Greatest running back ever. Period. End of story.*

Oh, it so gonna go how it go, Torn Slatterns and Nugget Ranchers

Roger Clemens had to testify to congress about lying about using performance enhancing drugs; it didn’t go well, Roger claims he thought the steroids were gum in a purse he borrowed from his girlfriend.

In New York, a man fell 39 stories onto a parked car and lived. He plummeted from so high so fast he was named an honorary San Diego Padre.

The first place San Diego Padres have lost seven games in a row. Apparently Padres is an old Spanish word that means: Chicago Cubs. (This puppy made "The Tonight Show" last night)

Right now the Padres are unraveling like a Paris Hilton gum alibi.

Paris Hilton has been charged with felony possession of cocaine and could face up to four years. What if Paris Hilton and OJ Simpson both end up in Nevada prisons? Atheists the world over would have to rethink their beliefs.

Paris Hilton claims the purse and the cocaine belongs to one of her girlfriends. You gotta hand it to her, when life hands Paris lemons she says the lemons were stolen by her girlfriend.

Paris Hilton has been arrested for felony possession of cocaine and was out on bail in an hour. If that had happened to me I would be in prison getting an “I heart Bubba” tattoo on my butt.

“Dancing with the Stars” announced its lineup and it includes “Jersey Shore’s” Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, Kyle Massey and Audrina Patridge. So since they don’t have stars, does this mean they won’t be dancing either?

Can you believe it is September already? In Florida, high school teachers have barely begun flirting with the students they’re want to have sex with.

The Miami Dolphins spent over an hour of practice scouring their field for a player’s lost $50,000 diamond earring. That noise you hear is Vince Lombardi spinning in his grave.

The NFL opens weekend after this. For Fantasy football players that means 12 weeks of no sex with their imaginary girlfriend.


Since you asked:

As someone who is allegedly attempting to create humor, it never ceases to amaze me how you can find humor where you least expect it, and find none where you expect it the most.

One of the funniest people on the planet is Zach Galifianakis. He isn’t physical comedy funny like Tracy Morgan and Will Ferrell are funny, Tracy and Will could read the phone book and it would be funny. No, Zach is a lot more studied, clever, tortured and cerebral. But he can do the physical stuff too.

So when they combined Zach with probably the least comedic person on the planet, Sean Penn, well now, that is a comedy formula slam dunk. Zach has a talk show on “Funny or Die” called “Between Two Ferns.” It is the ultimate nightmare talk show for the celebrity being interviewed. When the celebrity tries to be funny, Zach becomes deathly humorless, when they try to be serious, he is hilarious.

It should have been a perfect foil for the self-righteous-royal-pain-in-the-ass Penn.

It was not.

It was mostly awkward and uncomfortable. It was as if Penn’s humorlessness seeped into and infected the brilliant Galifianakis almost impossibly rendering him not funny. OK, it was a little funny, but not much. Whereas Zach’s interviews with Conan O’Brien, Bradley Cooper, Steve Carell, Natalie Portman and especially Charlize Theron, all folks who clearly have a sense of humor, were a laugh riot.

Now to the thing of which I had no expectations of laughing.

We all have a friend who send us those really gross e-mails. My most demented friend sent me an amazingly gross YouTube clip showing a guy getting a huge golf-ball-sized boil on his back/neck lanced. You don’t want to watch, but you cannot stop. Without going into detail, we all can imagine how disgusting that could be, but, suffice it to say, as disgusting as you can imagine that might be, multiply it times ten and that was this clip.

But that wasn’t what was so funny.

What was absolutely hysterical was the sound of an off-screen woman observer as she alternately laughed hysterically in amazement at the putrid carnage and then immediately would throw up violently with revulsion. Laugh. Wretch. Laugh, puke. Puke and laugh. It captured the emotions I had perfectly without even trying and it was hilarious. It was as if my brain had a soundtrack.

Good times. Goooooooooood times.

Re: Sean Penn.

Here is all you need to know about Sean Penn.

“Sundance” channel has a show called “Iconoclasts” where they match two successful and famous mavericks and film them hanging together so us poor schlubs may glean a hint of their brilliance. Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes it is just a mutual jerk session. I thought the show with big wave surfing god, Laird Hamilton and “Pearl Jam” front man Eddy Vedder was interesting. And not just because it has the two stand up paddle board surfing (For a guy who tells anyone he runs into how he grew up surfing, Vedder kinda sucked)

One show matched Sean Penn with “Into the Wild” author, Jon Krakuer. Krakuer was as you would think, an intellectual and earnest outdoor guy. Penn was playing the tortured artist bit to the hilt and pontificating on producing and directing the movie “Into the Wild”

“I wanted his (Christopher McCandless) story to be told right, blah, blah, blah, his voice should be heard, spew, spew, spew, his message should get out, dribble, dribble, dribble, I wanted his story to touch others as it had me, yadda, yadda, yadda, I wanted to honor his noble journey, squack, squack, squack.”

OK, fine. It wasn’t shocking to confirm Sean Penn was another self-absorbed Hollywood schmuck. The man is clearly a wildly talented actor, so we give these types a pass.

But then they show Penn returning to his nice/modest Alaska motel/hotel and he stumbles upon four pretty, young, slightly inebriated young local girls who were celebrating one of the young women’s wedding shower.

The women were clearly big fans of Penn and told him so. As they showered him with compliments, Penn looked like they were giving him a wedgie. When they asked to get their picture taken with him, he looked like he was stepping into a bucket of moose poop.

And then when they invited him to join them in the bar for a drink, Penn awkwardly balked, bristled and actually said;

“Let my try and get my head around that.”

What the . . .? A pretty fan just wanted to say she had a drink with Sean Penn at her bridal shower, and he has to get his head around it? And he was being filmed. How much more of a douche bag would he have been if there were no witnesses? Clearly the guy looks like he drinks heavily. Penn couldn’t be decent enough to make this bridal shower party’s entire year with one drink?

What a freaking tool.





*Yeah, yeah, I know, Jim Brown and Barry Sanders. Let’s put this in guitarist perspective. Jim Brown is Jimi Hendrix, Barry Sanders is Eddy Van Halen, and Gale Sayers is Eric Clapton.



Jimi, like Jim, was an icon, a great guitarist and way ahead of his time. A man among boys. But he got a lot of credit for being the first to do what he did. And, like Jimi, Jim was a little sloppy and rough and used power over finesse. Don’t get me wrong, loved the work of both.

Barry Sanders, like Eddie Van Halen, had amazing skills. Skills that were impressive but that did not move you emotionally, like Clapton/Sayers. You sort of sat there detached saying; “Gosh, that guy sure can maneuver.”

Sayers, like Clapton, hit you deep down inside. His running was art, it was beautiful, it was genius and a little bit of it stayed in your soul for the rest of your life. Clapton went on to be wildly prolific, and, due to injury, Sayers was not. But in Sayer’s all-too-brief time, he was the best there ever was, and that still counts. Sure, longevity is a plus, but it is just one factor. And Sayers had four great years. Today the average lifespan of a running back is 2.6 and Sayers played a few more years after his knee went bad, actually leading the NFL in rushing his first year back. But that was on pure guts. The magic was gone.

But, oh, while that magic was here? It was timeless. It was perfect.

And when Sayers came back from his knee injury a full step and a half slower, we saw a side of Sayers we hadn't seen because he was so fast and elusive, we didn't have the chance to see it, and that was Sayers's power. By sheer power and will Sayers led the league in rushing on a knee that was ruined first by Kermit Alexander of the San Francisco Forty Niners, and then ruined even further by the incompetent Bear team doctor, Doctor Fox. If a doctor did what Fox did to Sayers now, he would go to prison. And Sayers led the entire NFL in rushing. Tragic, heartbreaking for me as a kid, but amazing.

But, Lex, you ask, what about OJ Simpson? Eff OJ in the bee. Jim Brown has done some god-awful things since he played, but not enough to erase his entire football legacy. And Brown, despite his work with gangs, loves to hit and hurt women. That makes him a bad guy. But like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, both bad guys, Brown's achievements on the field still take precedence. OJ's crimes eclipsed his football accomplishments, as great as those records once were.

But being more objective, OJ was physically almost the exact mingling/middling of Gale Sayers and Jim Brown. That meant he had an awful lot of good qualities, but he wasn't a Jim Brown power-wise nor as nifty as Gale Sayers. It left OJ kind of a double wannabe.

But more thana double wannabe, OJ Simpson is a worthless cowardly double murderer.

My funny friend, Janice Hough, brought up a good point. "Sweetness."

Walter Payton was right up there. But even Mike Ditka, who loved and appreciated Walter as much as anyone, said Sayers was the best. In guitar terms, Walter was like Keith Richards: a team player who could do it all with amazing skills and who achieved even more amazing success.

Just not quite a Clapton, is he? But then, who is?