There's no end of fun to be had with a power drill, Underdog, and a jar of K-Y jelly.

Well, he has my vote, based on my theory that the hornier the guy, the better the president.

Our horniest presidents: Thomas Jefferson, JFK

Our most sexless presidents: Millard Fillmore, Richard Nixon, Martin van Buren.

I even have a slogan for Cain: we need a President more manly than Putin!

It's sad that Andy took fatally ill a week after retiring, but the way he did it was perfect. If he had kept working, we would never have noticed him while he was alive (c'mon, how often did you think of Andy Rooney), and if he dropped dead on the job we would not have been able to ridicule him immediately afterward because of the normal social conventions. But the way he did it, we had plenty of time to make fun of him before he passed, which served to remind us what an institution he was, and brought him up to the top of our consciousness. Now we can remember him fondly.

On behalf of cynics and comics everywhere, thanks, Andy. I hope they have a nice Victrola in your room in geezer heaven, and I wish you a jam-free eternal stapler and plenty of adorable Norman Rockwell kids to chase off your lawn.

Alabama did drop, but only one place, below Oklahoma State. The Tide thus stayed ahead of Stanford and Boise. That seems fair.

Houston crept up to 11th.

The humans and computers are in general agreement about the top nine teams, with one minor exception. The Coaches' poll ranks Stanford second, and the Harris Poll places that school third, but the computer boys say "no way they are that good" and rank Stanford seventh.

There is a severe drop off after 16th. #16 Texas is actually rated 11th by the computers, but the next three teams, all in the Big Ten, are missing entirely from the top 25 of many of the computer systems. The Big Ten is the greatest area of dispute between the computers and humans. The human polls continue to list four Big Ten teams in the top 25, but the computer systems give that conference no love at all.

All that missing love goes to the Big 12 and SEC.

In the measurement that Jeff Sagarin terms "rating," for example, he ranks Texas A&M 9th in the nation despite a 5-4 record, and Missouri 14th with a 4-5 record! According to him, they play the two hardest schedules in the nation, and all nine of their losses are to "top thirty" teams. By that rating system, seven of the nation's top fifteen teams are in the Big 12, and five more are in the SEC!

This is a complex analysis, but the bottom line is simple:

The owners have no reason to accept a compromise. If the teams never play again, they'll still have plenty of money.

If the players hold out for a better deal, they will lose more from the lost games than they could gain from the improved deal.

Puss in Boots established itself as a major hit. Obviously excellent word-of-mouth enabled it to retain 97% of last week's total! That is the second best retention rate in history for a wide (2500+ theaters) non-holiday release. (And the only better one is a sister film featuring the same character, namely the original Shrek film.) Part of that record can be attributed to the fact that last week's results were dampened by weather, and by cultural conditions like competition from Halloween and the World Series, but the most important factor in Puss's success is the fact that family audiences simply love this movie. It took in more this Saturday than last Saturday!

Tower Heist finished second with $25 million, while the lovable stoners H&K took third with $13m. Both new films finished on the lower end of expectations. Harold and Kumar's ticket sales were deceptively low, but the gross was buoyed by the fact that 95% of the moviegoers paid 3D prices.

Tower Heist's demo data doesn't look promising for its future. It scored a mediocre B from CinemaScore viewers, and nearly 2/3 of the audience was age 30 or older, with the majority being women.

Harold and Kumar also scored a mediocre CinemaScore B from audiences, but it did find its expected core audience of young males and is a Christmas movie, so it may well pass Tower Heist in the weeks to come. Maybe. I'm thinking that those two virtues may well work against each other. The conventional wisdom about Christmas movies may not pertain to a raunchy film like this, which is obviously not marketed at families. I'm not sure that the hard-core target demographic really cares about the magic of the Christian holidays. Compounding that problem is the fact that stoner films, like all raunchy R-rated comedies, have an inherent marketing flaw for their theatrical release: a large portion of the potential audience isn't old enough to buy tickets. This one may fare better on DVD than in the theaters.

Not to mention Larry Flynt's

#3 Oklahoma State barely hung on to a 7-point victory over pesky #14 Kansas State. (Endgame: KSU had first and goal on the OSU five, with enough time for three plays. Three incomplete passes. Time ran out.)

#4 Stanford crushed Oregon State, #5 Boise State won easily, #6 Oklahoma took down Texas A&M, #7 Arkansas won against a good team, and #8 Oregon won easily. #9 South Carolina lost, but that was to a higher-ranked Arkansas team, so it shouldn't cost them much in the standings.


So there's really nothing surprising there. The only real mystery is this: after an OT game where neither team could score a TD, will the voters keep Alabama #2 after an obviously even game, or will the Tide drop? If they do drop, how far? Below Boise? Stay tuned.

So there were no surprises in the top nine, but then you get to #10 Nebraska's loss to (gasp) Northwestern. Since #9 and #10 lost while #11 and #12 were idle, undefeated #13 Houston could move up as high as #9, or they could be as low as #12. They will pass Nebraska for sure. Everything else is debatable. Houston scored their usual 56 points against a rag-tag team of girls' volleyball players from Nowhere State. To be honest, I thought they would win that game by a much bigger margin than 56-13. Anyway, they will creep up, and will play another patsy next week. With luck they'll then be able to switch the rest of their schedule around and play both of their remaining games against Columbia.

Below #14 - who cares?

Just for fun: according to Sagarin's "predictor" system, if LSU played at home against Columbia, they would be 74 point favorites.

1. You lose to Northwestern in any intercollegiate activity except debating.

2. Northwestern beats you with their second string.

Georgia lost their first two games this year, both to teams which are now in the top ten, but the Bulldogs have been firing on all cylinders ever since, hoping to prove they belong in the bowls. They probably could have hit triple figures in this game, but they sat out the starters in the second half - and even the second-string quarterback had a QB rating of 152! (158 is the max.) They ended up using five different running backs and threw complete passes to nine different receivers.

Unfortunately, they can't play New Mexico State every week.

Tower Heist barely won the day, but Puss in Boots will almost certainly pull ahead for the weekend.

The early number held up with the mainstream critics, and it even got an A from Entertainment Weekly. There was just about universal agreement that this is a much better film than H&K2, a hurdle which, to be fair, was not difficult to clear.

She was the only living Playmate I could actually name. One of my college roommates was obsessed with her, and she was the most popular Playmate of my college years, a giant-breasted beauty who was only 17 when she posed for Hef. She was also said to be an incredibly nice woman who always went the extra mile for her fans.

Reader comment:

She sure was a knockout, but I don't understand your first line. Surely you can name Pamela Anderson or Anna Nicole Smith? Is there something (maybe a qualification) I am missing?

Scoop's note:

Yikes! Of course, I can name them from their movie and TV careers, but didn't remember they were Playmates. Stupid me. I must have read that somewhere. Obviously, that magazine is not my area of expertise! You guys reading this probably all know more about Playboy than I do. I never looked at a centerfold after college, and rarely looked at an issue at all, although I did always faithfully study their annual history of sex in cinema, which was my area of interest. I dated two women who appeared in the magazine (not as Playmates, but "the girls of ..." ), so I have two autographed issues around somewhere, but those are the only issues I own.

Wait - Jenny McCarthy was a Playmate, too, wasn't she? And Shannon Tweed? I've never seen their pictorials, but I think I've read that they were Playmates. So actually (assuming those are correct) I can name several, although I didn't realize it! Damn, there are probably several more! Barbi Benton is still alive. Was she ever a Playmate, or was she just Hef's main squeeze?

I can name Dorothy Stratten and Marilyn Monroe for sure. And I can name a fairly obscure one called Connie Kreski because she was my favorite from school days. Weren't Betti Page and Jayne Mansfield also Playmates? But those five are no longer alive, so maybe I've already exhausted my list of living ones.

Whoa. This is my cultural education for the day. I just looked at the complete list, and there are many more familiar names of women I can identify by sight:

Stella Stevens (1960; alive)

Claudia Jennings (1969; not)

Victoria Silvstedt (1996; alive; I should have remembered her. I knew she was a Playmate.)

Kelly Monaco (1997; alive)

Erika Eleniak (1989; alive)

Donna D'Errico (1995; alive). Actually I don't think I can pick her out of a line-up. I've forgotten what she looks like, so she probably should be in the next group below.

There are also many other names I recognize from a lifetime of watching bad movies, although I couldn't identify them if they were in this room with me now: Hope Carlton, Shauna Sand, Angel Boris, Devin Devazquez, etc. I don't think I recognize any names after 1998, although I didn't really study the list very hard.

Rhode Island has the best, although it has somewhat of an unfair advantage in that it has only one car and no left turns.

I'm assuming that he'll be a full-time pinch hitter in the NL, with DL duties in the interleague games.

Some people say that the Phils acquired the popular slugger because they expect Ryan Howard to miss quite a few games at the start of the season. Maybe so, but it's been many years since Thome played in the field.


Reader comment:

I assume you meant "DH duties in the interleague games"?

Now that I think about it, and considering Thome's recent history, maybe DL duties was the right choice of words.


Scoop's note:

You're right in both cases!

(Although I doubt whether he could time his DL trips quite precisely enough to coincide with interleague play!)

This is an objective calculation based upon the ratio of the actor's compensation to the gross of his or her movies.

Drew Barrymore heads the list by a very wide margin. She is 6-7 times more overcompensated than the second person on the list (Eddie Murphy)! "Barrymore is not one of the highest-paid players in Hollywood but her recent films have performed particularly badly."

The list is based solely on non-animated films.

(Not The Onion. A real news story.)

"Stapel was suspended after three junior researchers alleged scientific misconduct. But the extent of the problems became known only on Monday, when the university released an interim report concluding that dozens of papers, as well as 14 out of the 21 PhD theses Stapel had supervised, contain fabricated data.

'This is absolutely horrifying,' says Laura King, a social psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. 'We are talking about research that has major impact in the field of social cognition.' Social cognition is the field of psychology that investigates how our mental processes affect the way we relate to one another."

That we have ancient penises, and therefore need Viagra?

No, they probably predicted that we would eventually be watching The Jersey Shore

Not to mention the Playboy Mansion

"Widely seen as the most tolerant and liberal city in the U.S., San Francisco is drawing the line at nude public dining.

The city's Board of Supervisors has adopted new rules that ban naked people from eating in restaurants, and forces nudists to place a cover on public chairs and benches before they sit down, the San Francisco Examiner reported."

"The offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo have been destroyed by a petrol bomb, a day after it named the Prophet Mohammed as its 'editor-in-chief' for this week’s issue."

He had no power, but he was a single-hitting machine. In his eight full seasons (500 AB or more) from 1966-73, mostly with the Pirates, Matty never hit below .295. He won a batting championship in one of those years, and amassed 231 hits in another.

Perhaps the most famous item in his bio is that in 1963 he and his two brothers, Felipe and Jesus, were all with the Giants and on September 15th of that year, they covered the entire outfield, with Felipe in center, Matty in left, Jesus in right.

It was an artificial record. Felipe was obviously not the Giants' regular centerfielder (they had this guy named Mays), Matty was obviously not the leftfielder (a certain Mr McCovey filled that slot), and Jesus barely played at all (24 at-bats that year).

Felipe started in right that day, and the other two were late-inning substitutes in a 13-5 blowout.

But the record is still pretty cool, even if manager Al Dark had to force it a bit.

Harold and Kumar 3, latest in the stoner comedy series: 73% positive reviews, 2800+ theaters.

Tower Heist, an action comedy with Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, 60% positive reviews, 3200+ theaters.

Note: Tower Heist's score is legit, having been calculated based on more than 50 reviews. H&K3's score is not. It's based on 15 reviews, and the few mainstream reviewers who have seen it are split 50-50. The two big Chicago papers (including Ebert) gave it two thumbs down.

In all fairness, that was actually pretty cheap if you calculate it per square inch.

"A masked teen who took to the streets Tuesday night to pay homage to his favorite hip hop dance group was mistaken for a mime and asked by police to leave because 'some residents apparently find mimes disconcerting'"

In general I hate mimes, but I have to admit that I used to love watching them on the Riverwalk in San Antonio, where it's so much fun to push them in the river.

"Kim Kardashian hasn’t been successful at all in convincing anyone that her marriage and almost instant divorce was anything more than a publicity stunt and trick to get lots of presents, so she’s gonna step things up and cancel her public appearances so she can focus extra extra hard on frowning in front of the paparazzi.

Hopefully Khloe made it back ok too. I heard that when the aborigines saw her one went to the edge of a cliff and blew into a conch shell and then a bunch of the tribes got together for the first time in over a hundred years. It had something to do with a painting on one of their cave walls and then they all got a bunch of nets."

I'm completely shocked ...

that Kim Kardashian never thought of this.

"Witnesses say a man accused of stabbing two defense lawyers in their necks with pencils grabbed a pen and stabbed his latest lawyer in the side of the head as jurors listened to opening statements."

It's the ultimate "moot court" exercise for law school. Here's how it begins:

And how does your client plead to the charge of stabbing a lawyer in the neck with a pencil?

Not guilty, your honor.

Counselor, isn't that a pencil in your neck?

Citior, altior, fortior.

That's who we are as humans. We strive to better ourselves. Right now the 17-quarter guy is feverishly mapping out a rebuttal.

Here's a link just for you, 17-quarter guy, just in case you can't figure out how to do 19:

Ridiculous World Records - that you can break.

The good news? 2012 is the last Mayan Calendar you'll ever have to buy, so you can channel your Mayan Calendar budget into something more important. I suggest you take it in ones and head to a strip club.

"As for the 30 days Lindsay is getting now -- the judge made it clear ... NO HOUSE ARREST.

The Sheriff's Dept. tells us Lindsay will serve 20% of the 30 days -- 6 days in jail.

Judge Stephanie Sautner gave Lindsay a strict schedule on completing the rest of her probation -- by December 14, she must have completed 12 days at the morgue and 4 psychotherapy sessions. By January 17, another 12 days at morgue and 4 psychotherapy sessions. And so on. Everything must be completed by March 29 -- or she goes directly to jail for 270 days."

They have some talent on that team. They can make a run at a championship if they can clear up all the non-baseball issues that have clouded their recent seasons.

"It was unclear why the train made the emergency stop in Victorville"

Woah! It's an inside job. Somebody on the inside arranged for that unscheduled stop so the crooks could get the pigs' feet. It's a win-win for everyone.

Possibly excepting the pigs.

I am such a fish that I'm looking forward to this movie.

Not to mention stumpy.

This one is an oddity in that I can't score it for any of our usual competitors (Jesus, Russell Brand, Weird Al Yankowicz and Charles Manson). As the official apparition scorer, I'm awarding this one to Jimmy Caan.