfeit all of the results, winnings and records you set during your ‘roids period dating back to September 1, 2000, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and it won't keep this scandal from being the first thing people think of whenever they hear your name from this point on. On a side note, how is Jones going to give back those winnings when she reportedly only has $2,000 or so to her name? A few months ago, a story was published that alleged among other things that Jones has only $2,000 left and that she’s fallen on hard times, so I’m wondering how she plans on giving back her winnings. Was she lying about being broke too, since lying seems like her forte? Or will she set up some sort of payment plan, the “I cheated and used steroids so here’s ten dollars a week until I pay it all back” plan? The truly sad element of this story is that the U.S. Olympic Committee is now demanding that Jones’ teammates from the gold and bronze medal-winning relay teams in the 2000 Olympics give back their medals as well, which I hope they don’t do. It’s not their fault the Jones cheated and tarnished their performance, so they should keep their medals and tell the USOC to suck it. Yet another great result of your cheating ways, Marion, you really did as much damage as possible on this one…..

Yankees lose! Thhhheeeee Yankees lose! Plus college football thoughts and will.i.am's bomb of a new album

ftover college football thoughts from the weekend, since I didn’t do my usual rundown of the entire day of action. One, how pissed does Pete Carroll have to be right now? After new Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh spent all offseason tweaking Carroll by making comments about how USC might be the best team in the history of college football, Stanford goes into the L.A. Coliseum and stuns the #2 Trojans 24-23 with a last-minute touchdown. Gone are USC’s national title dreams, down the drain at the hands of a coach that Carroll has to want to kill right now. Meanwhile, LSU salvaged its own title dreams for now by rallying from a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to defeat Florida 28-24, handing the Gators their second consecutive loss in the process. LSU’s vaunted defense had a mediocre game at best, but in crunch time they stopped the Gators and for the time being, LSU is on course for a berth in the national title game. There were some real barnburners all day long, many of them involving non-ranked teams as usual. In the Big Ten, Northwestern actually won a conference game, 48-41 in overtime against Michigan State in a game where there literally seemed to be a score every time a team got the ball. Northwestern’s C.J. Bacher threw for more than 500 yards and five touchdowns and thanks to a porous defense, his team needed every yard and every point it could get. Really off the map was a Mid-American Conference game in which the University of Akron Zips scored 15 points in the final four minutes, including a safety with less than a minute left and a lateraled free-kick return for a touchdown with no time left on the clock, to win at Western Michigan, 39-38. Out in Hawaii, the Rainbow Warriors won the game against Utah State, 52-37, but may have suffered a bigger loss when star quarterback and Heisman hopeful Colt Brennan left the game with a leg injury in the third quarter. However, UH is still undefeated at 6-0 and sits at #XX in the polls, one spot behind the University of Cincinnati, which ruined the season of Big East rival Rutgers for the second consecutive year with a 28-23 victory in Piscataway, N.J. Also joining USC as a Top 5, undefeated team losing to an unranked conference opponent was Wisconsin, which fell 31-26 to the surging University of Illinois Fighting Illini. Believe it or not, the Illini have shaken their status as perennial doormats in the Big Ten and currently sit alone in first place atop the conference standings with a 3-0 league mark. Perhaps the best way to sum up the weekend is to say that when the dust had settled, the fourth and fifth-ranked teams in college football, respectively, are Boston College and South Florida. Yeah, it sounds insane, but it’s true – and we’re still only at the halfway point of the season.

- You brought this on yourself, America, with your inexplicable support of idiotic, gawd-awful TV shows like American Karaoke on FOX and Making the Band and its 45 different incarnations on MTV. Now, FOX and MTV have decided to lower the bar even further, if that’s possible, with new shows America’s Next Great Band (FOX) and Making Menudo (MTV). That’s right, MTV is resuscitating the rotting, decomposing corpse that is Latin America’s original man band, Menudo. Why they’re doing this, I don’t know. After all, this is the group that spawned the musical mistake that is Ricky Martin, so why reward it by casting a new bunch of matching-outfit-wearing, unison-dancing, hair-frosting man-banders to create more of the absolutely un-listenable music that Menudo is known for? Allow me to use this analogy: If a guy goes out and brutally murders a family of four, chops them up and burns their remains and then offers to make you a delicious strawberry cheesecake if you’ll overlook his transgressions, do you accept the offer? Heck no. Likewise, if a musical group spawns something as hideous and horrendous as Ricky Martin and his crap-ola music, then that group wants to reform with new members and produce more music and theoretically more guys like Martin, there’s no way you allow that to happen. Yet here’s MTV, not only supporting that effort but acting as a facilitator. Joining them in their stupidity is FOX, which clearly isn't satisfied with having crappy glorified karaoke contests to launch the careers of effeminate warblers like Clay Aiken and now wants to go out and find all the hack musicians it can, regardless of genre, and put them on TV as well in America’s Next Great Band. That poseur rockers INXS already tried this concept as failed miserably doesn’t seem to have deterred FOX, which will now parade an endless line of losers on stage with their subpar playing of instruments to supplement the mind-numbingly bad vocals that American Karaoke provides the network with a never-ending supply of. But I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you, America, because you brought this on yourself. If you’d had the good sense to not watch shows like American Karaoke on FOX and Making the Band in the first place, you wouldn’t be dealing with this new round of terrible TV.

- As strange as this might sound from someone who loathes the music of the Black Eyed Peas with every fiber of his being, I sincerely wish the members of the group would stick together and focus on only making music as a group. Why, you ask? Well, although every single album from the Peas has been utterly crap-tastic in the worst possible way, at least when they’re together, you only have to worry about avoiding music from a single source. Instead, we’ve been subjected to some of the most horrifically bad, sickeningly pathetic pop music ever made from the joke of an artist that is Fergie, and now will.i.am., who should apologize to e.e. cummings for ripping off the concept of putting your entire name in lower-case letters and using it for such a crappy musical career, is putting out his own album, Songs About Girls. Wow, how original, Will I Ain’t. Who would have guessed that as the “mastermind” behind the farce that is the Black Eyed Peas, whose music contains less depth and lyrical skill than the drunken ramblings of your average frat dude on a Saturday night and is far more painful to listen to, your solo album would be songs about girls. Not so coincidentally, your Peas pal Fergie also likes singing about girls – no, make that girl, as in singing about herself, how hot she thinks she is and how much guys wanna get with her. For this album, Will I Ain’t goes with a concept album, with the songs about a guy who meets and falls in love with a girl but ultimately loses her. It mixes funk, soul, dance and club music into one appalling ball of musical garbage. I didn’t know it would be possible to take so many different types of music, incorporate them and fail to pull out any of their good qualities into the finished product, but Will I Ain’t has done just that. It’s akin to taking every piece of leftover food – pizza, Chinese, hot dogs, watermelon, French Fries, a half-eaten quesadilla – and throwing them all into the same blender to mix. The result is going to be ugly, it’s going to smell bad, it’s going to be messy and you’re not going to want to be within a thousand feet of it, let alone eat it. The same can be said for Songs About Girls, except it might be even more unappealing than the mixture coming out of that blender.

- The Buddhist monks in Myanmar might be in a state of detainment or repression from the military in their nation, but clearly their example has inspired monks (and non-monks) worldwide to speak out against the brutally oppressive military regime currently governing Myanmar. Activists in cities across Europe and Asia held vigils Saturday in support of the pro-democracy forces in Myanmar, where the ruling military junta has been busy harassing beating, killing or jailing those who dare speak out against him and his regime. Some activists within the country also held their own secret vigils in support of those who have been injured, jailed or killed in the resistance efforts. While the worldwide demonstrations aren’t expected to have much of an effect inside Myanmar, they should help to keep the issue on our collective global conscience and thus increase the chances that someone will step in to help the people of Myanmar if they ask for international support in their fight against the elitist regime that has now ruled their nation with an iron fist for 45 years. Some of the protests on Saturday took place in locations such as Taipei, Melbourne, London and Paris, where police actually blocked demonstrators from marching on the Chinese embassy. That’s notable and amusing because I didn’t know that French military or law enforcement were good for anything but surrendering…..but I digress. Even in nations where protest marches are done in support of a conflict thousands of miles away, this situation is creating tension and strife. Keep the pressure on, world, because eventually this junta and his regime will go down.

- Thhhhhheeeeeee Yankees LOSE! Thhhhheeeeeeee Yankees lose! Suck it, John Sterling. Sterling is the Yankees radio announcer famous for belting out an elongated “Yankees win! The Yankees win!” every time the Bronx Bombers are victorious, so I thought it only fitting that I pay tribute to him on this glorious day when the Yankees are eliminated from the postseason yet again, this loss costing manager Joe Torre his job. That gem comes courtesy of the biggest ass in all of baseball, on the executive side anyhow, George Steinbrenner. Big Stein dropped the bomb before Game Three that unless the Yanks won the series, Torre was gone. That led to the predictable compulsion of TBS to show a close up of Torre every time something bad happened to the Yankees in the third and fourth games of the series. Now, that fatal loss has happened. Torre will be canned, while legendary Yankees public address announcer Bob Shephard, who is missing this series with some sort of throat malady and prompting the Yankee ass-kissing TBS broadcasting crew to continually fall prostrate at his proverbial feet and lament Shephard missing this series, can have until next year to rest his pipes and get ready to announce more baseball at Yankee Stadium. Speaking of that TBS crew, could Skip Caray, Tony Gwynn and Bob Brenly have been more biased in favor of the Yankees. If you watched the game tonight, you know that the answer is no. Every time the Yankees got so much as a 2-0 count on a batter, even if there were no runners on base and they were down by four runs, Caray ramped up his enthusiasm and jacked his voice up a notch, telling us that the Yankees are ready to make a comeback. Even as they trailed by two runs in the ninth, this ass hat was trying to tell us what the broadcast schedule would be for Game Five, as if it was a given that they would rally and win despite the two-run deficit and no runners on base. This isn't about an anti-Cleveland bias, either. I don’t believe it would have been any different if it had been the Angels, the Tigers, the Twins, the Mariners or the White Sox playing the Yankees. Clearly, the networks are sluts for the Yankees, desperate for the ratings boost that they provide. Should this affect the way the game is announced? No, but it does, and you could clearly hear it tonight. However, for the third straight year, the Bronx B’otches have failed to make it past the first round of the playoffs, setting up an American League Championship Series that won't make the rest of the country sick to watch. The Boston Red Sox aren’t the darlings they once were, but they aren’t nearly as hated as the Yankees. So I look forward to a great ALCS, but mostly I look forward to knowing that the Yankees will be watching that series from their couches. You suck, Yankees and Yankee fans.

University of Florida fans, world's biggest losers? High school reunions, could there be a way to make them worse? Justin Long, can't you do better?

- Two days ago, I wrote about how big a bunch of losers Star Trek dorks were, dressing up in their costumes, going to conventions and so rarely venturing outside of the darkness of their mothers’ basements. But you know who’s just as big a bunch of losers, if not bigger? It’s you, University of Florida football fans, those of you who made threatening phone calls to the owner of the impound lot who says that he received more than 200 menacing calls from you UF psychos who were irate that someone dared cal the cops on one of your beloved felons, er, players, when he broke the law. Worse yet is the fact that more than a dozen of the calls were death threats and others were bomb threats, Stan Forron told Florida Today. Several callers even offered to pay the $76 towing bill if Forron would drop the charge. Forron was surprised by the response, clearly forgetting that many fans are ignorant a-holes who excuse everything their team does and always thinks that someone else is in the wrong. “I've been in the [towing business] since '77 and I've never seen anything like it,” Forron told Florida Today. "The fans are very passionate. I think that's a big part of it. ... I'm disappointed that people could be like that. I realize how passionate people can be. But it's disappointing that they would threaten lives and property over something like this." Yes, disappointing is one word for it, while other applicable words would be moronic, indefensible, idiotic, brainless, ass-hatted, etc. How does your mind go from, “Hey, Joiner just got arrested for breaking into an impound lot,” to, “I need to call and threaten to blow up that guy’s home and business if he doesn’t drop the charges against my boy T. Joiner,”? Whose mind works in that contorted, malfunctioning a way? Clearly Florida Gator fan’s mind does. Oh, and what are these a-holes defending Joiner for? Well, according to Gainesville Police, Joiner pushed open an electric gate, got into his girlfriend’s car, inside the lot, and started to drive off. When Joiner stopped to close the gate, he was confronted by a witness who called police. Shortly after Joiner's arrest, Forron said the player had arranged to pay the bill and pick up the car. But Forron said no one was around to take Joiner's money, so he must have thought it was OK to take the car and settle up later. "He was a perfect gentleman," Forron said. "That had a big influence on why I wanted [the charge dropped]. If he had been yelling and screaming, they wouldn't have been dropped." Hey Forron, you already caved in and gave everyone what they wanted, you don’t have to continue the brown-nosing. I don’t know any perfect gentlemen who burglarize other people’s property. And I’m sure that’s what Joiner was thinking, that since no one was around to take his money for the car, it was acceptable for him to break in and take it. This isn't one of those roadside stands in some rural town where you pick up a quart of strawberries and drop your money in the pickle jar if no one is there to take it. This is a guy deciding he didn’t like someone impounding his girlfriend’s car and thieving it back before getting the charges thrown out because hundreds of ginormous tools who also double as Florida Gator fans scared the lot owner into dropping the charges. But what does Florida coach Urban Meyer care, he played Joiner quite a bit in Saturday’s loss to LSU. But maybe karma evened things out, because that loss ends Florida’s national title hopes, so Joiner, Meyer and Co. got a little bit of payback after all from the universe.

- High school reunions already suck, why does anyone need to do anything to make them worse? You go and pay $80 bucks for a mediocre meal that you eat in a room filled with a hundred or more people that you didn’t like when you went to school with them and probably like even less now. You listen to awful music, marvel at how badly many of your former classmates have aged and wonder if any of them have ever heard of a treadmill or elliptical machine, all while hearing them talk about their lives, which you could not possibly care less about. All the while, you’re reminded of how old you’ve gotten and how you can't do a lot of the things you used to be able to do. All of this would be bad enough to cause most people to avoid their reunion like Rosie O’Donnell avoids the salad bar, but then you have people like Timothy Joseph Vaughn, 39, of Lakeland, Fla. Vaughn is a deeply disturbed soul who decided that a good way to spice up his 20th high school reunion would be to threaten a massacre that would make the tragic Virginia Tech shootings look “like a birthday party.” He mentioned the Va. Tech shootings in an email to the reunion coordinator for the Lakeland High School class of ’87 reunion, then police found hundreds of homemade explosive at his home and arrested this tool. Look, I know every class in every school has their lunatic loner, the guy who you figure might go Unabomber, but hundreds of homemade explosives? And this guy was cracking jokes about a tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings? On second thought, maybe seeing fat, annoying, dull former classmates and having to look at pictures of their kids isn't so bad……

- How’s about a story featuring a college athlete not acting like a complete knucklehead? That would be Washington State basketball player Taylor Rochestie, who displayed a complete lack of selfishness and ego by voluntarily giving up his scholarship for his senior year so the team could sign a highly touted recruit from Florida. Rochestie is a starter and will be one of the team’s senior leaders this year, but he will also be a non-scholarship guy paying his own way because he and his family can afford the $25,000 cost of attending WSU for a year and he felt the scholarship would better benefit the team if it were used on this new recruit. You could point out that yeah, he’s only doing this because he and his family are well off and he doesn’t need the financial help, but not all wealthy people are that way. Not everyone is a Bill Gates-esque philanthropist who gives away his or her money to help others. Many people who have a lot keep it and don’t use any of it to help others, so props to Rochestie for not just keeping what he could have said was rightfully his, but instead doing something to make his team better. Not only is he not getting arrested, testing positive for weed, driving drunk or assaulting girls, but he’s actually sacrificing to help his team win. Now go sleep in and skip your early class tomorrow or build a beer-can pyramid in your living room so we know you’re still a real college dude, T.

- Mac is dating Drew Barrymore, but who is PC dating? Mac would be Justin Long, the actor who played the part of an Apple computer in the popular TV spots, and PC would be John Hodgman, who played the role of Windows-based computers. Long, who was in the most underrated TV series of all time (Ed, which NBC still needs to put out on DVD, get on it!) is dating Barrymore after the two acted together in the upcoming film He’s Just Not That Into You. The seem likely to continue the ever-present trend of on-screen hookup, on-set love, breakup within a few months, but you never know. After all, he does have a great operating system, isn’t susceptible to viruses like PC and….never mind. They’ve been seen out and about in Vegas, making out, and are said to be “very serious,” which is code for “they’ll break up in about a month.” Justin, I know you’re not an A-lister, my man, but Drew Barrymore in 2007, you can do better. If this were 1997, I’d say you were doing as well as you could, but you should at least be able to bag one of the girls on the new CW FALL shows like Life is Wild or Gossip Girl, right?

- It’s “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” all over again. While our former president, one Bubba Clinton, used that evasive wording and phrasing to talk his way around what women he’d had sex with, our current Moron-in-Chief W. is using the same verbal two-step to dance around the issue of whether or not the United States is in the practice of torturing terrorism suspects when they are being interrogated. In comments clearly written for him by someone else because they actually made sense – kind of – W. insisted that “this government does not torture people.” However, his administration sycophants still refuse to discuss certain torture, er, interrogation techniques that have reportedly been used, including head-slapping and water-boarding. Head slapping? What is this, terrorist investigation or the WWE? Head slaps are what HHH does to Mick Foley in their big WrestleMania match, it’s not a method an interrogator should be using to coax information from a suspect. What’s next, shots to the head with a steel chair and slapping on a submission hold until the alleged terrorist gives you what you need to know? Both Congress and the Justice Department have publicly denounced torture as an interrogation technique, but reports this week suggested that the department has secretly authorized torture techniques at some of the CIA’s secret overseas prisons. But if you parse words, get knee deep in semantics and double talk your way through questions about torture, I guess you could make it seem like you don’t allow torture and in no way is it going on. However, when your administration has lied, deceived, manipulated and misled the public and Congress on so many issues over the past seven years, don’t expect the rest of us to buy the load of sh*t you’re selling, W. You’ve shown over and over that you have no respect for the Constitution, the laws of this country, Congress or the wishes and beliefs of the American people. So is there torture going on? Yes, almost certainly. Are you lying when you say that torture is not going on? Yes again. Are we all über-thankful that in about a year your sorry ass will be gone from the White House for good? You better believe it.

- The Kaiser Chiefs said it best: I predict a riot. The same is true any time you mix angry French teenagers and the police, the authority figures those teens despise. Dozens of hooded teens in Saint Dizier, France, put on an impressive display of looting and rioting Friday, using metal bars to demolish two police cars, set fire to more than a dozen other cars and then set fire to a community center in the latest clash against authority in a region of northeast France that has seen more than its share of raging against the machine. The cause for this particular clash wasn’t anything more than the usual strife between angst-ridden teenagers and authority figures, but the ability of these hooded hoodlums to take their looting and rioting to the next level shows that they have the potential to be truly great social dissidents. If your only cause to riot is tensions with the police that aren’t even over a major issue like police brutality, racial profiling or a similar issue and you can get yourself worked up enough to do that much damage, just think what you could do if you were fighting for a major cause. So take pride, young French rioters, because you’ve staged this week’s Riot of the Week! Here’s to many future successful social demonstrations featuring violence, property destruction and general mayhem for all of you.

- Somebody’s lying here, and call it a hunch, but I’m going to say that the liar is Gen. Than Shwe, the military junta ruling over Myanmar. Conflicting reports about the detainment of Buddhist monks in the country and the number of protestors killed in the large-scale demonstrations in the capital city of Yangon on Sept. 26-27 are emerging, with the government insisting that the number of detainees is around 2,100 and the death toll at approximately 10, with the opposition movement placing those figures closer to 6,000 detainees and 200 deaths. Also, the government is claiming that only 109 of the hundreds of detained monks remain in custody, while they continue their search for four monks they have labeled as ringleaders of the rebellion. Both sides have reason to lie, with the government wanting to downplay the brutality and excessive force it use to stop the rebellion and the opposition wanting to make the government out to by as brutal and villainous as possible. Of course, that’s not a difficult task when your military is beating down and firing on civilians and arresting anything that moves on a city street and the whole world can see images of what is going on. Even going by the limited footage and images I’ve seen, it seems impossible that only 10 people were killed in those protest marches, so I have a very difficult time buying the government’s story. Either way, this conflict looks to be bogging down at the moment, with both sides entrenched in their positions and many citizens in Myanmar resigned to the fact that without outside intervention, they don’t have much hope of dislodging their oppressive government from its spot atop their country’s hierarchy. Hopefully the more bold and outspoken among them won't allow hope to be lost completely, because this is a fight worth fighting. Plus, it’s nice to see a country actually fight its own battle for democracy and not have the United States (well, pretty much W.) impose democracy on it whether the people want it or not (sound familiar, Iraq?).

Felons welcome at UF, Radiohead pioneering once again and The Black Donnellys resurfaces

- Welcome to the University of Florida football team, where our policy is that you can play in the game on Saturday as long as the felony charges are dismissed by kickoff! Yes, I know that UF defensive back Tony Joiner had the felony burglary charges against him dropped by state prosecutors after the owner of the impound lot Joiner broke into did not want to press charges. Coach Urban Meyer took the “massive” disciplinary step of….brace yourself…..stripping Joiner of his position as one of the team’s captains! Boo-yah, take that, Tony! Yeah, I’m sure that’s a devastating blow. Meyer also promised that Joiner will “pay a heavy price” with internal team discipline in the weeks ahead, which translates to some extra wind sprints and probably practicing with the second stringers, whoop-de-do. If Meyer does as he’s expected to and allows Joiner to play this week, he’s showing how little value he truly places on discipline and responsibility for his team. If that’s how you want to play it, that’s fine, just don’t pretend you’re some legendary hard-ass disciplinarian who’s really going to teach this kid a lesson. Don’t allow the lot owner not pressing charges to be confused with Joiner not having broken the law. Spencer Mann, chief investigator for the State Attorney's Office, said the charge was dropped because the towing company “believes it's a big misunderstanding. The victim is adamant that he sustained no loss or damage and does not wish to pursue criminal charges,” Mann said. “Based on that information, we cannot sustain a criminal charge. Without a victim, I have no crime.” Call me crazy, but if this were any normal student at UF, one who wasn’t an athlete, he or she would still be facing those criminal charges and the lot owner would be out for payback. You skated on this one, T. Joiner, hopefully you realize that.

- Radiohead have always marched to their own beat, musically and otherwise, making mostly great music in the process. Ten years ago, the melancholy rockers released the album OK Computer, which set the music world on its ear with a unique, computer-guided vibe. Now, the band is doing something even more revolutionary by releasing its newest album, In Rainbows, on its website and allowing consumers to decide how much they want to pay for it. Literally, you can download the entire finished version of the album for free, or you can decide to pay $5, $10, $15, etc. The decision has infuriated many in the music industry who already wrongly view the fight against listeners downloading music online for free as the battle their inudstyr needs to fight and win. Radiohead is currently without a record deal and are also one of the only artists of note not selling any of their songs on iTunes. Thus, if you want your copy of In Rainbows, you can go to www.radiohead.com beginning Wednesday and get it for whatever price you decide to pay. Obviously this isn't going to set an example for most bands to follow, because most bands don’t have the massive, loyal fan base and deep pockets that the members of Radiohead have. Still, it’s a novel approach to take and I’m really interested to see what the effect of this will be.

- The 2007 Chicago Cubs are the worst, most undeserving playoff team in the history of Major League Baseball. I may not have seen every playoff team from the past century plus of MLB postseason action, but I don’t need to because I know that there can not possibly be a single playoff team in the history of baseball that was as inept in every phase of the game as this year’s edition of the Cubs. In getting swept right out of the playoffs on their asses by the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Cubbies showed an astonishing lack of skill and execution on offense, a shocking level of awfulness in their pitching and all the defensive skill of a team of drunken baboons wearing blindfolds and trying to field the ball with cast iron skillets strapped to both of their hands and cinder blocks tied to their feet. In all seriousness, Major League Baseball needs to amend it rules so it can go back and retroactively award the playoff spot the Cubs wasted to a team that actually would have shown up for a game or two. The New York Mets may have flamed down the stretch, but I bet they would have at least won or been competitive in a game or two of their series, unlike the Cubbies. They struck out in timely situations, grounded into double plays like they were being paid to do so and pitched like it was batting practice all series long. Also, it has to be disheartening for every Cubs fan to know that their team has thrown away $136 million for this year and the next seven years on the contract they gave to Alfonso Soriano this past off-season. Soriano grounded out, flew out, struck out and found most every way there was to not get on base, not move runners up and not drive in runs, proving that he is as undeserving of an 8-year, $136 million contract as any player could be. He contributed absolutely nothing good to the team all series long, which is the same thing all his teammates contributed as well, but the fact that Soriano is making more than any of them makes this so much worse on his part. Good riddance, you losers, the playoffs will be a much better place without you. There is no curse on the Cubs, there’s just a roster full of incompetent, choking players who are never going to win a playoff series, let alone a world championship.

- An interesting TV note for all you fans of the short-lived NBC series The Black Donnellys, the entire series, including episodes that never aired on NBC but were only available at NBC.com, is now available on DVD. Since the series didn’t get a full 26-episode season, the DVD doesn’t have as much content as a normal DVD set for one season of a TV show, but in spite of NBC’s cancellation, I still argue that Black Donnellys was a very good show that could have gotten a lot better if given a chance. There are also some cool bonus features on the DVD, and although I might want to wait a bit longer to watch it so it doesn’t piss me off so much to know that the show was canceled as I’m watching it, this is a DVD that will be worthwhile to have.

- It’s a small crack in the wall of Myanmar’s military junta, Gen. Than Shwe, but it’s a crack nonetheless and a sign that the strong resistance of the country’s government is finally starting to have an impact. Gen. Shwe has hinted that he might be willing to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained democracy activist who has become a figurehead for the anti-government movement in Myanmar, but only if she stops urging international sanctions against the country and ceases urging her countrymen to confront the country’s military regime. On the one hand, it seems like selling out your principles a bit to stop opposing a government you are rebelling against and trying to overthrow just to get a meeting with its leader, but I believe San Suu Kyi should accept the stipulations and get the meeting, for several reasons. One, the resistance movement isn't going to stop doing what it’s doing just because San Suu Kyi is no longer urging them to rebel. They have momentum, they’re taking their stand and they believe in what they’re doing enough that the cause has force sustaining behind it, with or without San Suu Kyi’s words. Second, she only has to stop doing these things until she gets the meeting with Shwe, then she can right back to speaking out against this fascist regime. Or, if she so chooses, she can continue complying with the general’s demands, pass her messages along to someone else within the opposition movement and have that person or persons spread them. Regardless, I think San Suu Kyi should do what she needs to do to secure this meeting, although she also must approach it with extreme caution, because Gen. Shwe and his men should not be trusted under any circumstances. They could be setting up a trap of some sort with this meeting and might plan on using it to threaten and intimidate San Suu Kyi, so she should beware. Also, Shwe could be using this meeting to make a phony gesture to the rest of the world that he’s willing to hear the opposition out, but in reality he isn't planning on changing a thing. Bottom line: this meeting isn't likely to solve or resolve anything, but it is an interesting turn of events that could take this whole saga in a new direction.

No sympathy for Marion Jones, a dumb "no" from W. and no fear, eh, Londoners?

- It would be easy to feel sorry for Marion Jones right now….if she hadn’t made the rope, tied the noose and built the gallows that she and her career are about to swing from. She might be putting the final nail in that steroid-fueled coffin by pleading guilty to a charge of lying to federal investigators about her use of performance-enhancing drugs, but she started greasing the track for her freefall several years back when she threw out those ironclad, firm and specifically-worded denials about the fact that she had never, ever used steroids and was 100% clean. She could not have been more emphatic about asserting her innocence, yet here she is now in 2007, sending a letter to friends and family detailing how she went about building a legendary track and field career on the back of steroids. That letter expresses Jones’ disbelief that her coach Trevor Graham, a man who has been at the heart of the steroids problem in track and field of late, was mixing in ‘roids to her training regimen. She writes in the letter that she found it odd when Graham asked her not to tell anyone about what she was doing in the program, which should have been a red flag and either Jones saw it and chose to ignore it or she’s just so incredibly stupid that she didn’t put two and two together. But it’s hard to believe that she didn’t know something fishy was going on when she suddenly began to run like a thoroughbred and soar through the air in the long jump like freaking Bob Beamon and Carl Lewis rolled into one. It’s also hard to believe that she’s telling the truth about all of this now given the fact that she’s spent several years lying to everyone about this issue in the first place. The only thing that’s going to provide a modicum of relief for Jones at this point is the fact that she’s retired from active competition and out of the public eye in a sport, track and field, that’s so far on the periphery of sports in the U.S. that you need a GPS and binoculars to find it. Don’t let that fact make you think that you’re not a lying, cheating scumbag, though, Marion, because you are. Your entire career will now be thought of as a total fraud by anyone who takes the time to look at it and you deserve whatever punishment you receive.

- At this point, I think W. is just saying no to everything Congress sends his way just to be disagreeable and to give them another middle-fingered salute. He’s like a two-year-old going through their “no” phase, when every question, statement or request is greeted with the same negative reply from the tiny tot. Actually, since both W. and your average two-year-old are on the same level mentally, it’s not that much of a stretch….but I digress. W. has rejected a new children’s health care bill sent to him by Congress, a bill that would have expand federally funded children’s health care. The measure would offer health insurance from the government for children of families with up to three tiems the federal poverty level, approximately $62,000. Even fellow Republicans aren’t totally behind W. on this one, although their concerns are partially motivated by the fact that their leader taking a hard line against expanding children’s health care is akin to drop kicking puppies and beating up nuns and could cost them support in the 2008 elections. The Senate passed this bill with more than enough votes to override the veto, but the House fell a little short of the necessary two-thirds majority. W., showing he is anything but a friend of the common man, had this to say in response: “The policies of the government ought to be, help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.” First, props to whoever on W.’s speech writing team mixed in philosophical AND worked with him for the excruciatingly high number of hours it took for him to learn how to pronounce it correctly, even if he still has no idea what it means. Secondly, yes, it would be nice if everyone could find private insurance for their families, ass hat, but they can’t and that’s why there’s a problem. No amount of philosophizing and well-wishing are going to change the fact that many, many families can't get private insurance no matter how hard you try. Unless the government steps in and helps, the problem will persist and here you are, W., opposing a fairly logical solution. Had everyone followed my lead and moved to impeach you several months ago, this problem could have been averted, but it’s too late for that now.

- Here’s when you know that you are overly sensitive to terrorism: when a super spicy chili sauce causes road closings and evacuations in one of your city’s busiest districts, you might need to relax a bit. Such was the case in London’s Soho district Wednesday, when passers-by complained that a chemical smell coming from a Thai restaurant was burning their throats. These wusses put in enough calls to the police that a chemical response team from the London Fire Brigade was sent in, only to discover that it was simply one of the ingredients in the food that was causing the uproar. Hey Brits, I know that you all might be nervous about a terrorist attack, but have none of you ever eaten Thai food before? It’s one of the spiciest varieties of food around, spicy enough that if you’ve never eaten it before, doing so can cause serious problems. So maybe on of you Mensa’s should have put two and two together and thought, “Hmm, I’m right outside a Thai restaurant where they serve insanely spicy grub, maybe that weird smell that’s burning my throat has something to do with the food there.” Zero points on the intelligence scale for all of you and negative five points for being so soft that the mere smell of a spicy chili sauce is enough to send you running to the police. Boy, the terrorist have it easy with you, just mix up some cayenne peppers, horseradish and leftover Thai takeout and they could strike panic into the heart of all of London. The spicy sauces are coming! the spicy sauces are coming!

- This should help your case that you’re not the world biggest virgins and losers, Star Trek dorks. One of your own heroes, a man after whom you have tried to pattern much of your pathetic existence even though he’s a fictional character on one of the most loser-ish shows of all-time, has had the honor of having a giant ball of space rock named after him. Actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the Star Dork, er, Star Trek movies and TV shows, now has the asteroid 7307 Takei named after him, an honor bestowed on him by the International Astronomical Union’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. Ah, the I.A.U.C.S.B.N., who doesn’t long to be honored by them. I just want to know if these tools are the same ones that are offering to sell me “exclusive” naming rights to my very own star for $50. Even if they aren’t, why would I need your honor, I.A.U.C.S.B.N., when I can buy my very own star with no actual authority or weight given to the name that I’m getting ripped off to “buy”? But I’m sure that Star Trek losers worldwide are celebrating this one in full costume in their mom’s basement, their pale pasty skin accented ever so slightly by their wispy pube mustaches and their authentic Star Trek uniforms decorated just like their heroes, Takei and Capt. Picard. Enjoy your moment in the sun, dorks, just make sure you don’t actually go outside where the real sun and its rays might make actual contact with your skin…..

- This isn't going to help you make al of your child support payments, Travis Henry. The Denver Broncos running back, known as much for his skills as a prolific procreator with nine kids in with nine women in four states as he is for his skills on the field, is staring down a possible one-year suspension from the NFL after testing positive for marijuana for a third time and less than a year after a second positive test that landed him a four-game suspension. Henry, who is currently the NFL’s leading rusher, has filed a lawsuit to prevent the NFL from using the results of his urine sample for testing of its own and thus being able to drop the one-year suspension on him, and the case is currently making its way through the court system. However, this looks like a losing effort for Henry and in the end it’s likely to amount to little more than a stall tactic to delay the suspension for a few weeks. As I said, though, not playing for a year is really going to make things tight for Henry financially, because when you’re scratching off nine child support checks per month, you need all the income you can get. If you do get suspended for the year, Travis, I feel compelled to offer a bit of advice: Stop knocking chicks up, because the last thing you need in your year off is to add the expense of yet another child to your ledger. Actually, that’s good advice whether you’re suspended or not, because reaching double digits in the “Illegitimate Kids I Have to Support” column of your life ledger is something we should all strive to avoid. A second suggestion for Henry with his impending year off is to get his life in order, stop burning blunts and learn the meaning of the words birth control. Wake up, T., because what should be a promising, productive career leading to financial security for the rest of your life is slipping away from you quickly and it’s all your fault, my man.

Smallville keeps going strong, what comedian I want killed and another person W. could learn a lesson from

- See W., it IS possible. You can withdraw troops from Iraq, you aren’t limited to just adding more into the fracas. This isn't like putting your pennies in one of those clear plastic donation boxes that sit on store counters, collecting money for charitable causes. Those things have only one tiny slot to put money in and once you put your change in, you can’t get it back out. Conversely, you CAN get your troops out of Iraq, it is possible. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has declared that his country will be pulling out 20 percent of its troops that are currently in Iraq and will do so in the next few weeks. What’s amazing about this is the Iraqi leaders say that within two months, they’ll be ready to take up the responsibilities of the British troops that are leaving. So they can survive losing British troops, but we can't bring any of our troops home and need to send more? How f’d up is that? I realize that we have scores and scores more troops there than anyone else (yay us!), but we need to follow the lead of the British and get our guys the heck out of there. This upcoming fight over additional funding for the Mess O’Potamia is going to get very ugly and contentious and W. is going to have even less of a leg to stand on in asking Congress to help him further this debacle when other countries are pulling their troops out and the Iraqi government is still failing to meet the majority of the benchmarks set for it. This new announcement from Brown comes on the heels of the Brits abandoning their last remaining base in Basra last month, so the British government is clearly responding to the outcry from its citizens against the war in Iraq, something from which W. and his stooges out to take a hint.

- Youth rallies? What are we talkin’ about, youth rallies? Yes, Allen Iverson, we are talking about youth rallies, specifically the youth rallies and personal appearances you were scheduled to make in Omaha, Neb. during one recent weekend, the same rallies and appearances you bailed on. These may not be the high-priced commercial and advertising gigs you go out and die for and film every commercial like it’s your last, but that doesn’t mean you can just not show up at all, which is what a promoter in Omaha alleges that you did. A.I. was allegedly scheduled to make appearances at a youth rally and two other events in Omaha in early August but failed to show up for any of them, leaving a conspicuous void in the schedule at all three locations. The promoter has filed a lawsuit against the Denver Nuggets star, seeking $44,000 in damages. I hate to crack on A.I., especially because he’s responsible for one of the greatest spoiled, I-just-don’t-get-it athlete quotes of all time, but this is bad form. If you agree to appear somewhere, then you either follow through or you let them know in advance that you can’t make it. Don’t big-time people, not when you already have a reputation for not being the best guy in the world and being a troublemaker. Show up when and where you promise to show up, A.I., and that includes showing up at youth rallies and actually bothering to show up in the NBA playoffs instead of no-showing there when your team needs you most…..

- Someone might want to tell the Philadelphia Phillies that the playoffs have started, because they don’t seem to know. The Phills opened their series with the Colorado Rockies in the worst possible fashion, not only losing the first two games at home but not looking very competitive in doing so. The Phillies were shut down by Jeff Francis in Game One, getting a hearty 0-11 from their three top hitters. In Game Two, their offense showed up but their pitching was on par with what most Little Leaguers could do. Now the have to get on a plane, fly to Denver and win two games in the home park of the hottest team in baseball if they want to keep their season alive. Puss-throwing veteran lefty Jamie Moyer is set to pitch Game Three for Philly, but if their offensive tandem of Utley and Howard don’t contribute something, the pitching isn't going to matter much one way or the other. Over in the American League, the Yankees definitely know the postseason has started, because the Indians informed them of that fact by taking out their Louisville Sluggers and bashing the Bronx Bombers’ collective head in. Before the series, everyone seemed enthralled by New York’s offensive firepower, but it was the Indians who took advantage of the Yanks’ pathetic pitching to score a 12-3 win. That same subpar pitching should allow the Indians to win the series, although it is just one game. Still, with 19-game winner Fausto Carmona going Friday, the Indians have a great chance to stake themselves to a solid 2-0 series lead. Oh, and I hope all the Cub fans out there enjoyed the team’s brief foray back into the playoffs, because it’s going to be a very short visit for the loveable losers from the North Side. The Cubs have shown in the first two games of their series against Arizona that of all the eight teams to make the playoffs this year, they absolutely don’t belong. Shoddy pitching in key spots, a totally anemic offense and a lack of execution in pressure situations are clear evidence that the Cubs are only in the postseason because they won a crappy division and someone from the NL Central had to make the playoffs. Honestly, the swooning Mets or the San Diego Padres, who lost out in a tiebreaker for the wild card, would have made far better playoff teams than the choking Cubbies. Thursday night’s game featured a stink bomb of a start by Ted Lilly, more ineptitude by Whiff-meister General Alfonso Soriano and a lack of offense that is offensive to t-ballers everywhere. Seriously, Soriano is conjuring up an eerie resemblance to Cerrano from Major League, because clearly anything other than a straight-as-an-arrow fastball baffles this guy. Hey Alfonso, there’s this crazy pitch called a curveball, it doesn’t go in a straight line, it curves. Pitchers throw it and you have to actually try to hit it with a different swing than you normally use. You can’t just flail at it the same way you do at a fastball and expect to hit it. But hey, after Game Three on Saturday, your season will be over and you’ll have plenty of time to try and figure this out. Adios, losers.

- So we finally started to get some answers for the fallout from last season’s Smallville finale and this season’s premiere, and as it turns out, I’m just as smart as I thought I was. Tonight’s second episode the season for Smallville formally introduced us to Clark Kent’s cousin Kara, but just as importantly, it confirmed my guess that Lana staged her own death and jumped onto the passing delivery truck in last season’s finale. OK, so maybe I’m gloating too much on being right, so let’s move on to this new episode. As it turns out, Kara has a spaceship of her own, just like Clark had, and when Clark and Lois discover the ship, Kara isn't happy. Lois ends up unconscious and Clark is left in the dust when Kara takes flight. Kara doesn’t immediately recognize Clark because she doesn’t realize that she’s been in suspended animation for 18 years and thus Clark isn't the cute baby she remembers, but rather the same age as her. The spaceship saga also introduces us to a mysterious new character, a government agent working for the Department of Domestic Security. This guy steals the special crystal from Kara’s ship that contains vital instructions and information for her and takes it in for analysis. On the other side of the world, literally, Lana and Lex have a less-than-joyful reunion when Lex is cleared of murder charges and realizes that Lana is still alive. He tracks her down in Shanghai, apologizes and says she can return to Smallville and live her life peacefully, which based on the previews for next week, she decides to do. And how did Lex get off for murder, you ask? Well, despite the fact that Lionel Luthor (John Glover) has been AWOL on screen this season so far, he paid off a LuthorCorp employee who was dying of cancer to take the fall for Lana’s murder – except there was no murder. That’s because although I called the jump-onto-the-delivery-truck move, what I didn’t see was the culmination of the whole fake pregnancy story from last year, which as it turns out was Lex cloning Lana as part of his 33.1 experiments. Lana found her clone, which hadn’t been brought to life yet, and used it to plant in her vehicle before she blew it up, thus making it appear that she really did die and providing all the necessary DNA evidence to prove it. An interesting monkey wrench was thrown into the show at the end of the episode, when Clark returns to the Fortress of Solitude and is told by his father, Jor-El, that his cousin Kara is more dangerous than she appears and insinuating that she’s up to no good. Is that true, or is it just sour grapes from Jor-El to the child of his brother, Zor-El? Also, how is the Clark-Lana reunion going to go, now that she’s returning to Smallville and for the first time when she knows his secret? Right now, the show is mixing in a lot of new characters and information and changing quickly, which is a good thing (oh, Zach from The O.C. has joined the cast too), because hopefully it will add more life and length to Smallville’s run. Regardless, it’s been a very strong start to the season for the only good show remaining on the CW.

- That’s it, I’m officially starting a campaign to kill Frank Caliendo and destroy all the footage he’s shot for commercials for his new show, who’s with me? There’s saturation, there’s overkill and then there’s what TBS is doing with promoting Frank TV, Caliendo’s new show on the network premiering next month. I get it, OK? The guy does impressions of famous people, ha ha. I don’t care if it was Jerry Seinfeld in his TV prime, Dave Chapelle, Dane Cook, Johnny Carson or Jay Leno, if you show me that many commercials of the same entertainer over and over, I’m going to start devising painful and torturous ways to kill that individual. Honestly, I’m not saying this for effect: I am genuinely against this show even though I’ve never seen it and from everything I’ve heard, Frank Caliendo is generally considered to be a funny guy. I am that put off by TBS’ attempts to ram this show down my throat that I won't even consider watching it. Just think of a song you’ve heard, maybe even one that you actually liked. If you play that song over and over and over and over, eventually you stop enjoying it and start despising it. TBS and every other network with a new show to promote needs to understand this principle and stop the overkill, because the backlash from it is going to far outweigh any good you all think you’re doing by promoting the show so heavily.

Blackwater in trouble, college football players in jail and baseball finally in its postseason

- How about a trio of college football players ending up on the wrong side of the law in the past week and their respective fates, does that sound like something you’d be interested in hearing about? I thought so. Let’s start with Troy Joiner, a University of Florida safety who was arrested at about 5 a.m. Tuesday on charges of felony burglary. Joiner was taken into custody outside the fenced impound lot of a local towing company, Gainesville police said. He allegedly pushed a heavy electric gate open to enter the lot in an attempt to retrieve his girlfriend's car, which was being held in lieu of a $76 towing bill, a police report said. The owner of the towing company is now reversing field and saying the whole thing is a big misunderstanding, which I’m sure is true. After all, who doesn’t call the police and tell them someone is breaking into their property only to change their mind and say it was just a misunderstanding. Maybe this guy is a big UF fan and once he realized who he’d just busted, he had a change of heart. Maybe someone from the athletic department or associated with it got to him and “worked things out.” Regardless, I don’t buy this for a second. Joiner is the eighth Florida player in the past nine months to get in legal trouble. That might be the way to show you really are an elite program, by how many criminals are on your roster, but that doesn’t mean coach Urban Meyer isn't going to get a major black eye if his hooligans/players keep this up. Then you have former University of Northern Colorado punter Mitch Cozad, who has been sentenced to seven years in prison after a conviction for second-degree assault stemming from a 2006 incident in which be stabbed fellow UNC player Rafael Mendoza in the leg. Cozad was actually fortunate to get off so easily, because he was also facing charges of first-degree attempted murder that he was able to beat. Hope that was worth it, Mitch, formulating and carrying out your moronic plan to win the prestigious starting punter job at Northern Colorado and getting seven years in the hole instead. Good work, Einstein. Getting that gig is definitely worth the risk of being convicted on second-degree assault and ruining your life. Speaking of not helping yourself out…..one thing that definitely does not help your case when you’re trying to prove your innocence on rape charges is the revelation that you were already wanted on another rape charge in a different town before this new charge was levied. Central Washington University football player Josh Rojas is facing two rape charges, the first coming after he allegedly raped an 18-year-old freshman after he met her at a party last Friday night. Rojas, a sophomore linebacker, is described by CWU head football coach Beau Baldwin as “a model citizen.” I have to disagree with that, because I don’t know too many model citizens who allegedly rape a girl and then return to their hometown, where they’re informed by Snohomish County Sheriff's deputies that there is a warrant out for their arrest for another alleged rape last November in Ellensburg. Rojas and the alleged victim in his most recent (alleged) rape met at a house party on the 1800 block of Chestnut Street. Police say they left the party and went back to Rojas' house, where the 18-year-old girl says the raped occurred. Police also say Rojas and the alleged victim went to high school together, they were three years apart. Astonishingly, he’s no longer allowed on campus without permission from the campus police or office of student affairs, although Rojas is still officially enrolled as a student. Kinda hard to be a student and do the things that students need to do when you’re banned from campus, but I think J. Rojas has bigger things to concern himself with than reading assignments and research papers right now. Such are the travails of an (alleged) serial rapist in the making…..

- Two new movies coming out in the next couple of weeks have caught my attention, both for very different reasons. The first is Across The Universe, which looks great even though I’d normally be the last person to recommend a musical. However, given that most of the music is songs from the Beatles, I’ll make an exception in this case. The movie is about……….. On the flip side, we have a movie that’s already in the running for worst movie of the year even though it hasn’t officially hit theaters yet. However, when a movie comes from executive producer Jennifer Lopez, stars Omarion and features some of the stiffest, most wooden dialogue and sad-sack acting this side of Gigli (oops, wasn’t Lopez involved in that one too?), you get a feeling that Feel The Noise is gawd awful, no doubt about it. Amazingly, the movie is about dancing and crappy club music masquerading as hip hop, which is astonishing, given that a crappy club music-producing, faux hip hopper like Lopez is the EP. It just feels like Lopez is trying to force-feed her one main skill, dancing, into a movie even though there’s not really a plot or the acting talent to make it anything other than a waste of time and money. You can find a really hot female lead, as this movie has, but when the story is nonexistent, predictable and weak and the acting is awful, your movie is D.O.A. So for those of you keeping score at home, that’s a resounding yes for going to see Across The Universe and a strong suggestion that you do absolutely anything but waste your time and dollars going to see Feel the Noise.

- The opening day the Major League Baseball playoffs has arrived, so of course I have a few thoughts on the day on the diamond…..Although it’s not a fatal disaster, the first game of the NLDS went as badly as it could have gone for the Philadelphia Phillies without losing the series officially or seeing one of their key players injured. They lost Game One at home with their ace on the mound, meaning that they now have to win three of the next four games and do so relying mostly on the shaky second, third and fourth starters in their rotation. The Phils’ big hitters, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, combined to go 0-for-8, with Utley wearing the fabled golden sombrero for his four-strikeout game in which he saw more than the three pitches needed to strike out in only one at bat. Just up the East Coast in Boston, the power pitching of Boston’s Josh Beckett silenced the Angels and never gave the Halos a chance to play their trademark style of baseball. The Angels thrive on hit-and-run plays, stealing bases, going from first to third on base hits and generally being a menace on the base paths, but it’s tough to do that when you can barely get any runners on base. Beckett shut them down for eight innings and with home runs from David Ortiz and Kevin Youkilis, the Sox are out to a 1-0 lead. I’m not moving off my prediction of Angels in five, though, because I have a feeling that Boston’s next two starting pitchers, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Curt Schilling, aren’t going to be nearly as stellar as Beckett. This game was also noteworthy because it bucked the usual trend of playoff games going on and on and on, instead coming in well under three hours. Meanwhile, out in the desert, the Cubs and Diamondbacks matched aces on the mound, albeit aces at different ends of the personality and composure spectrum. The intense, combustible, emotionally-erratic Carlos Zambrano took the ball for the Cubs, while low-key, even-keeled Brandon Webb started for the D-Backs. Zambrano pitched well……but not well enough to overcome an inept offense led by the whiff-meister himself, the human windmill known as Alfonso Soriano, who again struck out in key situations when his team at least needed him to put the ball in play. The Cubs lost 3-1, which isn't a surprise to me or any other true Cubs fan. Expecting winning and postseason success from the Chicago Cubs is like expecting an Oscar-winning movie from Pauly Shore. The Cubs had numerous chances to bat with runners in scoring position and less than two outs and failed nearly every time. Some credit goes to Webb for great piching, but much blame goes to the Cubs for choking in the clutch. Now, they face a huge Game Two that could put them in an inescapable hole if they lose. We don’t have to wait long to see if that happens, with that game coming tomorrow night at 10 p.m.

- Caught some of the new ABC drama Pushing Daisies and honestly, I wasn’t swayed one way or the other. I didn’t love the show, nor did I hate it. It wasn’t totally boring, but it also wasn’t that entertaining. With shows like this, i.e. ones with a supernatural premise, you have to really buy in to the whole idea of the show or you’re not going to enjoy it. I just didn’t find the idea of a guy having some sort of bizarro Midas touch that allows him to temporarily revive murder victims so he can ask them who killed them. Also hurting Daisies is the fact that it aspires to be something of a comedy and as Reaper has so clearly shown, the combination of the supernatural and comedy in a TV show doesn’t bring good results. Look at the supernatural shows that have been successful and are actually good and you’ll see that they’re dramas, period, not comedies. Shows like Smallville, Heroes, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, etc. aren’t constantly trying to weave the supernatural and the super funny together and thus, they succeed. Unfortunately, their success has inspired others to try and capitalize on the supernatural fad and to incorporate comedy for a change of pace and the result has been abysmal failure. Is Pushing Daisies as bad as Reaper? No, not even close. Only the new, soon-to-be-canceled ABC bomb Cavemen can approach that level of suck-itude. But is Daisies anywhere close to the great new series that ABC is trying to paint it as? Not even close…..

- Hey, did you know that comedian Frank Caliendo has a new show on TBS? If you watched even a few innings of the MLB playoffs yesterday, not only do you know that, but you’re already so sick of Frank F’ing Caliendo that you want to shove a rusty ice pick through his forehead just to make him go away. Why is it that whenever there’s a major sporting event on TV (NCAA Tournament, baseball playoffs, the Super Bowl, etc.), the network broadcasting that event has to ram a new show down our throats with nonstop promos to not only the point of saturation, but to the point that you go from interest in the show if it happens to look appealing to resentment and irritation because you see the same promos over and over and over and you just become sick of them. So guess what, TBS? Frank Caliendo might be good at doing impressions, but any slim chance I would watch his new show is pretty much gone because I saw every f’ing one of his promos at least two or three times and now I can't stand the guy.

- Sorry, but no sympathy for you music industry. The recording industry continues its b*tching about illegal downloading of music and how it’s going to kill to industry, even though the practice has been shown to have a minimal, negligible effect on album sales. However, that isn't stopping the litigation and anti-piracy division of Sony BMG from taking Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old woman from Brainerd, Minn., to court on charges that she illegally shared more than 2,000 songs online. Oh no, she shared songs! I’m sure that she and other miscreants like her are going to bring the recording industry to its knees…..or not. Just to be safe, though, Jammie, my suggestion is that you do something I do, check that, something I think might be helpful if you do it. Just check out music you want from your local library and rip it to your computer, which also gives you lots of free music. Of course, I’ve never, ever done this and don’t at all advocate finding ways to get free music from a music industry that squeezes money from consumers at every turn…..uh, let’s just move on…..

- When the W. administration hires a private security firm to go to Iraq and act like a bunch of vigilante commandos without being subject to any real oversight or regulation, should we really be surprised when the head of that security firm goes before Congress and acts like his company is above the law? Watching Eric Prince, the 38-year-old former Navy SEAL and chairman of Blackwater USA. “I believe we acted appropriately at all times,” Prince told a congressional committee investigating his companies activities in Iraq. When asked if he admitted that his men had shot and killed innocent civilians, which clearly they have, Prince denied this was true. These hearings were inspired by a Sept. 16 shootout that left 11 Iraqis dead, a shootout in which Blackwater personnel were involved. Not surprisingly, the State Department is being uncooperative and vague about what it is doing to monitor and investigate Blackwater. Hmm, you mean a part of the W. administration is screwing around, lying and deceiving when it comes to investigating a shady, underhanded practice that the administration itself initiated? Wow…..I’m shocked. Prince actually spent much of the hearing leaning back in his seat to listen to his lawyer’s advice to not actually answer questions asked of him, most of them about whether Blackwater employees are guilty of the murders of Iraqi citizens. Of course, if you give me the option of having American soldiers in Iraq, in harm’s way, in a war they never should have been involved with in the first place, or some private security vigilantes doing the same thing, I’m going with the latter, because I won't feel nearly as bad if anything happens to them. That being said, stop killing innocent civilians, Blackwater personnel, this isn't a shooting gallery, it’s a country with a lot of innocent civilians who really don’t deserve to have you kill them.

A great night of TV, a controversial night of baseball and a new world marathon record

- I was really torn between watching a Monday Night Football game that was a total mismatch, the Rockies-Padres wild-card tiebreaker game to make it to the playoffs and episodes of Heroes and Prison Break….no I wasn’t. I watched the latter two and then when they were done, I locked into the baseball game for a thrill ride of a contest that ended in dramatic, controversial fashion. In a game that decided what the first 162 games of the regular season could not decide, the Rockies and Padres went back and forth for 13 innings, with the Rockies winning an epic 9-8 contest that saw two blown calls and a blown save by baseball’s all-time saves leader that has many fans in San Diego tearing down Trevor Hoffman, a man they’ve cheered for more than a decade. The two major controversies came in the sixth inning and the last inning, respectively. In the sixth, a ball hit by Colorado’s Garrett Atkins that looked to go over the fence, hit the seats and bounce back onto the field was ruled in play instead of being a home run, which would have been the correct call. Those who are saying replays on the play are inconclusive are missing a key point: no ball that hits off the top of a padded wall is going to bounce as far, as fast as that ball did. It struck something solid and firm, namely the seats. However, it was ruled in play and kept the Rockies from scoring…..until the 13th inning, when the Padres pushed across two runs in the top half of the inning and the Rockies countered with three to win it in the bottom of the inning. The last run scored on a disputed play in which Colorado’s Matt Holiday slid into home and appeared to miss touching the plate while Padres catcher Michael Barrett blocked home. Replays were again inconclusive, but home plate umpire Tim McClelland ruled Holliday safe, so that’s that. Again, everyone is missing something key in discussing this play: Barrett never tagged Holliday anyhow. He lost the ball before he could make the tag and after he recovered it, McClelland’s safe call caused Barrett to stop trying to make the tag and walk off the field. So to this point, 24 hours later, Holliday still has not touched home plate and Barrett has still not tagged him. Those three runs to win the game came off Hoffman, who blew a crucial save for the second time in three days and cost his team a shot at the playoffs. San Diego fans want his head on a pike, but a contrite Hoffman stood up and took the blame for the loss and it should be left at that. He didn’t get the job done, period. It was a great game, and for someone who didn’t have a rooting interest, it was a great way to start the opening week of the MLB playoffs.

- That’s the Heroes we all know and love. Last night’s episode, coming on the heels of an entertaining-but-erratic season premiere, was flat-out awesome, still whirling us around the globe and the space/time continuum but with a lot more coherence and flow. A large part of the reason that this episode was better is that our pal Peter Petrelli was on screen a lot more often. Milo Ventimiglia is great in this role and seeing Peter start to get a grip on his powers and piece together who he is was cool. He’s in trouble with some common Irish thugs who think he stole the shipment of iPods that they were going to steal, but ironically Peter doesn’t realize that with all of his powers (some of which he still doesn’t remember that he has yet) he could easily steal the box containing all of his belongings and possessions and get back more of his memories. There was also plenty of Hiro Nakamura comedy, with the diminutive, bespectacled time traveler helping his friend, Japanese legend Taketo Kensei, by putting on Kensei’s armor and using his ability to stop and bend time to perform feats of heroism in Kensei’s name. Another twist is added when the real Kensei is shot with arrows and appears to die, only to recover and heal himself, a la Claire Bennet. Speaking of Claire, she continues to try to blend in as a normal high school student but new friend West, with his own secret ability, makes it tough and he even sees her cut off one of her own toes and grow it back so she can know how far her regenerative powers really go. I didn’t exactly get the point of Claire having her new car stolen at school, but I have a feeling that there’s more to it than a simple car jacking, so stay tuned on that. I’m also not completely sure who it is that Mohinder Suresh and Mr. Bennet are trying to bring down with their scheme, but they used to resources of “the Company” that Mohinder has infiltrated to bring the mysterious Haitian from Season One back into the picture. The previews for next week showed our first glimpses of Nikki/Jessica (Ali Larter) and Micah (Noah Gray-Cabey), so htat’s something to look forward to. There’s also the saga of Maya and Alejandro, the Latino twins who are trying to reach America for a cure to their mysterious powers, which we also learned more about last night. As it turns out, Maya’s tears cause other people to have some sort of seizure/reaction where they die and blood comes from their own eyes like tears, Alejandro seems to be a yin to Maya’s yang, because by holding her hands and reciting some weird chant, he can reverse the effects of her powers and his own eyes do some weird color-changing and mutation. Also on the schedule last night was Prison Break episodes, which wasn’t quite as good as Heroes on this night but was still awesome. The dynamic between James Whistler and Michael Scofield continues to evolve, and anyone who thought that Whistler was some shrinking violet, wallflower type who would just be grateful to Scofield for his help was mistaken. Whistler, an Australian with a bad attitude and a mean streak of his own, is clearly not going to follow blindly wherever Scofield leads. He revealed that his involvement with “the Company” (there seem to be a lot of “Companies” going on, eh?) came when he took a mystery man out on a charter fishing trip and two months later, some “government types” came around, asking questions about where he’d taken the man and what they’d seen. This took place near Seattle, but Whistler fled to Panama, got into a bar fight and as previously stated, killed the son of Panama City’s mayor, thus his presence in SONA. On the outside, both Lincoln and Whistler’s girlfriend continued their fight to get their respective loved ones out of SONA, but Linc’s episode also included an ill-fated attempt to rescue Sara and L.J. when he and Michael figured out that they were being held captive in the town of Santa Rosa. Obviously the rescue attempt wasn’t going to be successful this early in the season, especially not when Sarah Wayne Callies is no longer on the show. The most likely outcome seems to be that she’ll be killed off somehow during the season while in captivity or trying to escape, because there’s no way you can try to recast the part and pass off a new actress in the role. Back in SONA, in typical PB style, we saw Michael in various moments of careful analysis of his surroundings, flashbacks of goings on at the prison and details that you know are going to be a part of his escape plan. So far the hints seem to involved the fact that the only known way out of SONA is if you’re dead, which would lead you to believe that the escape plan will involved he and Whistler being thought dead, although as always with this show, the obvious and likely are usually the opposite of what happens. So it was a great night of TV, which means a lot this season because the rest of the week contains only one really good show (Smallville), and it’s not on until Thursday, yikes……

- Maybe I’m biased on this next one because I’m a marathoner myself, but a truly amazing sports feat took place over the weekend and odds are that most sports fans didn’t hear anything about it. Haile Gebrselassie, one of the top distance runners in the world, set a new world marathon record, running an amazing time of 2 hours, 4 minutes and 26 seconds in the Berlin Marathon. To break that down for you a bit, that’s a pace of 4:xx per mile. It wasn’t more than a few decades ago that breaking the four-minute mile barrier was a huge deal, and based on personal experience I can say that even running a marathon at a eight-minute per-mile pace is tough. Yet here’s Gebrselassie, running an absurd pace of 4:45. I tip my hat to him, and not just because he was busy running that 2:04:26 while I was running a 3:44:59 in a different marathon on a different continent. Not nearly enough people recognize and respect marathon runners, especially the elite ones, and this is a great sporting accomplishment. Well done, H., you deserve a whole lot of respect for this one.

- I’m not really pro or con when it comes to The Dr. Phil Show because who cares if some egotistical, arrogant shrink wants to gravy train off of his fame from being a friend of Oprah Winfrey to score his own talk show where he brings on screwed up losers and tries to help them out? If he does help these people, then good for him and for them. If not, who gives a crap, because it’s a freaking TV talk show, so how much can you really expect? However, I do have one particular bone to pick with the good doctor, and that’s this: how the hell can Dr. Phil’s show have seasons, aren’t those for shows with plots and characters, not some souped up therapy session masquerading as a talk show? Yet there was a commercial promoting the new season of The Dr. Phil Show, just like NBC promoted a new season of Heroes. Let me help you out, Phil. You don’t have a plot, you don’t have storylines and you don’t have an actual legitimate TV program. You go on every day and conduct a glorified therapy session for clueless losers who look to you as some sort of life savant. Unless and until you mix in characters, story arcs, soundtracks, sound stages, special effects, action scenes and something other than one show after another dealing with different psychological issues, you don’t have seasons. How the hell do you even determine where one of your “seasons” ends and the next one begins? Do your “season finales” have cliffhangers where you try to help someone and something goes terribly wrong, but we have to wait all summer to find out what really happened? Again, I’m not saying you can’t do your thing and have your show, just don’t pretend that you’re something you’re not, namely a legitimate TV series.

- If I ever run for elected office, one of the issues in my platform is going to be ridding the world of The Guinness Book of World Records. Nothing encourages more morons around the world to attempt idiotic, pointless and waste-of-time feats in the hopes of achieving “greatness” like this absolute plague of a book. In the hopes of getting their name published in a massive waste of paper that only other losers with aspirations for similarly ridiculous feats ever read, people do things like compile 40-foot-thick balls of yarn, line up with a couple thousand other a-holes to play the famous opening riff from Smoke on the Water or they see how many people they can shove into a 1979 VW Beetle. Then there are ass hats like Russell “Rock Bottom” Byars of Franklin, Pa., who has so pathetic a life and such a dearth of friends that he went out to a stretch of river near his home, about 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, set up his video camera and recorded his “feat” of skipping a stone across the water 51 times, with the stone traveling an estimated 250 feet. Why videotape it, you ask? Because Byars submitted the tape to the equally pathetic people who publish The Guinness Book of World Records and they actually did a detailed analysis of the video to make sure that Byars’ effort was legitimate. No word on whether he will also be brought in for a drug test to ensure that he was not on any performance-enhancing drugs at the time, but I wouldn’t put it past these people. Someone needs to inform Byars, though, that he may have a world record in one of the most pointless, peripheral activities known to man, but holding that record does not make him famous, cool, great or a person of significance. No one knows who you are and no one cares, R., so go back to your one-bedroom trailer and make sure I never hear from you again unless you actually do something worthwhile.

- I’ll skip right past all the bad chess-related puns and talk about former world chess champion Gary Kasparov’s decision to enter the Russian presidential race sans lame jokes. That Kasparov was selected as the candidate for the Other Russian coalition isn't a huge surprise; he’s been active in politics for a long time now and in a country where opposing the president is almost a given (sound familiar, America?), you have to like his chances as long as he sticks to the “I’m nothing like Vlad Putin” card. After a president who seems determined to drag the country back to communism, nearly any candidate has to seem like an upgrade for Russians (again, sound familiar, America?). Kasparov received 379 of 498 first-place votes in a national congress held by the opposition coalition, but his candidacy still needs to be registered and because the opposition coalition is not officially in registered and can’t take part in elections for the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, which will play a big part in the selection process for the candidates for president. The move to put Kasparov on the ballot is likely to be blocked, so his chances of defeating the candidate endorsed by Putin and the country’s ruling party are not good. But if he fails here, G. Kasparov can always go back to playing the supercomputer Big Blue in chess matches for man v. machine supremacy.

- The weekend has come and gone at the box office, and the Rock has once again succeeded in his quest to layeth the smacketh down on the candy asses of all the other movies currently in our nation’s theaters. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now light years removed from his career in WWE, has scored with his second-consecutive No. 1 film, The Game Plan, a football-themed comedy on the heels of last year’s Gridiron Gang, a football story with a dramatic, real-life-story slant. The Game Plan grossed $22.7 million on its opening weekend, edging out runner-up The Kingdom, which came in at $17.7 million despite rocky reviews. In spite of an opening weekend that exceeded expectations and that top spot in the earnings race, I don’t think I’ll be seeing Game Plan any time soon. The Rock is great and I loved him as a wrestler and even in Gridiron Gang and Walking Tall, but a Disney comedy about football is where I’m drawing the line. So I hope the film does well, just as long as none of my dollars contribute to its success.

Traveler's final farewell, the Mets finalize their collapse and Freedom's Watch = blathering idiots

- During the summer, I became a devoted follower of the ABC drams Traveler, which was unfortunately and wrongly canceled after its short summer run. Since then, the show’s fans have waged a campaign to get it back on the air and one of the show’s creators, David DiGilio, has maintained a blog about the show on TVGuide.com. Unfortunately, despite ABC putting mind-bogglingly bad shows like Cavemen and Big Shots on this fall, the network refused to bring Traveler back and so things are now over for Will, Jay and Tyler. However, before the show goes away for good, DiGilio used his space on TVGuide.com to answer the many questions fans had about things left unresolved due to the series’ early cancellation, things like what would have happened with current storylines as well as in future seasons. Here is the link to that blog so you can check it out yourself and see all of the great action we’re missing out on so that we can instead see a show about a group of cavemen from a series of lame auto insurance commercials in the most moronic comedy ever to come to the small screen and other brainless shows like it. Thanks again, ABC, for showing why I won't even bother acknowledging that your network even exists until Lost premieres in January.

- The New York Mets’ collapse is complete, but I have to admit that it still seems surreal and hasn’t entirely sunk in. I watched the MLB standings the past few weeks and it always seemed like the Mets were able to fend off the Phillies and Braves, but over the past two weeks, the Metropolitans have choked away all of a seven-game lead and today, on the season’s final day, they lost the NL East when they were hammered 8-1 by the Florida Marlins and the Phillies beat the lowly Washington Nationals. Mets manager Willie Randolph was a ­Seinfeld­-esque low talker as he mumbled about his team’s September swoon, while Mets players exited the dugout after the game like they were headed for the gas chamber. If you’re a part of an epic collapse like this, then New York is the worst possible place to be, because obviously New York as a whole is harder on and more scrutinizing of its sports teams. The Mets are going to be mercilessly ripped in the Apple for a long, long time because of this, and with good reason. That being said, if you’re not a Met, a Mets fan or a New Yorker, this could not have happened in a better place because now the rest of us get to look on with a sick pleasure from the outside as NYC devours one of its own for their massive meltdown. I would have much rather seen it happen to New York’s other MLB team, the Yankees, but I’ll take what I can get. See you on the golf course starting this week, Mets players……

- I love it when someone tries to do something genuinely benevolent and beneficial to others…..and no one cares. I don’t have hard numbers to back me up on this, but something tells me that when Nickelodeon went off the air for three hours yesterday at noon to promote its fourth-annual worldwide day of play, which encourages children to get off their obese behinds, go outside and be active, very few kids paid attention. When they saw the dead air on Nickelodeon, they inevitably switched over to one of the other hundreds of channels offered by their cable or satellite provider, hopped online to post and blog on their MySpace page or turned on their Nintendo Wii for an afternoon of video games instead. It’s a nice concept for Nickelodeon and it gives them a chance to claim that they’re actively promoting healthy lifestyles for kids, but I hope behind closed doors the suits at the network know that it’s nothing more than a shallow, irrelevant gesture that isn't going to make much of a difference to anyone.

- I’d be remiss if I didn’t take some shots at one of the most asinine, idiotic groups of complete and total tools I’ve seen on the political scene in a long time: Freedom’s Watch. I could sum the whole thing up neatly and convince you what a bunch of ass hats these people are simply by telling you that they have close ties with the W. administration, but where’s the fun in that? No, more needs to be said about a group of wealthy, white a-holes who are so far out of touch that they make Zubaz pants look current by comparison. The group is fronted by two former W. administration officials and was founded this summer by 12 über-wealthy individuals. Its most visible campaign thus far is as clear an indication as you can get as to the absolute cluelessness and lack of mental acuity these people possess: trying to convince the American public to support the floundering debacle of a war in Iraq and W.’s indefensible, inexcusable troop surge plan. Bradley Blakeman, a former deputy to W. and president of Freedom’s Watch, is now leading the group’s charge against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Let me stop for a moment and point out that Bradley Blakeman is perhaps the whitest-sounding name in the history of whiteness. Can’t you just picture Bradley Blakeman sitting in his study, sipping hundred-year-old Scotch, smoking Corona cigars and talking about the travails of being in the country’s highest tax bracket while his wife Muffy puts on her tennis outfit and prepares to head to the country club in the Bentley? Something tells me that Freedom’s Watch isn't going to be including Sal, the deli owner from the Bronx whole drives a 1984 Chevy Caprice and lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and three kids any time soon. Freedom’s Watch also has its overpriced tighty-whities from Sacks Fifth Avenue in a bunch because of the good folks over at MoveOn.org who have smartly been advocating, well, moving on from the war in Iraq. The word used by Freedom’s Watch for the MoveOn.org folks is obnoxious, which is only one of the many derogatory adjectives I could think of for the Freedom’s Watchers. Besides, if you all are so smart, shouldn’t you know how much average Americans who don’t have two or three homes, several luxury cars and their own private jet feel about having arrogant, self-righteous, out-of-touch ass clowns tell us how we ought to think? How’s about you watch me giving you a double-middle-finger salute, Freedom’s Watch, then I’ll take your pompous, Cristal-sipping a**es and put my size 12’s up them…..

- In what may be the first case ever of a male model and fake-butter pitchman being mistaken for an airplane, an AirTran flight taking off from Philadelphia and heading for Atlanta had to return to Philadelphia Friday after a bird flew right into the craft’s windshield, cracking it and slightly injuring the co-pilot as well. My only thought is that this bird is a distant cousin of the one that flew into the face of Fabio at an amusement park several years ago when he was riding a roller coaster. I mean, you can see how a bird might confuse those two things, what with Fabio’s ginormous beak so clearly resembling the large, pointy nose of an aircraft in both size and shape. The plane was able to land without further trouble, although I’m sure there was a plane full of angry travelers who weren’t amused when they found out why their flight had been waylaid. Actually, having been on many flights with many impatient travelers, I’m guessing many passengers on the flight were actually pissed at the pilot and co-pilot for being such wusses and not continuing the flight in spite of the cracked windshield and minor injuries. But add this to the ever-growing list of weird, annoying and always irritating reasons for flight delay and cancellation: bird damage to the windshield. And why do I get the feeling the PETA is somehow going to get snippy about this and try to attack AirTran for the death of this bird? Ah, the friendly skies…..