Let's be honest here for a minute. I'm a little jealous of Colbie Caillat. Not only does the 22-year-old singer-songwriter from Malibu look a lot like Jennifer Aniston, Colbie also shot to fame like a speeding rocket shortly after being discovered. Normally, this wouldn't be a big surprise if it weren't that this time around, the one that discovered her wasn't some fast-talking cagey label exec crossing his fingers hoping he's found the next Fergie. It was the American public. Which means that her success, well before the existence of an album, a hit song, or a even a manager, was already guaranteed. And the forum that made it all possible? MySpace. read more ...

Back in 1998, when bisexual rock-folkster Ani Difranco married sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist, baby butches all around the world wept. For weeks. She was, after all, one of the few women we really really really wanted batting on our team and would gladly trade Ellen, and even Mary Cheney, for. So when she divorced him five years later, we thought there was a glimmer of hope she would return to our side.

No such luck. In July 2006, when the National Organization for Women presented Difranco with the Woman of Courage Award, she announced her pregnancy. The father? Her boyfriend, producer Mike Napolitano who worked with artists Andrew Bird, Blind Melon, and others. Looks like there is no turning back now for Mommy Difranco, but many die hard fans (still mostly lesbians) will continue to flock to her shows.
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Well, the great man is no more. Pavarotti, he who gave us the most useful accompaniment to European soccer, to doing the dishes, to life itself, has finally popped his clogs, as they say in Northern England. He's dead.

Pavarotti exploded into the popular consciousness after performing Nessun Dorma at the opening ceremony of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. For the first time, England's beer-bellied idiot fat slob violent thugs were able to experience the soaring joy of release provided by the legendary Italian tenor, in between vicious baton charges and truncheonings from the Italian Carabinieri. Where the working classes in most countries were more accustomed to lending an ear to pop music or jazz, Pavarotti introduced the great tradition of Italy to the European masses that memorable year, and soccer and opera were forever wed. The first of the now globally loved "The Three Tenors" concerts was held on the eve of the World Cup Final, when Pavarotti performed with fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. From that moment, the common people of Europe, even the pig-ignorant English, developed a great love of opera. The rest is history.
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Is it just me, or was there a ludicrous spectacle broadcast live on national TV last weekend? I refer, of course, to the long-awaited debut of David Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Never has a single (and apparently not very intelligent) individual allegedly rocked America since Elvis Presley in the late 1950s!

General Manager of the Galaxy Alexi Lalas – whose team finished second bottom in the league last season - declared recently that Beckham can be "bigger than Tiger". At first I took this to be a reference to an aspect of their relationship that was best left to the tabloids, until I realized Lalas was actually inferring that Beckham was perfectly capable of picking up a golf club and becoming the best player in the world. Outrageous! Further in that article, which is featured on an unofficial Beckham website, Lalas says that Beckham can be bigger than Michael Jordan, which frankly had me laughing out loud. One, Beckham’s skeleton is over twenty one years old, and if my years at Harvard Medical School taught me anything it’s that the human bone machine stops growing at that point. And two, Michael Jordan was a basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, and so is really very tall and not likely to be topped by a dimwitted Limey superstar whose wife has never read a book in her life.

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Well, it’s almost that time again. I’d almost forgotten about football season, to be honest, until the Mayor pulled up in his car the other day while I was tending my herb garden, honked his horn and shouted, “Watson! Let’s take a trip down memory lane!”

The Mayor’s trips down memory lane are legendary in this part of town, and this one was no exception. My herbs had to wait another day. Having made a brief visit to a certain, er, gentleman’s club downtown to pick up some lady friends of his, we installed ourselves in his plush private theater and he brought out a stack of DVDs to play on his six-foot television screen, with surround sound. And once more the magic began.

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Several evenings ago I was invited round to the home of the Springfield Police Chief for dinner. After the meal (which was frankly inedible) we sat around his Ikea table and amicably chatted as we smoked third-rate cigars the Chief insisted were Cuban (if they were Cuban, I shudder to think what they must’ve been immersed in for the journey across the border, as they literally tasted like camel feces. You’d sleep better in your bed at night if you didn’t thoroughly believe your city’s Chief of Police was an utter nincompoop, not least due to his inability to detect counterfeit garbage).

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Ricky Hatton climbed into the boxing ring in the desert a while back, and faced a quite diminished Jose Luis Castillo, destroying him with a fourth-round liver shot that sent his giblets through his ribs and his frame to the canvass. During the after-fight interview, Hatton proclaimed himself to have delivered more action in those four rounds than Floyd Mayweather had produced in his entire career, and now the American has lashed back. The Hit-Man’s post-match euphoria, undoubtedly justified to some extent, has hurt Mayweather, who has surely discussed the matter of sorting Hatton out with his close friend, rapper 50 Cent.

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I am one of those rare people these days that still loves the NBA. Yes, March Madness is better, but my goodness those pros have skills. And when playoff time rolls around, they have heart too. At least some of them do.

I almost didn't watch the game last night though between the Dallas Mavericks and the Golden State Warriors. It seemed like the Mavs would blow the Warriors away. Isn't a 1 versus 8 series supposed to be a walk in the park?

The Golden State Warriors certainly proved me wrong. Baron Davis lead the way to victory on the road (97 to 85) with 33 points (26 in the second half), but the whole Warriors team deserves a lot of credit for playing with tremendous heart and energy. I can't really say the same about a Mavericks team that just seems to lack focus and direction during much of the game.
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Don Imus has been canned by CBS Radio. After his funding’s been pulled, and he was suspended by MSNBC for his disparaging remarks about the Rutgers University players. Forgive me if I sound insensitive, but what the hell is the big deal?

We created this problem on our own. Just the fact that the word “shockjock” exists as a common term is proof that what this country wants are crazies that take the normal to the next level. Judging by the success of the original shock jock Howard Stern, we simply love what borders on the obscene, what pushed the envelope. We eat up the insults, and it drives up the ratings of those that are doing the insulting. The shock factor is what everyone is getting used to…so that the shock levels must increase exponentially to outdo the last.
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Police guitarist Andy Summers is scheduled to perform a book signing for his biography, One Train Later at a London branch of Borders on April 4, a few weeks before the once-mythical tour they've all been waiting for begins in North America.
Andy will read from the book he has written, thereby smashing the myth that guitarists (and people from northern England in general) are thickheaded dullards who spend their lives eating tripe and racing pigeons (that's racing pigeons, as in engaging in the sport, not consuming them in pies, as they do wood pigeons, confusing, I know) but are actually quite intelligent when they want to be, they just don't want to be very often.
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