The Friday Hot Sheet

It was supposed to be a week where all I did was bask in the glow of the fun I had over Labor Day weekend while relaxing on my couch and watching the first real weekend of NFL football -- and it turned out to be anything but.

Without going into too much detail, there are things in this life that you experience that you hope you can learn to laugh about later -- and I caught more than my share of them during the last seven days. Hopefully the storms in my personal life will pull a Hurricane Hanna and high-tail it out of my area almost as soon as they appeared, but let's just say I would have much rather been sitting at home doing nothing than what actually went down. All that being said, it's not like the world ever stopped for me and my petty little issues, and that's what we're here to discuss.

So before the motards win this thing and we all have to go kill moose with our bare hands (except for j, who looked all day and still wasn't able to find one) -- here are this weeks risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here.

	Sarah Palin Mania	I don't care if that bikini picture was Photoshopped or not -- the fact that there was a picture like this available to doctor in the first place is pretty good proof of the reason this whole thing should scare the hell out of you -- because the idgits are out in force, and it looks like they've found themselves a queen. I thought it had gotten to the point where it felt like it was an election between a young populist reformer and an ex-military hardliner, and because of that the dumbass vote wasn't going to be such a factor the way it had been in the past. But now everyone from Jamie Lynn Spears to Donnie Deutsch is calling her "hot" and "sassy" (two words that should honestly never be a part of a process like this) and she's on the cover of every supermarket magazine there is. At this point it doesn't matter if she's under-qualified at all -- if she starts pulling in the kind of voters who are looking for something to do now that American Idol is starting to get boring, we're all in trouble.
	Oh Hell Nawl	Part of me worries that Slaus, Wanna, and all of the other regulars over at the OHN are getting tired ass tired of me leaving honky comments on nearly every post, but between the great music videos, the original comic strips, the fresh viewpoints on current events, and the hilarious tangents that seem to crop up in the comments -- it's pretty much my favorite place on the web right now.
	Chad Johnson Ocho Cinco	As NFL showboats go, I always sorta liked Chad Johnson. His touchdown celebration antics, the mohawk, the way he seemed (at least at first) to be able to laugh at himself -- there was a point when he came on the scene where the No-Fun-League sorta needed a Chad Johnson to shake things up a little. But now dude's gone into a Florida court and officially changed his surname to match his self-applied nickname "Ocho Cinco" after his team refused to put it on the back of his playing jersey. Seriously Chad -- do you have a mama? Because I did, and if I pulled something like this she'd have slapped me silly. Being a character is one thing. But creating a character and then expecting us all to buy his stuff is quite another. What's next, Ocho Cinco's -- the breakfast cereal?
	John Stewart and The Daily Show	Man if there was ever a week when we needed your brand of insight and humor, this was it. At the same time -- kudos for not ever letting yourself sink too low into out and out name-calling, regardless of who you're picking on at the given moment.
	Vin Diesel	Dude -- what the hell happened to you?
	Ann and Nancy Wilson	For finally putting their foot down over the Republicans using "Barracuda" as Sarah Palin's theme song. Not only is the song not about politics or women candidates at all (it's actually an attack on the record industry) but didn't it finally feel good to have one of your favorite artists stand up and say, "I don't care if you do pay royalties -- I don't want my art used in support of your bullshit ideas." Which unfortunately, isn't something that happens all that often *pointed stare at Chrissie Hynde, who apparently doesn't mind [anymore, after a legal settlement back in '97] Rush Limbaugh using one of her songs as his theme, even though she claims to disagree with everything he stands for*
	My Fantasy Football Team	Every year I run into the same problem -- I draft with my heart. If you don't already know, I'm an enormous Denver Broncos honk, which means that every year around draft time I overload on scouting reports on my own team, which invariably leads me to drafting far too many of the donkeys' third-stringers in the name of loyalty while everyone else is snapping up the LaDainian Tomlinsons and Tom Bradys of the world. This year I did my best to resist that sort of thinking -- and I think I ended up with a much better squad. My WR core is still a little suspect, but I'm hoping this bunch will win me a few more games than I ended up with last year.

             

[Listening to:  The Police – "Canary in a Coalmine" ]