Running for cover: Newsweek's Sarah Palin mistake

Sarah Palin doesn't need us to defend her. She has an army of REAL AMERICANS who LOVE GUNS, HATE TAXES, EAT VELVEETA with their BARE HANDS and probably IMAGINE SHE SMELLS PRETTY DAMN FINE. We, on the other hand, think she was stretching herself as mayor of Wasilla. President of the United States? Do you remember Jennifer Jason Leigh's exit scene in "The Hitcher"? That's the kind of stretch we're seeing there.

Still, we have to wonder what they were drinking at Newsweek when they picked the cover picture for their Palin article. It's from a shoot she did for Runners World a few months back. Weird pose, tight runner pants, flag over the back of a chair next to her (her urge to wrap herself in it must be overpowering), plus something in her hand that we didn't look close enough at to identify (Taser for liberals? "Greatest Hits of Lee Greenwood" to run to?).

We saw when Runners World posted it with other pictures and some Q&A stuff online, back during a stretch when Palin wasn't doing much press. We thought some of the pics, well, odd, but we had never heard she was a runner during the campaign, so it was news to us, and oddly humanizing news about a person we thought might have been built on a secret far-right assembly line. (The line has since been upgraded, we heard, and is now producing Carrie Prejean.)

Newsweek's excuse -- "most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover" -- sounds weak. We haven't seen the story yet, but given the description on the front, using this pic might be another of those Jennifer Jason Leigh stretches. There are plenty of "interesting" photos of Palin that don't look like rejects for the cover shot of J. Crew's late-summer clearance mailer. Maybe the story brings it all together, but we could have used a hint on the cover as to why that image was used other than to embarrass her, if that is indeed possible.

Palin's saying it's sexist (for all the Rush-rants against the cult of victimization, it's nearly a fetish for some of the far-right types). We'll stick with questionable, and maybe dumb.

The CrapTastic5: Oct. 14, 2009

Here’s how competitive things are: Our first tie, at No. 5! The Browns managed to play their way off the list, and play the Bills on, by winning a 6-3 thriller in Buffalo. The Bills’ relief pitching sucks.

T5. Tennessee Titans
L: @Pittsburgh, Houston, @NYJ, @Jax, Indy
We’ve kept the Titans off this list so far, probably thanks to the close loss at Pittsburgh to open the season, but they’re 0-5 and they’ve lost to the Texans at home, fergawdsake. We probably should have done it after the embarrassment at Jacksonville, but the weak Sunday night home showing vs. Indy sealed the deal. This is another team that may just want to go to the Wildcat full time.

T5. Kansas City Chiefs
L: @Baltimore, Oakland, @Philly, NYG, Dallas
Saw the Chiefs’ retros on TV and thought Texas had invaded Missouri. Probably over barbecue. Chiefs had Dallas beat, but in the end their will to lose was too strong.

4. Buffalo Bills
W: Tampa
L: @New England, New Orleans, @Miami, Cleveland
That one-point loss at New England was a long, long time ago. The 6-3 home loss to Cleveland last weekend is a strong candidate for CrapTastic Game of the Year, right up there with the Rams-Redskins 7-6 barnburner.

3. Oakland Raiders
W: @Kansas City
L: San Diego, Denver, @Houston, @NYG
We know, we know, the Raiders won at KC in Week 2 and they’re ranked worse than the Chiefs. But we must recognize that the Raiders have momentum, or negative momentum, or something like that, you know what we mean. Combined score of last two games, at Texans and at Giants: 13-73.

2. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
L: Dallas, @Buffalo, NYG, @Washington, @Philly
The beatdown goes on in Tampa, where the schedule doesn’t look to offer much hope. This weekend at home against Carolina and trip to equally beleaguered Miami in early November may be Bucs’ best chances to avoid the oh-fer.

1. El Rushbo Rams
L: @Seattle, @Washington, Green Bay, @SF, Minnesota
Rams scored 10 points at home against the Farvikings and their scoring average went up. Tells you all you need to know. At least the Rams are losing to decent teams (minus the Redskins). The problem is, they’re losing really badly every time.

The DamnFine10: Oct. 13, 2009

Two big SEC games helped remake the top of the list. Both, unfortunately, were about as fun to look at as the Denver Broncos’ throwback uniforms.

1. Alabama
W: vs. Va Tech, Fla. Intl., N. Texas, Arkansas, @Kentucky, @Ole Miss
We still think the Tide’s body of work puts it a shade above Florida. Win at Ole Miss wasn’t as good as Gators’ win at LSU, but Bama also has the Virginia Tech scalp. And by the way, why does Bama have an elephant for a mascot? Is it the “Tusk”-aloosa thing, or is it just all the Republicans?

2. Florida
W: Charleston Southern, Troy, Tennessee, @Kentucky, @LSU
Florida finally played somebody, and the Gators won. SEC Championship Game rematch could again end up being de facto national championship game. Still not sure why LSU couldn’t figure out that TEBOW WASN’T GOING TO KEEP THE BALL, but, hey, that’s for the X-and-O geniuses to figure out. We think perhaps Tebow used his whirly messiah eyes to hyp-no-tize the Tiger line into thinking maybe, just maybe, JHT might keep it this time. They probably all went to a nice evangelical Christian church the next morning, too.

3. Iowa
W: Northern Iowa, @Iowa St., Arizona, @Penn St., Arkansas St., Michigan
We thought the Florida-LSU game would be a far more entertaining Saturday night offering than Michigan-Iowa. Wrong again. All these close games will eventually catch up with the Hawkeyes, we think -- although they play in the crappy Big 10, so maybe not. QB Stanzi seems capable of playing down to just about anybody’s level, though.

3. Cincinnati
W: @Rutgers, SE Missouri St., @Oregon St., Fresno State, @Miami (OH)
Didn’t do a damn thing last week, but they didn’t lose. Now they must prove themselves against another suspect undefeated team. That’s what passes for drama these days.

4. Boise State
W: Oregon, Miami (OH), @Fresno St., @Bowling Green, UC Davis
Ditto. The seething cauldron of hate that is Tulsa’s home stadium awaits. OK, that just didn’t sound right.

5. Virginia Tech
W: Marshall, Nebraska, Miami (FL), @Duke, Boston College
L: vs. Alabama
OK, it was a cozy home game, and, OK, BC wasn’t supposed to be a powerhouse, but sweet Jesus. The Hokies looked like they were playing the cast of “Glee” out there. Game at Georgia Tech may be the best we get out of the ACC this year.

6. LSU
W: @Washington, Vandy, La-Lafayette, @Miss. St., @Georgia
L: Florida
We know Florida has a good defense, but LSU’s offense was more than a little underwhelming. Coach Ballcap better figure that out or there will be more close losses.

7. TCU
W: @Virginia, Texas St., @Clemson, Southern Methodist, @Air Force
We’re not just keeping TCU in here for Dan Jenkins’ sake. But if ever there were a worthy cause. We would pay good money to read a Dan Jenkins TCU national championship column.

8. USC
W: San Jose St., @Ohio St., Washington St., @California
L: @Washington
Whipping Cal in Berkeley (dirty hippies!) helps dull the memory of that horrible loss in Seattle (more dirty hippies!). A little. Also proves Trojans can beat a team without “State” in its name.

9. Nebraska
W: Florida Atlantic, Arkansas St., La-Lafayette, @Missouri
L: @Virginia Tech
We were going to give this spot to Kansas, but the more undefeated the Jayhawks get, the worse they look, their narrow home escape from putrid Iowa State being the lastest example. Nebraska’s last-second loss at Virginia Tech looks better than any of Kansas’ wins. Cornhuskers’ win on a miserable night at Mizzou puts them No. 1 in the Weather Channel poll.

10. Miami
W: @Fla. St., Ga. Tech, Oklahoma, Florida A&M
L: @ Va. Tech
Took a break from reasonably challenging schedule to crap on Florida A&M. Terrific, but what have you done for us lately?


Undefeated teams ought to play somebody: Texas, Kansas
Undefeated teams that had the misfortune to win at Tallahassee during Florida State’s Season of the Apocalypse: South Florida
One-loss Big 10 teams that just aren’t doing it for us yet: Ohio State, Penn State
Teams that we can no longer see because we gouged our eyes out after witnessing their horrific season opener: Oregon

The CrapTastic5: Oct. 9, 2009

The race for the bottom in the NFL is hot. Can you feel that? It's hot. Stuff's melting. The Titans' hopes, Daniel Snyder's teeny-weeny patience, the city of Jacksonville's interest in having an NFL team, all drip-drip-dripping onto the pavement under the harsh glare of unyielding incompetence.

We're going to race through this because it's already the weekend, ya know?

5. Detroit Lions: Who turned on the lights? Why'd the music stop? Don't tell me the party's over already. Oh, yeah, it's over. At least they won't provide any Tigers-style heartbreak.

4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers: RTTS, or Roster Tells The Story. Nobody gets high off seeds and stems.

3. Kansas City Chiefs: Close call between No. 4 and No. 3, but the Chiefs' home loss to JaMarcus Russell and the Raiders continues to be the trump card.

2. Cleveland Browns: We think we understand now: The Browns didn't want Jets castoff Mangini, they wanted University of Kansas behemoth Mangino, who regularly guides his teams to bowls and even more regularly guides himself to the all-you-can-eat buffet. We can see the movie poster now: The Coach Who Ate Cleveland.

1. El Rushbo Rams: America's biggest ego wants to buy America's worst NFL team, scoring an average of 6 points a game and losing by an average of 21. What ensues? That's right -- hijinks. And more losing.

The DamnFine10: Oct.9, 2009

Some weeks the genius overwhelms us. We’re nearly carried away in its tide, and it’s all we can do to type some of it out as it washes over us. Other weeks it takes us several days to write a sentence or two about a few college football teams. This, my friends, is one of those weeks.

1. Alabama
W: vs. Va Tech, Fla. Intl., N. Texas, Arkansas, @ Kentucky
By a thread. Finally, a trip to Mississippi and a chance to play a real team for the first time since the first week. Wait a minute. Is Ole Miss a real team?

2. LSU
W: @Washington, Vandy, La-Lafayette, @Miss. St., @Georgia
Moved back up after going to Dawgville and winning. If LSU had beaten the living beejesus out of Starkville Tech instead of needing a goal-line stand to win, we might be ready to move them up to No. 1.

3. Cincinnati
W: @Rutgers, SE Missouri St., @Oregon St., Fresno State, @Miami (OH)
Jeez, Cincy at undefeated South Florida is Thursday next week, the night after Boise at Tulsa. It’s the Midweek BCS Pretender Crucible of Fire. Maybe ESPN can sell a sponsorship for that.

4. Boise State
W: Oregon, Miami (OH), @Fresno St., @Bowling Green, UC Davis
God, UC Davis? Is that all you have for us? Next game, at Tulsa, moves to the top of the “Game With Most BCS Implications Ever Played on a Wednesday” list. It’s a short list, and Boise is on it a lot.

5. Iowa
W: Northern Iowa, @Iowa St., Arizona, @Penn St., Arkansas St.
If Michigan can come in and play like Northern Iowa or Arkansas State, it has a chance. That sounds weird, but it must be true.

6. Auburn
W: La. Tech, Miss. St., West Virginia, Ball St., @Tennessee
Auburn finally collected enough moonshine money to gas up the buses and play a road game. And what do you know, they beat Lane Kiffin! Shame, that. Speaking of Tulsa, the old Golden Hurricane offensive coordinator is doing his thing at Auburn so well that Auburn has forgotten what a lousy head coaching hire it made.

7. TCU
W: @Virginia, Texas St., @Clemson, Southern Methodist
Throttling SMU doesn’t get TCU any closer to its dream of winning the Atlantic Coast Conference. Now the Frogs go to Air Force. Maybe they want to get their hands on the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy. Strangely, the game won’t be played midweek.

8. Virginia Tech
W: Marshall, Nebraska, Miami (FL), @Duke
L: vs. Alabama
Hokies managed to play their first true road game and take the week off at the same time. They still beat Duke.

9. Florida
W: Charleston Southern, Troy, Tennessee, @Kentucky
Definitely outplaying Oklahoma in the “We Should Have Given This Guy More Snaps With the First Unit in Practice” sweepstakes. Have fun in Gumbo Land, Gators.

10. Miami
W: @Fla. St., Ga. Tech, Oklahoma
L: @ Va. Tech
We give Miami credit for the schedule so far: all opponents ranked at kickoff, though it turned out Florida State sucked and nobody had come to terms with it yet (Bobby Bowden still hasn’t). The Hurricanes lose some credit for getting prison-raped at Virginia Tech. And they play Florida A&M this week, so forget about that schedule thing, too.

Teams that were considered but left out because they’ve played Louisiana-Monroe, Wyoming, Texas Tech and UTEP, three of them at home: Texas.

Will the Rams Ride the Polarize Express?

We already have America's team, or so the Dallas Cowboys tell us. Are we ready for Red America's team?

The news is out that Rush Limbaugh is interested in buying the St. Louis Rams. The involvement of Dave Checketts, whose group owns the Blues and Real Salt Lake in the MLS, makes this more than a conservative sports fan's fever dream.

We got to thinking -- no, really, we did. What happens if Rush runs the Rams? Specifically, how will this affect the team's fan base, assuming it still has one after its recent history on the field?

Plenty of sports owners have been involved in politics. Our previous president was a baseball owner while he was governor of Texas, and a U.S. senator owns the Milwaukee Bucks. Far more operate behind the scenes, pushing money toward campaigns.

But no one as, shall we say, polarizing as Rush has climbed into the owners box of a pro club.

It's easy to imagine Rush's Rams would lose some liberal fans. But let's face it, disdain for the Rams is one of the few things that has garnered bipartisan support lately. They still carry the stench of L.A. about them and they haven't put much on the field to get excited about since Kurt Warner stopped being Jesus.

The question for us is, Would the RushRams draw the love of conservatives across the country and blossom into a national team? Regardless of where you sit on politics (and we sit as far away as possible from what passes for political discussion today, since we generally find decibel level inversely proportional to IQ), it must be said that hard-core conservatives support their own with cash. Would a Rams sweatshirt automatically be penciled onto the shopping list below the Bill O'Reilly book, the Ann Coulter Screech-a-Day calendar, and the teabags for the next rally?

And what if Rush were to push things further and jettison the Rams name, long associated with bastion of liberalism L.A., and replace it with something a little conservative-ier? Patriots and Eagles are taken (damn Donovan McNabb, damn him to hell!), but how about the St. Louis Pachyderms, or the St. Louis Don't-Tread-on-Me Rattlesnakes, or the St. Louis Tax Cuts? You get the picture. Merchandise could be moved.

Would St. Louis become a preferred home for the NFL's conservative talent, giving the RushRams the chance to sign players who want to bask in the light of Mr. EIB for little or no premium?

We don't know. We're not even sure what we had for dinner. It's hard to tell how things might unfold at the Edward Jones/Spatula City Dome.

One thing we know for sure, though: If Glenn Beck buys the Seahawks, it's on.

Three things we don't understand

Three things we don't understand.

1. 5 p.m. ET start time for the Twins-Tigers one-game playoff Tuesday. At least it shuts up the people who complain their kids can't stay up to see the end of the game. Their kids will be at home watching while they're stuck in rush hour traffic, unable to see it. Maybe this is a plan to drive traffic to the radio -- how quaint! Just like Giants-Dodgers and Bobby Thomson, except that now winning a playoff game doesn't get you a pennant, only a spot in the never-ending NHL, er, baseball postseason.

2. The Cowboys' last two plays against Denver on Sunday. Romo tried the slant to the right side and it didn't work. So the braintrust called a play that was similar but drew even more coverage to the middle, and Romo threw the same pass again. Strike two, you're out. We wish Cowboys coach-for-now Wade Phillips good luck in his future endeavors.

3. Nurse porn. We just don't get it. Nothing against nurses and certainly nothing against porn, and we get the whole she's-there-to-take-care-of-him thing, but you can do that with waitress porn or maid porn or female plumber porn, right? You see, we've spent a little time in the hospital (but rehab doesn't count, does it?) and there's not much sexy about it. The food? Unsexy. The smells? Very unsexy. The catheter? You're-going-to-stick-that-tube-where?-Sweet-Mother-of-God seriously unsexy. Waitress? Check, please.

Rio and the Five-Ring Carnival

We love the USA, but let's be honest here. A Summer Olympics in Chicago would be about as much fun as gargling shampoo.

Think about August in Chicago. Brutally hot. The whole north side of the city is surly because the Cubs have been out of the pennant race for two month. The whole south side of the city is surly because, well, because it's the South Side of Chicago. We're thinking instead of a bunch of guys beating the hell out of drums like in Beijing, Chicago would give us a bunch of Teamsters giving everybody the finger and walking out of the stadium. Yeah, screw you and all five of the rings you rode in on, buddy. Bob Costas would tell you not to tune in later.

Rio, on the other hand, is going to revolutionize the Olympic Movement. Those Opening Ceremonies are going to have color and music, and probably a bunch of feathers and a lot of skin, too. And they're going to run six hours long. Hell, the whole Olympics may take a full month to finish. (And the array of multicultural babies with athletic genes that will be born nine months after Rio douses the torch will stock the Games of 2036, once the kids decide whether to compete for Sweden or South Africa, Switzerland or Swaziland.)

Thongs as part of Opening Ceremonies team uniforms. Just on the women, we hope, and not on the women from the pasty, chubby countries.

And the Closing Ceremonies are guaranteed not to have Smashing Pumpkins.

Is samba dancing an Olympic sport? Or salsa dancing? Do they do either one in Brazil? Hey, we don't care. We're busy thinking about the spectacle that will be women's beach volleyball at the Rio Olympics. Our pants can't stop smiling.

So Brazil, we raise a cachaca to you tonight. Sorry, we couldn't find the right keyboard combination to make the little "c with the dangly thing" that should be before the final letter. And, in all honesty, it's a Budweiser, because we wouldn't know how to buy Cachaca if a pack of ruthless Rio street kids put a pistol to our head.

Budweiser, St. Louis' finest. Sorry, Chicago, just not a good day for you all around. Wait till next year -- oh, yeah, that's the Cubs.

The CrapTastic5: Sept. 29, 2009

The Lions won a game, completing their rise from historically bad to merely crappy. Remember when you used to actively search for a Lions score, wanting to see whether they would stretch the streak one game further? Those days are gone, my friend, and so is the Lions’ hideous mystique. They’re just another bad NFL team. They didn’t even make the CrapTastic5.

5. Washington Redskins
There are several more teams out there at 0-3, but the 1-2 Redskins earned this through their lack of hard work, preparation or ownership humility. There’s that whole losing-to-a-team-that-hadn’t-won-in-a-couple-of-years thing, and the 9-7 home victory over the Rams two weeks ago was as good as a loss in our book.

4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Given that Florida is 1-8 in the NFL this year, somebody has to represent. Jax actually won this week (at Houston -- oooh) and Miami came close against the Colts a couple of weeks ago, so hello, Bucs!

3. Kansas City Chiefs
Anybody can go to Philly and get whacked, even against their backup QB and their felonious backup backup. But that loss at home to the Raiders a couple of weeks ago -- now that, that was special.

2. St. Louis Rams
Man, we thought Florida was bad NFL territory this year. Get a load of Missouri. The Rams are the new Lions. Or maybe the old Lions. We’re thinking nothing short of a zombie attack at the visiting team’s hotel is going to get the Rams a W this season.

1. Cleveland Browns
A thoroughly CrapTastic performance at Baltimore earns the Browns the top spot this week. It is the first time the Browns have lost to a team that’s actually good (are the Broncos the worst 3-0 team in NFL history?), but they put up so little fight in doing so that we wonder whether Mangini is already packing for his pending move to the Old Belichick Assistants’ Home. One blogger suggested chucking the QBs and going all Wildcat, all the time -- count us in!

Circling the drain: Raiders, Panthers, Titans (but not the Lions!)

The DamnFine10: Sept. 27, 2009

Ole Miss, Penn State, Cal: What do all these teams have in common? we ask. Well, you say, they're all top-10 teams that got knocked off Saturday. Yes, we say, but please also note that none of them were in CrackStaff's DamnFine10 because none of them had beaten anybody close to anybody yet this year. Cal's victory at Minnesota was probably the best win any of them had. Gophers. Ooooh.

But, you say, you did have Miami in the DamnFine10 and they got waxed too. But, we say, they had a victory over a Florida State team that had won at BYU, then turned around Saturday and lost at home to South Florida, making the whole mess a little tricky to evaluate. (We're now of the mind that Fla. St. is not an up-and-down team but instead a bad team that played really well in Provo. But check back with us.) Oh, and Miami played in a car wash Saturday. But when you're from Miami, that really shouldn't matter, should it?

Finally, you say, why are you using this silly rhetorical device? We're sorry, we say, hanging our heads. It mirrors the conversations we have inside our heads. And we started drinking a little earlier than usual today.


1. Alabama
Big plays carried the day for the Tide. Expected a little more sustained excellence out of the offense against a Hawg defense that Georgia toyed with. Bama D did the job though. Will Petrino follow his previous MO, quit in the middle of the season to take a D-2 job?

2. Houston
Avoided what looked like a perfect setup for failure: big game at home vs. name opponent (Texas Tech) after a huge win and a week off. And the Cougars were well on their way to following through. Then they went out at halftime and recruited a real defense, which shut down T-Tech in the second half and allowed them to squeak one out. Cougartown!

3. Florida
Kentucky blows, but that's the way a big dog is supposed to win on the road in the SEC. If we hear one more announcer asking for our prayers for JHT, we're going Satanist on you. A ton of kids get carted off fields every weekend while playing for our enjoyment, guys with worse injuries and far grimmer career prospects than Tebow, and nobody says a word about them.


4. Cincinnati
Holy Christ on a moped, do you realize that we're just a few upsets away from a Cincinnati-Boise State BCS Championship Game? As our dear mom says, Now, wouldn't that be something? Yeah, Mom, that'd be something all right; something more horrible than any right-thinking college football fan could imagine.

5. Boise State
The Boise scheduler seems to have gotten the idea that MAC beatdowns will help the Broncos with the pollsters. Good luck with that.

6. LSU
Yeah, it's a win on the road in the SEC, but the triple goal-line stand at Starkville was reminding us a little of the two field goals that Iowa had to block to beat Northern Iowa. A win, good, but not a good win. The win at Washington, which increased in value after the Huskies beat USC, just lost some luster after UWash went to Stanford and got pasted. Fun conference, that Pac-10.

7. Iowa
Speaking of Iowa ... maybe Kirk Ferentz is worth the money. He is when he's playing Penn State.

8. TCU
We were going to put Texas here, because they beat Texas Tech at home, but the rest of their sked has been La-Monroe, at Wyoming and UTEP. And now they're taking a week off. TCU has won at Virginia and at Clemson. We think the Horned Frogs are leading the ACC now.

9. Virginia Tech
We swore we weren't going to let a team with a loss in for a while, but the Hokies' loss was to our top team on a neutral field, and on Saturday they made Miami look as bad as ... well, as Miami two years ago.

10. Auburn
Man, it's funny for us to see Auburn hanging up 54 on teams, even when they do suck. Are we sure this is really Auburn?

Teams we considered for a fleeting moment before deciding we don't like their colors or their mascot or somesuch: Texas, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas

The DamnFine10: Sept. 22, 2009

Note: We don't really know what Blogger's doing with the font back-and-forth, but we're not staying up another minute to figure it out. It's all in English, more or less, so don't be demanding. You're above that.

REBRANDING ALERT! We were bored with the old name, so we gave this list a new name. We try to be consistent, but we just can't do it with any frequency.

We're only three weeks into the season, so nobody who has lost a game need yet apply. Don't feed us any of that "good loss" crap untill at least halfway through the season. Have some pride, fergawdsakes.

1. Alabama

Beat the living hell out of another lousy team. That stirring victory over the Gobblers in Week 1 looks a little better after Tech dropped a miracle on Nebraska in Blacksburg, but it's also receding further into our alcohol-fogged memory. Hey, Tide, better hang half a hundred on Arkansas' lousy defense this weekend if you want to sniff the top again.

2. LSU
Like Bama, LSU gets some "win appreciation"; victory at Washington looks better because USC and it's crappy backup QB couldn't do it. Another chance to get it done on the road this week at Mississippi State, which, it seems, is still in the SEC.

3. Boise State
Nobody who ever plays on Friday night should be ranked this high on any list, but that wasn't just any team that Boise beat on the road last Friday. It was Fresno State, the former king of Friday, the best Friday team this side of a good Texas 5A squad. Well, the king is dead, and we don't mean Elvis. Long live the Broncos.

4. Miami (not of Ohio)
Are we back to the glory days of pregame brawls and nine unsportsmanlikes a game? No -- the Orange Bowl has been abandoned, and Jesus H. Tebow rules the land of Florida football with his swarthy but loving fist. Not the glory days, but 2-0 vs. top-20 teams makes us think a little less about recent outrages in Miami football history like, say, that 51-13 loss to Oklahoma a couple of years ago.

5. Cincinnati (of Ohio)
We swear, we saw one pundit with Cincinnati in his BCS National Championship Game vs. Florida. Mmm, boy, there's one we just can't wait to see. If that's where this whole road ends, can we just turn the car around now? Sweet Jesus, we'll become NBA fans if that's what it takes.

6. Houston
Celebrated colossal upset of Boone Pickens U. by taking the week off. Good on ya, and good luck in the game against Texas Tech, probably the first college football game with an over/under number that requires a comma.

7. Texas
Finally played somebody we've heard of, struggled through a grudge match at home.

8. Florida

Finally played somebody we've heard of, struggled through a grudge match at … hey …

9. UCLA
3-0 against schools from the Big 12, SEC and Mountain West. And that, friends, is what passes for excellence these days.

1o. Michigan
That RichRod fellow may have the best college football team in the state of Michigan. Congrats!

We're just not that into you anymore: The Mormon-Pacific Islander Coalition Known as BYU, Southern Cal, Georgia Tech, Minnesota

The CrapTastic5: Sept. 22, 2009

The Cowboys’ new stadium is big and shiny, and has a ginormous video board that hovers over the field like the Death Star. Oh yeah, it was also Week 2 in the NFL, so here’s the CrackStaff CrapTastic 5. And we’re so high, no punter will ever reach us.

5. Kansas City Chiefs
Chiefs outgained Raiders 409 to 166 and still lost, so you should either bet them next week or never, ever bet them again. We’ll let you decide. And, hey, Chiefs, stop allowing Al Davis to win -- it just eggs him on.

4. Detroit Lions
Halftime lead -- isn’t that worth a rouge point?

3. Cleveland Browns
Specialists at making not-so-good teams look good ply their trade in Denver. Kyle Orton says thanks! Hard to save the franchise when you’re on your back; Brady Quinn, please meet the turf (four times).

2. Jacksonville Jaguars
When the Arizona Cardinals come all the way to the East Coast to play a 1 p.m. ET game at your stadium, you’re supposed to win. Apparently, Jaguars fans were too entranced by Jacksonville’s many other early-Sunday-afternoon leisure opportunities to bother showing up for the game. Note to Jags ownership: Drafting Jesus H. Tebow will not lead you to the promised land.

1. St. Louis Rams
We left the Rams off last week’s list because we thought they had defected to the UFL. But, hey, what do you know, they still wear the Shield, still play on network TV and everything. Oh, and they’ve scored 7 points all year. Maybe the UFL is still an option?

The CrapTastic5: Sept. 18, 2009

Because the NFL has a playoff system to determine its best team (what a concept!), ranking the best teams is kind of pointless. There’s no playoff to see who sucks the hardest, though, which makes the CrackStaff CrapTastic5 a stark necessity. We rank ’em as we see ’em; continuity with any previous list is not high on our list.

5. Detroit Lions
We don’t kick puppies or trip blind people -- we’re just like that. So because the Lions are fresh off a season so wretched that it scarred anybody associated with the franchise and just about anybody who was sentenced to watch them play, we tried to keep Detroit off the list. And they gave it a good go down in New Orleans. But when you give up 2,400 total yards and 73 TD passes, even to Drew Brees, you’ve earned your way on. (OK, we made up those numbers, but it was almost that bad.)

4. Denver Broncos/Cincinnati Bengals
Broncos required a play drawn up by Mary herself to beat the Bengals, and the Bengals got beat by it, so that put them in a tie (and nearly put Gus Johnson in the hospital). What’s Brandon Stokley going to do this week, release a plague of locusts on the Browns?

3. Cleveland Browns
Maybe he won’t have to. The Browns allowed Brett Favre to show his prowess at handing off to Adrian Peterson (couldn’t Tavaris Jackson have done that?) and gave up 24 straight points in the second half.

2. Houston Texans
Every rookie QB should get a first game like Mark Sanchez got against the Texans. If Sanchez totally blows after this, he has only the Texans to blame for the high expectations.

1. Carolina Panthers
QB Jake Delhomme coughed up more balls than a pachinko machine against the Eagles, including four interceptions and a fumble that went for a touchdown. (At least he was efficient -- he accomplished all that without even making it to the end of the third quarter.) This comes after a similar effort(?) against the Cardinals in the harsh spotlight of the playoffs last season. The Panthers’ owner got a heart transplant in the offseason. Perhaps the team should have done the same?

The CrackStaff Top10: Sept. 13, 2009

If your school had beaten two decent teams at this point, it would be at the top of the list. Unfortunately, two games into the season, no one has done that. So most on this list beat one decent team and gave some poor sister everything the Geneva Conventions would allow. Boy, adding that 12th game really ratcheted up the drama, didn't it?

1. The Mormon-Pacific Islander Coalition Known as BYU
TMPICKABYU followed up its upset of Oklahoma by thrashing Tulane, which any halfway respectable team should do without too much trouble. The game was in New Orleans, though. Did the Mormons convert anyone on Bourbon Street? Did any of them defect?

2. Alabama
After beating Virginia Tech in that Chick-fil-A game, Bama devoured Florida International, the college football equivalent of a Chicken Mini.

3. LSU
The Tigers have a rarity at this point: Two victories against teams from BCS conferences. OK, so it's Washington and Vanderbilt, but that's a president and a commodore, right?

4. Michigan
Was it us, or does that new addition make Michigan Stadium look a little like Lambeau Field, another pile of bricks with luxury boxes piled on top? Wolverines had every opportunity to fold up against the scrappy Irish, but somehow managed to win despite Clausen's wholesale destruction of their cornerbacks. Good thing nobody throws in the Big 10. (Oh, and can somebody tell Big Charlie Weis to get some plain-front pants? The pleats on his khakis were screaming so loud that they drowned out the Michigan band.)

5. Southern Cal
USC is cagey. They head east only to play big-name teams that aren't as good as they used to be. Virginia, Nebraska, Ohio State, that kind of thing. OK, Ohio State's a little better than those previous two, but they can also be counted on to lose any big game outside the comfy confines of the Big 10. By the way, USC at Syracuse in 2012. Like we said, cagey.

6. Houston
Prolific offense + SI cover jinx = hard times at T. Boone Pickens State. It was a lousy weekend for OSUs. And come to think of it, a pretty crappy weekend for the Big 12: Colorado humiliated at Toledo, K-State goes down to a Sun Belt team, Iowa State proves that Iowa (and thereby Northern Iowa) is several levels above it, and Missouri nearly craps its pants at home against a MAC team.

7. Georgia Tech
That first-week pasting of Jacksonville State looks a little better after JSU nearly took out Florida State in Tallahassee. Then there was Tech's shootout last Thursday with Clemson, which packed about as many big plays into one game as you'll see this season. We'd say Tech can't pass to save their lives, but that's pretty much what they to did to avoid full-out collapse against the Tigers.

8. Boise State
What better way to fade back to obscurity after a national TV game than pistol-whipping a really bad MAC team at home?

9. UCLA
That home victory over San Diego State in Week 1 didn't do much for us, but anybody who shuts up Lane Kiffin, even for a moment, is OK by us. Florida, you have your marching orders.

10. Minnesota
Hope there are some adrenaline junkies up in Minneapolis this season. Gophers come back on the road against Syracuse and Greg Paulus (whose eligibility grows blessedly closer to an end every day) and win in OT, then score two touchdowns to avoid the ignominy of opening their new stadium with a loss to a Mountain West team.

Teams that were on the list last week before embarassing us as well as all their family and friends by losing, but that's OK, right, because it's just a game: T. Boone Pickens State, Notre Dame, South Carolina

The CrackStaff Top10: Sept. 7, 2009

Welcome to our first CrackStaff college football Top10. It's a ranking of our own making, completely subjective and subject to our own weaknesses, biases and outright stupidity. But it's our ranking, and we like it. If you want polls that are slaves to preseason rankings and a hopeless attempt to maintain continuity, please go directly to the AP and ESPN versions. We hope you are very happy together.

We try to base our Top10 on games, not expectations. You will notice, for example, that Florida is not at the top of our list. That's because Florida has played one team, a team slightly better than a very good high school squad, and played them in Gainesville. Florida beat them soundly, but that tells us only that Florida is a reasonably good FBC team. Florida hasn't done anything on the field to deserve a No. 1 ranking from anybody. And so they don't get one from us. You'll play real teams later in the season, Gators; get back to us then.

It's possible we left your team out because their brilliance has somehow evaded our laserlike focus on the game of college football. It's possible we left them out because they've been beating up on crappy teams (we base our rankings on what teams have done on the field, not on what we think they're capable of).

And it's possible we've left them out because they suck. You get to decide which reason is applicable.

And so, the Top10.

1. The Mormon-Pacific Islander Coalition Known as BYU
Yeah, Sam Bradford went all spectator for the 2nd half, but OU wasn't lighting up the scoreboard when he was in. Downgrade at O line and receiver may hold Sooners back a little this year, put they're still no pushover, and Arlington, Texas, was as neutral as Tabasco sauce. TMPICKABYU earned it this week.

2. T. Boone Pickens State
The Cowboys spent last year beating up the sicklier members of the Big 12 and getting rocked by the big boys. On Saturday they showed they might be up for something better this season. We don't think Georgia is quite as good as their preseason national ranking, but for now we'll buy into the SEC superiority thing and figure this was a pretty good win in a remodeled stadium that yet again proves money doesn't buy taste.

3. Alabama
These guys are a terror in the Closed on Sunday Preseason Shootout thing. First Clemson last year and now Virginia Tech, which played hard and probably shouldn't have stayed this close. Bama still has some questions to answer, but a win over a high-quality opponent on a (semi-) neutral field does a lot in the first week.

4. Baylor
Notice the list dropping off here? Don't blame us -- talk to the ADs who make the schedules. Baylor wins on the road against a well-coached Wake team that's been a bowl regular lately -- that's enough for us. Baylor QB is the kind that makes defensive coordinators reconsider that job in sales.

5. Missouri
We thought the Tigers were going to be pretty rough this year after their offense skill players left campus en masse, but new QB looked good, or at least good enough to eviscerate the Illini on a (semi-) neutral field. Zook may want to start working on those broadcast audition tapes.

6. Boise State
An ugly game against Oregon, and it would have been ugly regardless of what color the turf was or what Oregon was wearing. Still, when you not only shut down the stud RB but get him suspended for the season, you've had a pretty good night. Some of Boise's most, shall we say, enthusiastic fans look just as stupid, cruel and dangerous as any you'll see cheering for the big boys -- welcome to the big time, Broncos!

7. LSU
We'll be honest -- we didn't stay up to watch this one. But in Week One, when a team that generally relies on a big home-field advantage travels multiple time zones and beats a team we've heard of, it's good enough.

8. Winner of the Miami-Florida State game
Tied late in the second quarter, but, hey, we're not picky. Who wants No. 8? Beg for it, ACC dogs!
UPDATE: Welcome, Miami! Don't take anything while you're here.

9. Notre Dame
Was Nevada really supposed to be any good? Is Notre Dame really any good? It's great when a home victory over a WAC team is taken to mean that the Notre Dame glory days are back. Knute Rockne would retch.

10. South Carolina
This we pray: If you are indeed a merciful God, please, oh, please, do not make us watch the South Carolina offense again all year (or the North Carolina State offense either, but that goes without saying).


Others receiving consideration before we sobered up: Ole Miss, Cincinnati, Tulsa, Southern Cal, Iowa, Michigan, Richmond, William & Mary

Day late, dollar short: Why everyone hates Brett Favre

We woke up this morning and discovered to our disappointment that:

1. Lady GaGa is still considered a musician, and is getting paid for it.
2. Those patches of dirt in the yard where we keep hoping grass will grow? Still dirt.
3. Brett Favre is still in the NFL.

The first two we can't really dwell upon. They are decisions made by nature or a vengeful God, and there's not much we can do but sit back and suffer the consequences.

But the Favre thing bothers us because a couple of years ago, we didn't hold much against the guy. We're not Packers fans (green and yellow belongs in cornfields, not on people), so we don't have to join in the ritualistic love/hate exercise going on in Green Bay these days.

So what is it? We know we're not the only ones feeling some malice for the old guy, who's only doing what we American males have a right to do, which is squeeze every dollar out of the talent that we have before we go off to fish, take ED drugs, play golf and die.

We think it may be because America hates the wishy-washy. If you go back through U.S. history, you don't find a lot of famous slogans along the lines of "Give me liberty or give me death, or you can torture me a little (but nothing too gruesome) and then maybe just some liberty, like house arrest maybe, and, oh, can I have a grilled cheese and a pint of ale while I'm deciding?"

We like the decisive, especially in our male personalities. When Karl Rove wanted to smear John Kerry (besides lying about his war record) in the 2004 campaign, he painted him as a flip-flopper (which he was -- that was one of Karl's easier assignments). Changing your mind a lot is seen as, well, less than manly. When John Wayne decided it was time to kill the bad guys, he killed the bad guys. He didn't sit and ponder whether he should have gone into stagecoach driving instead.

So if Favre had decided a couple of years ago to keep playing or retire, but to do one or the other and shut up, we'd be fine. There might be the Jordan argument, that the American sporting public should be spared the pain of watching a formerly great player perform at a lower level later in his career. But that, of course, is a load of crap -- great players, more than anybody else, have earned the right to keep playing even when they're only average.

Instead, strong, rugged Brett was reduced to looking weak and indecisive. Geez, Lady Gaga wouldn't have hemmed and hawed her way through two offseasons. She would have strapped on her Kermit the Frog doll dress and gone out and done the job, whatever it was, unhindered by the fact that she can't sing, write a decent song or talk about anything other than herself.

Maybe the Raiders should give her a shot.

The audacity of grope: Disney edition

Oh, we tried so hard to lay off of this one. But we are weak, Lord, so weak, and when you give us "Minnie Mouse" and "grope" in the same sordid headline, what are we to do?

So this 60-year-old dude has been convicted of testing Minnie's melons for freshness. But we've gotta ask: If you're going to feel up a Disney character (and we're not advocating that, kids -- it's not a nice thing to do, and, as the story proves, the police care about things like this) why in the name of Jessica Rabbit are you going to grab Minnie?

Or Daisy or any of the characters with the big, plastic, nonhuman heads, when you've got full-fledged babes walking around as Disney princesses? The Little Mermaid and the chick from Aladdin (neither of them overdressed), all the old-school ones like Snow White and Cinderella, even Alice in freakin' Wonderland. And this guy goes for the giant rodent.

The court convicted him of misdemeanor battery. We convict him of dumb-assery.

Day late, dollar short: Philly screws the pooch

We couldn't be happier that the Eagles won the race to the bottom and signed Michael Vick. The NFC East is easily our least favorite division in all of sports, and probably in all of life, and it just got a little easier to hate.

Now don't get us wrong. Michael Vick served his time, and he deserves to do what he does for a living, which is run around and make defensive lineman look silly, throw more bad passes than good ones and win some games, none of them very big.

We reject your argument that you wouldn't get hired back at your old job after a few years in the pen. That's right, you wouldn't, but you probably would have molested children or something. Honestly, we've always gotten that freak vibe off of you. Michael was very bad to dogs, which is bad but not as bad as being very bad to people. That's just the way it is.

But Vick should have gotten back into the league with some horrible (Raiders), desperate (Raiders), pathetic organization with out-of-touch, incompetent ownership (well, you get the picture). Maybe Al slept through the whole thing.

Vick is a guaranteed life-suck for any team, and he's not even a starter, ferchrissakes. Protests, QB controversy, the Eagles just bought the whole package. Did they really need him that bad? I guess the T.O. thing taught the Eagles that you can put up with just about anything for one year if it will get you to the big game.

For a team like the Eagles to take him ... I don't know, it doesn't feel right. But it does guarantee that the Eagles, Cowboys and Giants will combine to form an NFL media black hole, sucking all coverage away from the other clubs in the league and leaving them in total darkness. Maybe Daniel Snyder should learn to dance with an umbrella like Benson in New Orleans, anything to draw a stray camera the Redskins' way. Regardless, just another reason to hate the division.

And a note to the PETA babes: Get those protests out of the way early (as if the Philly crowd will let you survive the first one). Naked and December in Philadelphia do not go together.

Hanging with the fishes

We went to the aquarium today. It was like that credit-card ad where the dad rolls out of the office on a Tuesday to take his kid to see the beluga whales, except this was a weekend so we didn't have to take a vacation day. And the wife and in-laws were along, so we barely had to deal with the kids. And we didn't pay. Hell, we didn't even drive.

Now we like aquariums, and this was a good one, nicely laid out and well-presented, but as we were wandering from one collection of gill-breathers to the next, something struck us.

You want make sure that nobody looks at a tank? Put fish in it.

That may sound odd, but it's the god's truth, even at an aquarium. If you have a tank with 10 things in it, and nine of them are fish, people are going to be magnetically drawn to that 10th thing. Generally doesn't matter what it is -- crab, turtle, jellyfish (come to think of it, they segregated the jellyfish, which is a pretty fine idea; that's why they're running aquariums and we're lying here in our underwear typing). But you get the idea: The non-fish rule the aquarium.

This aquarium had a few other kinds of critters, and they had their own displays and sometimes their own rooms. The penguins. The butterflies -- bugs, mind you, but they still seemed to wax the fish in the popularity contest. The river otters were total rock stars. You may as well take that weird-looking kid from "Twilight" and drop him off at the local mall and see what happens. That's what happens when you put some hell-for-leather river otters in the middle of a bunch of fish displays.

Not every all-fish tank was a loser with the crowds, but even then, most of the fishy stars were, well, non-fishy. The serial killers, like the sharks. The mass murderers, like the pirhanas. The freaks, like the sea horse that looks like seaweed or the catfish the size of a minivan. And the rays -- we don't know if they're fish or not, but even if they are, it doesn't make much difference. They might be fish, but they're not like fish. We're in the same general mammalian grouping as a marathon runner, but that's where the physiological similarities pretty much end.

The one honest-to-God fishlike fish that seemed to get the crowd fired up was the clown fish, and of course he doesn't count. He's Nemo. He's a movie star.

So we found ourselves drawn to the loneliest tanks in the building, the ones full of fish that weren't too big, weren't too colorful, weren't too exotic. No crowding, no pushy kids and, hey, maybe a technicolor shrimp or somesuch might pop out of a hole in a rock and liven things up.

Unable to escape the building without being routed through the gift shop, we waded into piles of merchandise showing everything but fish. One daughter got something with a penguin on it; the other, an alligator. In their own house, the fish are second-class citizens. They must feel like the PGA Tour players who think the people coming through the turnstiles are there to see them. Sorry, boys, they're not here to see golfers; they're here to see Tiger.

In the end, the fin-and-gill set didn't get much attention until the end of the day, when we went to dinner and somebody ordered fish and chips. Small consolation.

Quick three: The fourth coming

1. It must be almost college football season, because it has been a week since Sports Illustrated launched the beatification process for Jesus H. Tebow. Don't get us wrong; he seems like a fine young man. He gives inspirational speeches to prison convicts and helps poor kids in the Philippines and can probably run off tackle twice as far on water as either Sam Bradford or Colt McCoy.

But we think back to the most horrifying example of man-on-Tebow love we have encountered, the national championship game in January, when Fox's announcers stroked him so hard that Jesus -- wherever he hangs out for BCS games -- probably wondered, "What the hell is going on here?" And we wonder: If Tim Tebow did everything he did now, except that his name was Muhammad Al-Tebow and his dad was an imam and he told prison convicts that Allah would provide and he pulled himself out of two-a-days to get down on his prayer mat every day -- if all these things were true, how would he be covered? Would the Fox announcers still think he was the greatest guy in the world? Would members of the press stay more at arm's length from his private life, since he didn't play for "our team"? Would they ignore it completely, or perhaps call him out as a bit of a freak?

Does it matter? It kinda does to us. We're just that way.

2. We're looking forward to an expansion of the "beer summit" concept. There are limits -- we're going to have to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to ramp up their suds intake before we can solve the whole Mideast thing -- but we fully support the idea that if you can sit down and drink a beer with somebody, things can't be that bad and might even get better. Now, absinthe -- that's a whole 'nuther story.

3. I don't really care whether Big Papi was juicing -- geez, at this point, who wasn't. And as somebody we know said (whom we've seen in pictures wearing a Red Sox cap, it should be said), at least he juiced and won. But if we care this much about whether ballplayers are taking drugs, shouldn't we be drug-testing politicians, who, unless you're loading up bets on baseball, are actually doing something that affects us? Not like the insurance and pharma companies woudn't be happy to hand out a little product to keep the system from changing too much. Maybe we could put them in chastity belts too.

Quick three: We want Vick

1. We hope our favorite team signs Michael Vick for one reason, and one reason only: PETA protests! Naked PETA babes in body paint in cages (we know of them pulling this one before when the circus comes to town) outside the stadium on game day. Might be enough to pull us away from the tailgate a few minutes early.

2. If some team brings Vick in as a backup, and wants to bring him in for a few plays a game to run the Wildcat formation, we humbly submit that they rename it the Pitbull formation. Please?

3. If we don't get either one of those, Vick in Cleveland playing in front of the Dawg Pound will suffice. That is all.

The biggest waste of time in sports

*2008 presidential election preseason All-America (Democrat): Hillary Clinton
*2008 presidential election preseason All-America (Republican): Rudy Giuliani

This message is brought to you by People Who Think Preseason Polls and All-Star Teams Are a Ridiculous Waste of Time, and we approved this message.

Don't look at the preseason all-conference team. Don't look at the preseason player of the year. For god's sake, don't look at the freshman of the year, selected from among people who haven't even set foot on the field during an actual college game yet.

Read something else. Do a crossword puzzle. Play with the kids. You're better than this, we know it.

Money on the table

This here's capitalism in the good old USA, as you know; everybody has the God-given right to go out and make as much money as they want. And that's what most people do. We believe it's a pretty good system, with certain limitations.

One person that we can think of that doesn't is the guy who owns Chick-fil-A, who keeps his restaurants closed because he's religious and wants to honor the Sabbath rather than make a bunch more money selling chicken sandwiches and tic-tac-toe-board-shaped potato thingees.

We find that interesting, even though you wouldn't call us religious or pious or not-hellbound. Leaving money on the table is a lot more interesting than making it sometimes, because so few people do it (on purpose).

Opening on Sunday might cost Chick-fil-A some fans, because some churchgoers probably appreciate the policy and see it as an extension of his (and their) faith. But the cost of being closed is far greater than the money that it stops at the locked door. Any day you're closed and your competitor is open is a day that the consumer can fall in love with the other guy's chicken. (Sorry, that doesn't sound very savory.)

Now we're hungry. Good thing it's not Sunday. What were we talking about again?

Bitter on Twitter

We twitter, or tweeter, or twatter, or whatever you want to call it. We're @crackstaff if you're interested, although we don't do much more than pimp our columns (our lack of motivation knows few boundaries).

From our relatively short time on Twitter, we have found it full of new-age cheats, frauds and charlatans, an unprecedented collection of unrepentant hucksters whose sheer number and audacity would bring tears to the eyes of H.L Mencken (perhaps tears of joy for all the column inches he could wring out of them, though a modern-day Mencken would have probably already taken the layoff shiv in the back from The Sun).

We remember fondly the days in the late 1990s when any bozo could roll out a sure-to-fail plan and still extract enough money from a foolish venture capitalist to keep a small office in Post-It notes, pastries and Friday keg socials for a few months, until reality came rudely calling. (Well, almost any bozo. We were still typing on an IBM Selectric at the time. This whole Internet thing has never come easy for us.)

Those people at least had to break a sweat to be fraudulent. They had to have some sort of idea — online dog food warehouse, whatever — to steal cash. Today's Twitter hucksters just position themselves as gurus, able to impart to the magical knowledge of social networking in 140 characters or less to any business that can pay them. They don't even have to come up with a crappy plan. Businesses, not knowing any better, hopelessly desperate not to be left behind, ante up.

But don't think we're running from Twitter faster than ESPN from a Ben Roethlisberger civil suit. We're there. We're in. We're typing. We'll never be smart enough (or patently dishonest enough) to label ourselves a guru, but we promise to be smart enough to always laugh at those who do.

Interactivity: Vastly overrated

We disabled comments. We're just not that into you.

If you absolutely have to comment, e-mail us. If we feel like it, we'll post it as an add to the post. We'll pick a random adjective and a random noun from the dictionary as your user name.

Interactivity isn't really for us. Call us throwbacks.

UPDATE: We put comments back up. Not because we feel any different. Just because we're bored.

We no peep

You know us. We don't take moral stands. We'd paper this blog with porn ads, ankles over elbows, if it were of reasonably good taste and the checks cashed. So take heed when we say this.

We're not going to watch it.

You know what we're talking about, you pervs. The Erin Andrews peephole video that's been burning up the Internets, that's what. We've read time and again that it shows ESPN's princess of the sidelines in all her why-would-anybody-be-watching-me-through-my-hotel-room-peephole glory, but we're sitting this one out. And we don't sit many out.

If this had been a sex tape, that's one thing. If you're silly enough to make one of those things and think it's going to stay private, then we're certainly silly enough to watch you putting on a show.

But Ms. Andrews did not choose to make a vid, so we choose not to watch it. And we hope her dad or maybe a whole group of suitably brawny male relatives get hold of the peep creep. (But can we say here that the vigor with which some bloggers and posters have lept to her defense is almost a little creepy itself. There's a lot of that creepy going around this summer.)

Regardless of what happens from here, there will be some awkward moments when Ms. Andrews returns as part of a sports that ESPN broadcasts and people actually watch. "Now let's go down to the sideline, where Erin Andrews is going to tell us about a very special tight end ..." We, of course, will be spared that.

You can join us in abstaining if you wish on moral grounds, or you can do it because you're scared of the virus that is said to be attached to some versions of the file, and that brings us to another point: If we're ever featured in some sort of embarrassing video — say, committing unnatural acts with underage livestock at a West Virginia rest stop on or about ... but no need for that many details, we're just making up an example off the top of our heads, right? — we're going to say there's a virus attached to it. Fine strategy.

British Open and closed

You'll pardon us if we're a little low, but we're having a tough time with Tom Watson's tragic explosion over Scotland. We'll admit it, we were pulling for the old man, and after 71 holes we were almost convinced he could do it, but when he gave the Putt He'll Always Think About that granny tap on 18, we knew what was coming. Not quite Jean Van de Velde territory, but painful nonetheless.

Don't get us wrong: We have nothing against Stewart Cink except that he looked like a human version of those awful day-glo Slurpees we used to get at 7-Eleven when we were young and didn't realize you shouldn't drink anything that's bright green. An enthusiastic Twitter user, he's already posted his clubhouse clutch with the Jug. Perhaps it's good that Watson hasn't embraced the technology; otherwise we would waiting for an iPhone snap of the old guy throwing his tired bones into the Irish Sea.

Sometimes things seem like they should be, feel like they should be, SHOULD be, dammit, and they aren't. That is our imperfect world. Babies die. Villains prosper. Controversy peddlers disguise themselves as writers even though most of their prose has all the craftsmanship of a Waffle House menu. People eat haggis.

If Watson had crapped out after a great first day, as he did at the U.S. Open a few years back, his life story would essentially read the same. Now he's written a new chapter, and who knows how it will read a few years down the road, or even a few weeks. For the moment, though, it feels like a sad ending.

A world without the Worldwide Leader

Due to some unforeseen home improvements — OK, they were pretty foreseen, we just put them off till we didn't have a choice because we're like that — we're cutting some expenses, and one of the casualties is ESPN. That's right: Bristol will have to do without this household for a while.

We dropped to the bargain-basement DirecTV package, just one step up above rabbit ears and more snow than Aspen on the local CBS channel.

They call it the Family Package, but in DirecTV-land Dad must have run off from the family for a big Hooters-and-meth weekend and never come back, 'cause there's not much in this batch of losers for him to watch. It's anchored by shopping channels, which don't play well with the theme of saving money. After that it's kids' networks, religious broadcasters and home-type stuff (HGTV, DIY, etc.). Unless we're feeling ready to regress, repent or remodel (and I'm not sure which is least likely), there is officially nothing on TV.

If you're going to drop ESPN, though, this is the time of the year to do it. We're feeling about as much passion for MLS as David Beckham does, and we haven't mastered the over/under line in the WNBA (struggling to factor in recent returns from pregnancy), so we'll get by on local news and Internet porn for now without much trouble.

When fall comes, though, and Bristol is rolling out football on Thursday night, Wednesday night, Tuesday night, anytime the Anything for TV schools like Louisville, Boise State, South Florida or Fresno State are willing to play, we'll be shaking like a junkie in an alley.

Maybe the religious networks can pick up the slack. Doesn't anybody show Liberty football games? After all, up until we were about 14 we thought "The 700 Club" was a bowling show.

When you wish upon a scar

Sweet and holy Jesus in a Mickey hat, what is going on down at Walt Disney World? First the rock 'em, sock 'em Monorail episode (1 dead, 7 injured) and now two buses get together in front of the Contemporary (12 injured).

We don't judge, and you know we seldom question, but could it be that our friends at Disney got a little too ambitious when the Wonderful World of Layoffs made its debut in Orlando? We'd guess that driving buses, boats, trams or trains, all full of Disney-addled families who are long on sugar and stress and short on sleep and money, would fall somewhere fairly high up the tension scale, like air-traffic controllers in gaily themed uniforms. Tack on some extra shifts and the threat of sudden termination around every carefully landscaped corner, and we're not talking Happiest Place on Earth anymore.

Unless you're a personal injury lawyer. Line forms behind Scrooge McDuck at the big silver golf ball in Epcot.

First and long

Far be it from us to question the experts of the porn industry, who have their fingers on the engorged, throbbing pulse of America and prove it by pumping out a trillion different titles every year, or at least enough to cause repetitive stress injuries in every adult American several times over.

But doubt has crept into our mind about just what the gods of porn valley are thinking when they come up with this, and, no, of course it's not safe for the workplace, dummy. For those too timid to click, "X-Play has just announced the upcoming release of 'Not Monday Night Football XXX.'"

Pardon us while we adjust our raincoat, but are you telling us that somebody was watching a network football broadcast and decided it was great fodder for a skin flick? (We're coming at this from the straight side of the street, Bucko, and don't you forget it.) Sure, there are cheerleaders, but we hear that was covered in some little "Debbie" movie years ago. And, yeah, there are sideline reporters, but still, there's mostly a lot of athletic guys and a few athletic-for-being-that-fat guys knocking the crap out of one another while two or three non-athletic guys talk about it.

Maybe it was porn's Super Bowl debut this year. Perhaps Mike Tirico has something to do with it. Maybe the departure of John Madden from "MNF" really was the act that would set the Apocalypse in motion, just like that little voice in our head told us. Shut up! Shut up! Oh, sorry, did we say that out loud?

All we know is, we don't get it. You're getting old when you don't get the popular music. When you don't get the porn, you're pretty much dead.

Drunk and drunker

It appears Arizona has an "extreme DUI" charge, and WNBA star Diana Taurasi has found herself facing one (she pleaded not guilty).

Extreme DUI? Really? It's like a whole 'nuther level of sloppy driving, reserved only for the best and drunkest. Although the name has an X Games kind of feel to it, too, don't you think? Legit drunken driving incorporates a little bit of slalom, anyway.

But if you're going to set aside a special class of road drunks, shouldn't you make the bar a little higher than 0.15 percent, which is the cutoff for extreme DUI? After all, we would probably blow 0.15 on our way to church some Sundays. But don't worry -- Arizona has that covered too.

That's right, there's a super extreme DUI charge, reserved for anyone hammered enough to break the 0.20 barrier. SUPER EXTREME DUI!

Gotta wonder if there are some off-the-books classifications above that, like super-duper extreme DUI at 0.25 or supercalifragilistic DUI at 0.30. Like so many things in this world, if they don't exist, they should.

If this limo is unoccupied ...

We'd been formulating a theory after Ed McMahon, Farrah and Michael, but the Billy Mays out-of-nowhere death sealed it for us.

The celebrity rapture is upon us. God is taking his chosen people, celebrities, home to their eternal VIP club in the sky. (And don't give us the old Jews-as-chosen-people story -- that is so Web 1.0.)

Soon the limos will be parked, the late-night shows quiet, the crime dramas out of production for good, the concert stages empty. And all of the rest of us, the little people who supported them through the hard times, will be left to deal with all that bad stuff coming our way. (We'll admit here that we're a few weeks behind on our Bible study and haven't gotten our heads wrapped around the whole Revelations thing -- will there be frogs again? Or hot -- should we stock up on linen shirts?)

So prepare for a celeb-less world, where the supermarket tabloids feature housewives from Akron and the only thing on TV will be reality shows, without even one reality star. Woe be to us.

The worst time of the year

Unless you get your groove on for lawn tennis, this is the worst time of the year to be a sports fan. We usually mark the start of this sports Bermuda Triangle with the end of the NBA/NHL finals, but this year we extended through the College World Series and felt we were rewarded for it. The college kids put on a good show, although sometimes it looks, well, very white out there. Diversity does not seem to have reached D-I baseball.

But when you're looking to Omaha for salvation, you can be sure that you're in trouble. Now that they've shut the lights off there, it's just you, us, and the MLB All-Star Game from here till football.

Celebrity deaths help pass the time, but the Reaper could come for the rest of the Jacksons, the rest of Charlie's Angels, and the whole Osmond family for a little value added and still not get us to the end of August with our sun-baked wits intact. God have mercy on us all.

Dead celebrity threesome

The blog's not dead (yet), but these three are. Thoughts on each:

Ed McMahon: We know the last few years weren't easy, but what a ride this guy had. Best job ever and all the free Bud he could drink. And the Super Bowl ad may have been some of his best work ever. Shed no tears for Ed, America; he wasn't super smart or super hot, but he rang the bell anyway. Gives the rest of us hope.


Farrah: We were big on the "Angels," young but filling up quickly with testosterone and in prime Farrah poster age, and we liked her well enough, as friends and all, but we were firmly in the Jaclyn Smith camp.

But here's the thing, as we remember it: After Farrah's poster blew up, Jaclyn did a poster with the idea that it would be more modest, reflecting her more modest values. Translation: No swimsuit, no nipple. She was in a nightgown under a comforter, or something like that. They may as well have put her in a burkha. And did Kate Jackson even get to do a poster? It sucks to be the smart one.


Michael Jackson: Not MJ, because that's Michael Jordan. And not the King of Pop, because we think we remember that, out of nowhere, he made MTV call him that repeatedly so they could premiere his stuff or something like that.

We were also of a prime age for MTV's glory days, and in our crowd Michael Jackson was what you had to suffer through to get to ZZ Top, Van Halen and the metal bands. We can understand Michael's meaning in the grand scheme of things, and the videos were cool to look at the first 70 or so times, but there's a whole army of guys our age who are looking at all the hoopla right now and thinking, "He wasn't our king." Or worse.

That said, we understand what an innovator he was. In fact, we always felt that he was so creative that it was like radioactive material within him, and after a while it started to burn through from the inside and destroy him. That's what turned him from sweet, lovable young Michael to creepy, bizarro old Michael. America's OK with weird genius, but Michael starting out so young and adorable hurt him in the end. When he transformed into a freak show, people still had that image in their heads for comparison's sake, and it wasn't pretty.

Top five things overheard in a Michael Phelps-Carrie Prejean relationship

We're not saying there is one ... but if there were ...

5. "Matt Lauer is lying in the driveway, and he says he's not leaving until we agree to appear on the show together."
4. "Your mysteriously leaked picture is WAY more embarrassing than my mysteriously leaked picture."
3. "I'll wear the medals if you wear the tiara."
2. "I think the institution of marriage will survive one little threesome, now, won't it?"
1. "Don't think of it as an orgy. Think of it as a multi-team sex medley."

Oh, Miss Cali

Nude indeed (or thereabouts -- we haven't seen the pics yet), and yes, we called that one before it broke. Our psychic powers are a heavy burden, but we try to carry them with dignity.

Crossing the line

Miss California USA has us in a gay frame of mind tonight. We're man enough to admit that.

Given the speed with which gay marriage seems to be gaining acceptance (argue if you want, but the polls from four or five years ago and now don't look like they were taken in the same country), we're thinking of another barrier that might be broken soon: an openly gay active player in the NFL, the NBA, the NHL or MLB.

Granted, jock culture doesn't necessarily mirror the broader spectrum in a lot of ways, and testosterone by the gallon changes everything, but we still think it's going to happen. The question is, which sport? Numbers might make the NBA the likeliest spot -- fewer guys on the roster, not as many people would have to buy in and say it's not any big deal -- but our money's on baseball. Any thoughts?

Day late, dollar short: Miss California USA nude

Now that we would be interested in. But, alas, it's not true, at least not on this site. It's just a shameless attempt to get a few search hits.

The rest of the Miss California USA stuff, we don't care about, no matter how many times Carrie Prejean shows up on the "Today" show. Maybe she'll set a record for appearances by pretty blondes who aren't missing or dead. We still won't care.

We will give her some credit, though. If we were packed into our gown on stage at a beauty pageant we really, really, pleaseGodohplease wanted to win, and Perez Hilton asked a question that was anywhere near about gay people, we're pretty sure we'd talk about how great gay people were and how they deserved to get married and how our mom and dad were both gay, if you can believe that, it's really a funny story, Perez -- regardless of how big a Bible we liked to thump and how terrible we thought it made gay people out to be in God's eyes and all. We're like that. So, yeah, Miss California USA has a bigger pair than we do. We'll admit it.

But we guess there is one thing we care about now. As Carrie becomes the banner carrier for the don't-let-them-gays-marry crowd, we await the reaction. Because we've often heard that singers, actors and athletes who espouse causes should shut up and act/sing/play because they aren't qualified to talke about it and nobody cares what they thing. In just about all these cases, the causes are liberal and the "shut up" crowd is conservative.

Now we have a beauty queen -- not even an accomplished actor or musician, but a pretty girl who didn't win the big pageant -- weighing in on an issue. And we would ask those folks who say Bruce, Babs and Sean should shut up, what about Carrie? Is she an earnest young woman using her moment of fame to support a cause she believes in, or should she shut up and wave?

Twitter fail

From a newspaper reporter listening to the speech by Bank of America's Ken Lewis at the shareholder meeting:

Lewis says 2008 was tough year for BofA shareholders.

We know everybody is hot for Twitter, but is this the kind of insightful info we can expect as more media outlets tweet, tweet, tweet? Really? Is this what people are looking for? If so, we apologize for interminable posts. Soon people's brains will start shutting off after 140 characters -- if not sooner.

Lone stars

The flap about a London Super Bowl recently was a waste of time, since we're one crazy legislature away from already having an international Super Bowl on the schedule: the 2011 edition in post-secession Independent Texas.

Texas secession would also give the NFL its first international teams and give Toronto some company in MLB and the NBA. And don't even start thinking about the U.S. medal count in London -- if all those gymnasts and swimmers that train in Texas can get "citizenship," they could put a serious dent in our total. That's not even counting that tae kwon do family in the commercials.

This is if we don't immediately attack freshly seceded Texas, or just bomb it back to the Stone Age, or at least the Alamo. They lay on their doctrine of Texas exceptionalism pretty heavy, and I think the enlistment rates in Oklahoma and some of the other border territories would be impressively high.

College girls, sand and NCAA approval

It's buried in this USA Today item, but the NCAA has approved beach volleyball as a women's sport (they're calling it sand volleyball, we guess, because there aren't any beaches at some volleyball hotbeds like Nebraska and Penn State).

We at CrackStaff give this our tentative approval, but we're waiting to see the uniforms. If they're anything like Misty and Kerri wear, then we'll see you at the tailgate.

UPDATE: So how will this work? Will schools have to truck a lot of sand into their arenas, or will it all be outside? Seems like some campus operations guys might have to learn some new tricks.

Is this what they call bareback?

If you won $3.3 million in the lottery, how would you spend it? Here's one way you may not have thought of: Open a nude dude ranch. And we hope you'll be careful with what you're lassoing, pardner.

We'll scratch your back

Gingrich doesn't like Obama's handshake with Chavez. We wonder where shaking hands with your enemy falls on the big diplomacy continuum compared with giving an unwanted massage to your ally, a la Bush and Angela Merkel. Politics is so complicated.

Trend or today's storyline?

Time magazine has a cover story on "The New Frugality," one of many pronouncements that "Things Are Going to Be Different From Now On."

Haven't we been here before, though? Didn't we hear repeatedly after 9/11 that things were never going to be the same? That we were going to concentrate more on what counts, spend more time with our families, stuff like that?

We're not sure, but, aside from padding through airport security lines barefoot carrying a lot of tiny bottles in Ziplock bags, not much seems to have changed in people's lives. And you could make the argument that had people really decided to treasure the simple things in life rather than earn, borrow, charge and buy as much as humanly possible in the last few years, we might not be in quite as bad of an economic mess now.

So pardon us if we roll our eyes at the latest round of "things will never be the same" stories. The more things change ...

Time to kill a trend

With the popularity of sites like Cute Things Falling Asleep and Cute Things Laughing, please keep an eye out for our new sites, coming soon: Cute Things Making Their Parents Buy Them Things They Don't Really Need and Cute Things Passing Gas.

And you can have the toaster, too

Gee, I wonder why they split up. The crazy is not healthy for relationships.

Hey, Fox Sports

Do you still have rights to the Cotton Bowl? If so, tell Brian Baldinger to find something else to do on New Year's Day or thereabouts, and reunite the newly retired John Madden with old partner Pat Summerall in the booth for the game.

Then, rather than trying to get people to tune in to see an SEC team beating the living crap out of an overrated Big 12 team, you can sell them on the Sunshine Boys in the broadcast booth. And Madden can help remind Summerall which teams are playing. Maybe you can get the bowl to buy into the retro theme and have Oklahoma State and Auburn, or whoever, wear leather helmets.

That's OK, you can thank us later.

Meeting and exceeding our gag reflex

"Meeting and exceeding" is required language for any mission statement these days, and, boy, are we tired of it already. But if your company is exceeding expectations, isn't it pretty much implied that you're meeting expectations too? You can't drive 70 without at some point driving 60.

What the Devil?

For any Duke hater, this is too much to hope for. If watching starter-turned-scrub Greg Paulus stumble, flail and flop through his final game in a beatdown by Villanova wasn't enough, how about watching him run for his life against Big Ten football defenses?

Note to Greg: Do not try to "take a charge" against the Ohio State D line. Refs don't call those penalties in football, even if you did go to Duke for four years.

... but with a 'Boom!'

We're happy and sad that John Madden is walking away from the mike. We're happy that he's not sticking around to wander into Pat Summerall territory -- the once-a-year return by Madden's former partner for Cotton Bowl play-by-play duty always makes us wonder if somebody should grab power of attorney and make it stop. But we're also sad, because even if some of his stuff has grown a little stale over time, he's still more listenable than most of the guys doing the same job. His fire has certainly dimmed from the early days, though, when you got an idea of how this guy might have been able to control a crew as unruly as the old Raiders.

Is there another announcer who could carry a video game title the way he does? Our only other candidate would be putting Vitale's name on a college basketball title, but we're guessing that Vitale probably generates more negative reaction than Madden ever did.

Day late, dollar short: Dead and gone

Mark Fidrych and Marilyn Chambers, taken from us in the same 24 hours. This truly is a cruel world. We can imagine them walking hand in hand into heaven, Mark talking softly to his ball, Marilyn talking softly to his balls ...

We think of both these folks as museum-quality examples of models no longer produced. Fidrych was the loveable sports oddball. The stuff he did -- talking to the ball, grooming the mound, all the other stuff that made everybody (including us) drop everything to watch him on "Monday Night Baseball" in 1976 -- seemed to come from the heart. We read plenty of interviews -- he was just an odd dude. If somebody was doing the same stuff today, it would obviously be a schtick, something dreamed up by an agent or a marketer to improve a guy's marketability. And when fate booted him out of the spotlight almost as soon as he had wandered into it, he seemed to take it in stride. He enjoyed the ride, but he didn't seem bitter that it had ended so quickly. He just wanted to drive his dump truck.

Marilyn Chambers was the girl too pretty for porn, and while there may have been a few girls that fell into that category afterward, it's not something that applies today. Porn was so far beyond the pale in the early 197os that not many people were willing to have sex on camera and suffer the social consequences, and a truly pretty girl was rarer than a bikini wax. These days, it's not the best path to Hollywood stardom and it won't do your beauty contest or political career much good, but it's not your ticket to Outer Castoutia either. Lots and lots of people make lots and lots of dirty movies (some pretty much for fun, others for hire), and the participants can fall just about anywhere on the beauty scale. Cherry-pick some porn stars (leaving out plastic surgery nightmare Jenna Jameson) and mix them up with fashion models, then have somebody try to tell the difference. The '70s are long gone.

It did make us wonder, though -- do they still make Ivory Snow? We have to get to the supermarket more often.

Crazy people we know

A note before we tell this story: We like to curse (quite a bit, actually), but we try to keep this blog free of the seven dirty words and their associates because we have smart, conniving children who we fear will figure out this URL someday. We don't want them to experience us in all our foul glory, since we work hard to keep our language clean when they're around in the hopes that they will defy their genes and not sink to our depths. So we'll put some dashes in the gratuitous words we have to use to tell this story. We can take it, and we know you can take it, but we don't want to sting our children's pure, untainted eyes.

And children, if you're reading this, close the browser immediately and go back to watching your mindless cartoons, you scabby little monkeys.

And now our story.

We work with a woman who is tie-up-the-sleeves-and-run-for-your-life crazy. She has a good heart, but she is unquestionably nuts, and she would probably tell you more or less the same thing. We are not her boss, but our performance is judged in part by her performance, and this keeps us up some nights.

She was on the road working in a stressful situation with unfamiliar people. We were nearing the end of a conversation on the phone when she stopped midsentence.

"G--------!" she yelled. "I think I've lost my cell phone! Where is it? F---! S---!" Then after a moment, "Wait, I'm talking on it."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Sometimes I drive myself crazy." Believe me, we know the feeling.

Jailhouse Honeys

They're good but they're bad (allegedly). It's why we care. And we lead off with a semi-celeb.

Age: 27
H/W: 4-11, 120
Charges: DWI 1st offense, 6-10 over 25 mph speed limit, simple assault on an officer, interference with official acts.






This is Sara Ann Fazio. When she got hauled in on suspicion of drunken driving, she showed her displeasure by stripping naked, which prompted an officer to write in the arrest report, "About midway through the implied consent advisory, this officer experienced a first after nine years on the department." It was good enough to get her written up in the Des Moines Register. We hope they weren't keeping it too cold in the jail. She's teaching us a valuable lesson here, you know: When you get angry, get naked. The world would be a better place.

Now back to our regular, anonymous programming.

Age: 18
H/W: 5-3, 115
Charges: felony forgery, misdemeanor shoplifting, misdemeanor false report

Whatever you're trying to take, we'll give it to you.













Age: 24
H/W: 5-10, 130
Charge: DWI
Previous charges: None







In happier, non-3 a.m. times.

Oops: The perils of paper

Financial Post Magazine printed something about a company and its CEO. The company didn't like it. The magazine had already been printed, so the magazine's employees sat down and tore the offending page out of every magazine before it hit the streets (thanks to Romenesko). The mag's average total circulation is about 200,000. That's a lot of tearing. It's much harder than tearing pages out of the Web.

We can only wonder what the magazine wrote about the company and the CEO and perhaps malfeasance of some sort or maybe unnatural relations with a farm animal or some such. Somebody should find that stack of ripped out pages.

Maybe there was a full-page ad on the back of the page. That would add some financial injury to the insult. Sorry, Mr. Advertiser, but we tore your ad out of every single one of our publications after we printed it. It happens sometimes. Well, not very often.

Not dead yet, just cheap

We'll bet you thought this was a dead blog. Not yet, anyway -- just out of town and without time to post for a few days.

We're a little late to the game, but this Priceline and Hotwire thing is a good deal. We booked a couple of hotels in Florida on the cheap, and we were playing without a net. It wasn't just us, but the family too. If these had been bedbug-infested, hooker-filled hellholes, we would have gotten it from all sides.

Turns out, they were pretty nice places, not 5-star resorts but clean, quiet and comfy brand-name places at $50 a night instead of $100. Who knew? A lot of people other than us, we guess, but we're onto it now. And when we do get the hooker-filled hellhole, we'll hope there are no bedbugs -- and no family along for the ride. Hookers charge extra for that.

OH, YEAH: I learned what little I know about Priceline and Hotwire at betterbidding.com. There's a database of successful bids and buys for both sites there that helps you plan your strategy.

Didn't you used to be player of the year?

That was a weird, sad scene watching Tyler Hansbrough in the Oklahoma game yesterday. In a battle of players of the year, this year's model, Blake Griffin, told Tyler where to go and when to go there. He dominated him inside, then took him outside so he could blow by him to the rim.

Thinking back, we guess it all started in the Final Four last year, when Kansas' big freshman came in and put the dog collar on Tyler. But it's still weird to see last year's POY as only the third (fourth?) best guy on the floor for his team.

It all culminated yesterday with The Dunk, when we could almost see the thought in Tyler's googly eyes: He was going to show us all who the real player of the year was. He then lifted off for an extremely ill-advised dunk attempt over Griffin. Like a rocket misfiring and heading for the sea, he must have realized that he was going to land far short of the rim, so he just threw the ball, hoping it would fall into the basket. And no, no foul call to bail him out. It was embarrassing to watch.

Any NBA clubs thinking of wasting a pick on Tyler probably saw all they needed to see yesterday. Does Chapel Hill have a D-League team?

Quick three: Doomed

1. Will Missouri ever get to the Final Four?
2. Can UConn win a championship before it gets put on probation?
3. What's the appropriate penalty for a bar that wants you to think it's a sports bar and has dozens of TVs tuned to the Sweet 16, but then holds Friday night karaoke and runs that through the speakers, not the game audio? Is any penalty harsh enough?

Jailhouse Honeys

We all do wrong (or are accused of it), even the loveliest among us. And that's how we get Jailhouse Honeys. Today's contestants, taken from online arrest records from around our fair country. No names or locations, just mugshots, vitals and bonus shots:

Age: 19
H/W: 5-7, 130
Charge: Misdemeanor -- Selling wine/liquor/beer/mixed beverage to someone under 21
Prior charges: None




Not quite in the league of hot teachers who take up with their junior high students, but there's a lot for an underage male to like here -- cute, and she'll sell you a Jagermeister shot.

Non-jail shots: OK, correction: Definitely in the league with the hot teachers. We love the beach.













Age: 29
H/W: 5-10, 125
Charge: Misdemeanor larceny
Prior charges: Speeding; reckless driving

You just don't get enough pigtails down at lockup. Or are those braids? We never can keep them straight.












Age: 27
H/W: 5-6, 115
Charges: Multiple traffic charges
Previous charges: More traffic charges, marijuana possession, felony fugitive extradition/other state.

Six mugshots online, and they get progressively more attractive. Lifestyle change? Better photog at the lockup?

Non-jail shots: Forgot to pack any clothes for the cabin.




















Age: 44
H/W: 5-9, 150
Charge: Misdemeanor solicitation -- crime against nature
Previous charges: Possession of drug paraphernalia, maintaining place for prostitution, misdemeanor possession of stolen goods.

Ahoy, matey -- d'ya get poked in the eye?