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.