Only in Britain would a bunch of self-righteous douchebags characterize an amputee sprinter's use of prosthetic legs as "cheating."

Next up for the English renegades: closing down those elitist hearing imparied schools, and confiscating those "annoying red sticks" that blind people are always precariously waving about.

We often wonder how Ryan Seacrest has any time to sleep or carry on his hetero charade between hosting his morning radio show, fulfilling his duties as the E! News managing editor and on-air talent, plus hosting American Idol. Now we're adding Keith Olbermann to that list of overzealous multi-taskers.

The Countdown host, who just re-upped with MSNBC for $4 million, also co-hosts an ESPON radio show — and is now joining NBC's Football Night in America as a co-host, along with Bob Costas and analysts Tiki Barber, Jerome Bettis and Cris Collinsworth. It'll be the run-up show to Sunday Night Football, where the anchors will analyze who's likely to throw the most passing yards and whether President Bush should pull out of Iraq.

Sunday was the Super Bowl. Us? We threw a party, watched the game commercials on the big screen, and stayed out of the cold. And CBS? They wanted to juice the ratings, get viewers excited even if the game was going to be a wash. So they went all Olympics-style, telling the war stories of NFL players and the struggles of black coaches getting their due. The network bet untold hundreds of millions (billions?) on the Super Bowl, and they weren't about to let their investment flounder.

And then along comes WaPo sports columnist Leonard Shapiro, whose column on Monday had the audacity to suggest a four-hour preshow had room for sad tales and actual news of relevance. "Journalism," we've heard it called.

There was no mention, for example, of the growing number of retired NFL players furious at the league and their own union for what they perceive to be callous indifference to the plight of many of their less fortunate teammates who need better insurance and disability coverage and increased pensions. [...]

Three days before the big game, The N.Y. Times and Boston Globe also broke an important story on the health problems of former Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson. Only 34 and a key man in three Patriots three Super Bowl victories this decade, Johnson was quoted as saying that Patriots coach Bill Belichick forced him to practice against medical advice a few days after he had sustained a concussion in a preseason game, and that he's been dealing with the consequences ever since.

But the real travesty was the lack of in-depth coverage of a major Super Bowl tenant: the commercials. Where were the Stuart Elliot levels of analysis? Alas, laughing at the gay-baiting Snickers commercial will have to suffice.

Just how many different ways are there to describe badly how the Jets, Giants blew it yesterday? Apparently, quite a few. The NYT goes the boring/traditional route,** but the tabloids nearly wet themselves in the excitement of dreaming up new, innovative ways to say "You Suck."

In the first corner, we have the New York Daily News, who scores immediate bonus points for channeling a cartoon pig:

FOR ERIC'S JETS, PATS ALL FOLKS
N.Y. FANS SPELL FINALE WITH 2 L's
BRADY, JETS ON TWO PLANES

In the second corner, the New York Post proves a worthy competitor, rising to the challenge by whipping out an arsenal of puns:

JETS FLY FROM CHAD TO WORSE
TIME RUNNING OUT TO PENN WINNING STORY
MAGIC RUNS OUT THIS TOM

The Verdict: Both papers certainly get an "E" for Effort, but—in our slighly biased opinion—we feel that we've come up with a headline of our own that better encapsulates the seriousness of the situation:

WITH GIANTS, JETS OUT OF THE PLAYOFFS, NEW YORK'S POSTSEASON HOPES ALL RIDING ON ISIAH THOMAS' KNICKS.

Winner: Team Jossip

**as usual

• WSJ readers like planes, not as interested in trains, automobiles.

• Thin is good! Thin is bad! Tabloids are passive-aggressive! Which is good! And bad!

• NFL tries, fails at gouging cable providers.

• Ousted Viacom exec Tom Freston finds a new hobby in Plum TV.

• Sure, Reader's Digest is getting bought for $1.6 billion by Ripplewood, but that pricetag is $150 million shy of what it could've been.

• If you say it fast enough, "B.M.I." sounds like the noise a purger makes while booting.

• Microsoft hands out free computers, bloggers everywhere post items from their new free computers questioning ethics of accepting free computers.

Guess which B-list celebrity we despise having to write about? Carrie Underwood, and it's not because she's destined to be the next Tara Conner, but because with the exception of Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson, American Idols should not stay on your radar for more than 60 days past the series' finale. But when a Scoop Wars soldier alerts us to a battle to be faught, our unwritten rules fall to the wayside.

At the center of this Scoop Wars battle is word that AI winner Underwood is dating Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, who's been linked to Jessica Simpson in the past. David Perel's National Enqurier – flying high this afternoon with a just-launched website redesign – set out word yesterday at 4:20pm that the "Thanksgiving flirtation has turned into a New Year romance," with full details hitting the print issue of the Enqurier, on sale today.

But then Richard Spencer's In Touch Weekly went and dropped the "exclusive" bomb, claiming the scoop at 5:10pm yesterday:

Now Tony, 26, who has been linked with Jessica Simpson, has confirmed that he and Carrie are a couple in an interview with a small-town paper in Charleston, Ill., where he played college football. The article will appear in Wednesday's Journal Gazette/Times-Courier.

Wait, what's that? The news actually came from a small town Illinois paper? We found the article, which carries a pre-holiday, Dec. 19 publication date.

So who gets this exclusive and the Scoop Wars win?

CONTINUED »

Remember when Time magazine blew your mind and named you its Person of the Year? Shmuel Tennenhaus certainly does. Now Fox Sports is running flea flickers on this newfound era of citizen-everything by naming its Fan of the Year to be ... you.

That taste in your mouth? It's bile.

You, the Houston Texans fan who watched in stunned horror as your team passed on once-a-generation phenom Reggie Bush and hometown hero Vince Young to select Mario Williams with the No. 1 overall pick. [...]

You, the Dallas Mavericks fan who saw your team lose two games in the NBA Finals on two horrible calls, one impossibly ticky-tack, the other merely unconscionably wrong.

You, the Detroit Tigers fan who got punched in the stomach over and over as your pitchers were constantly confounded by simple comebackers in the team's World Series debacle.

You, the sally who pretended to be a Knicks fan to justify the purchase of a 46" Sony Bravia LCD flatscreen. Congratulations. Go put yourself on YouTube.

That GQ magazine, always up for a good prank on the level of Maxim. The laddie mag with class spends part of its January issue testing the NBA's waters on just what level of celebrity it takes to score some free courtside tickets.

It had an easier time scoring front-row Utah Jazz tix for Jenna Jameson than getting Mischa Barton into the Dallas Mavericks game. "We're all sold out down there," said a Mavericks rep. But the Jazz told the fake Jameson: "I'm sure we can work something out ... Two tickets or four?"

Author Malcolm Gladwell isn't getting Chicago Bulls seats until his phony rep sends "an E-mail with credit card information." But The Rock (below) can see the Nets for free, especially if he's willing to sing the national anthem.

But what about Rosie O'Donnell belting out "The Star-Spangled Banner"? "I'm a big Rosie fan," said a rep for the Phoenix Suns, "and we're excited about this, but for the date you mentioned, I have a 5-year-old trumpet player I'm flying in from Washington."

Because as any gay knows, a big instrument always trumps a bull dyke.

• The Donald loves disgraced Miss USA Tara Connor for one reason alone: the press.

• Denver Nugget Carmelo Anthony and six others suspended for multiple games after creating this brilliant display of sportsmanship.

• The YouTube guys sold their company to Google and all they got was this lousy article in Time.

• Judith Regan's camp promises an all out "war" on everything you hold sacred. Like News Corp.

• Copyright infringement is less fun when computers are doing all the work.

• Joy Behar, that silly liberal.

CONTINUED »

We don't talk much about sports because, you know, there's always a Golden Girls rerun on Lifetime, but Saturday night's Knicks v. Nuggets game was certainly a point of interest. Because, you know, there's always a good brawl on NBC.

An eagle-eyed reader has alerted us that Jim Nelson might have had his GQ staff working a little too hard to put together December's "Men of the Year" list — and not paying much attention to what's between November's covers.

(Click image for larger version in pop-up window)

The magazine's first stutter comes in a spread on Bob Woodward, where Woodward's former Washington Post editor and Watergate scandal cohort Ben Bradlee is pictured. Except Ben Bradlee doesn't get the proper name check: the caption misspells his ID. And while we'll be the first to own up to our gratuitous errors, the mispelling gives Ben the name Ed Bradlee, a mixup of oversight and unfortunate timing.

(Click image for larger version in pop-up window)

Next up is the blurb on Joe Namath. As any casual sports fan knows, Joe shaved off his famous Fu Manchu moustache for $15,000 in a commercial for Remington electric shavers. GQ, meanwhile, calls it a handlebar moustache.

At least GQ saved its ass by naming Leo DiCaprio one of its Men of the Year. You know, because he's done so much this year to be proud of. Namely, banging a Israeli model.

• Some celebrity charity projects have merit. Stripes on a face? Not so much.

• Ground breaks on CitiField, otherwise known as Shea's demise.

• Ellen Pompeo agrees to marry music producer boyfriend who is only one year older, though looks twenty.

• The Upper East Side is now the new Gramercy: Post-college kids who need space on the cheap.

• Sniff, but don't lick, those ads in People.

• Survivor contestant also Playboy TV hardcore reality series player (NSFW).

• Former Miss Seventeen contestant and Seventeen intern Brianne Burrows pops up from the woodwork to dish on Atoosa Rubenstein's departure. Everyone loves a MySpace spat.

• Voted "most likely accurate" of all of Simon Dumenco's predictions: Greg Gutfeld's crack den.

• Effective Friday, shelter title Dwell named Sam Grawe editor-in-chief, who began at the magazine in 2000 as an editorial assistant. J-school grads, there's hope for you yet.

It was the picture of the woman runner holding a digital camera that first attracted us to today's NYT item article on "marathons meet tech." Yes, those Nike+ shoes are all the rage this year, transmitting data from your shoes to your iPod so you can constantly monitor your pace and progress and not see the car running the red light. But what runner, pro or novice, actually packs a PowerShot on their 26.2 mile quest for knee injuries? Apparently, quite a few; or, if not digital cameras, then a whole roster of gadgets to pass the time, remember the moment, and weigh you down.

“I’ve been at finish lines where people come across looking like a hardware store,” said Andrew Graham, the chief executive of Bones in Motion, which makes the software Mr. Kaye will use in his Motorola Motokrzr K1m phone.

Technology is adding a new sound effect, beyond the roar of the crowd and pounding of feet, to many races. “In marathons these days, it’s really common to hear beep beep beeping,” said David Willey, the editor in chief of Runner’s World, referring to the alarms on the heart-rate monitors worn by many runners to track their pulses. “That’s definitely something you didn’t hear 10 years ago.”

This is the point where, if we had the energy, we'd get in touch with Observer-to-Portfolio staffer-cum-marathon critic Gabriel Sherman who, staring through us as he's wont to do, would launch into a teeth-clenched rage about idiot first-timers poisoning the art of the marathon with their gizmos and widgets before putting his earbuds back in, reading his text messages, and glancing at his wrist to check his pulse on his heartrate watch.

While we never had any hopes of winning a marathon, we did attempt to complete one. The San Francisco/Nike marathon, in fact. The one that thousands of (mostly women) completed yesterday. But we didn't make it that far, shin splints and all. In another part of the country, meanwhile, another group of folks that Gabriel Sherman likely hates did what we couldn't do: run 26.2 miles and cross the finish line. And the first among the nearly 35,000 runners to do just that? Robert Cheruiyot of Kenya, this year's "unofficial" winner with a time of 2:07:35. Number of finish line slips and injuries? One.

CBS 2 EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Men's Elite Runner Falls At Finish Line [CBS2 Chicago]

Fox sportscaster Steve Lyons isn't taking his firing so well. After his ousting from the network over the weekend – for connecting Hispanics with stealing wallets while calling Friday's American League Championship Series Game 3 with Lou Piniella, or so the top brass claim – Lyons is coming to his own defense. His exchange with Piniella – which included the always ethnically sensitive dialog "habla-ing Espanol" – shouldn't have been construed as accusing Hispanics of being lazy deadbeats with no hope for economic survival aside from stealing, you see; he was just saying he couldn't trust sitting next to a Latino after his wallet went missing. See, all better now, right?

Well, it would've been, except this little incident is at least Lyon's third strike.

Lyons had survived making fun last week of a fan shown wearing unusual glasses that, it turned out, the fan was wearing because he is visually impaired. In 2004, Lyons was suspended by Fox for comments about a Jewish player missing a game during Yom Kippur.

Though, that Jewish comment we're willing to forgive: It's not often a sportscaster gets to make a Jew joke that isn't about money.

Lyons defends honor after dismissal by Fox [Michael Hiestand, USA Today]

• Ya think? [Fresh Intel]

• New York Times readers will not tolerate fair-weathered Mets fans. And neither will the Observer. [NYO]

• We don't think NYC needs to get all San Francisco with baby names like "Moonclover" and "Ashbury." And while they're very nice names, we thought New Yorkers could get more creative than Michael and Emily. [1010 Wins]

• Seriously? Barnes & Noble is poly-bagging ArtForum? Come on, we've seen moms in the kids section wearing sluttier outfits than that. [Page Six]

• We are so relieved. Some areas of Brooklyn aren't so full of futons and pregnancy tests that the crime stops. [Curbed]

• You know how Robert DeNiro didn't buy the Observer? Maybe he was saving up to buy Harvey Weinstein's duplex. [NYP]

• A party at Beauty Bar where everyone walks around saying "Hi, I'm a twenty-something" sounds more or less like our version of Hell. [NYO]

• A sign of the Times: Pepper & Potter gone for good. Sniffle, sniff, sniff. [NYT]

• Did your hummus sandwich from Dojo last week taste a little funny? That's why you never let somebody feed you a plate of noodles the size of your head for three bucks. [Gothamist]

• Something about sports and New York and teams. Baseball maybe? [NYDN]

• The Italians are accosting adopt-a-model spokesperson Dylan Stableford. [FBNY]

• We would find this article sentimental or something, except the only game we've ever seen played in Prospect Park is softball. [NYT]

• Andrew Krucoff earns his Conde Nast potatoes, one charity dollar at a time. [YM]

• Brian Williams tries to save Saturday Night Live, viewers remain unimpressed. [You Tube, Gothamist]

• Because everyone in New York thought that the 9/11 hijackers never laughed before. Not once in their lives ever. [NYDN]