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.