A month into the show, I must admit: I absolutely adore MTV's Jersey Shore. Not since the network's legendary Real World Las Vegas have I been so invested in a television show. After all, Jersey Shore represents the triumph of the American Dream, pure and simple. It is kandy-kolored "ego-porn,"...

There's one aspect of the ongoing Tiger Woods drama that I just don't understand. How did he get from Point A, a minor single-vehicle traffic accident; to Point B, an admission of "transgressions" against his family to anyone and everyone in the world with an Internet connection; and now...

There are a good many rules, written and unwritten, that govern behavior on the New York City Subway. You can't spit. You can't assault the conductor. You can't ride in the interstice between cars. You can't use the straphangers' poles like vertical couches. These transgressions are actually against the law,...

I've spent, like much of professional football-watching America, the past two weeks getting my mind around the concept of a Super Bowl featuring the Phoenix Cardinals. (Yes, I know they're really the "Arizona" Cardinals, but I still refer to the Tennessee Titans as the "Houston Oilers," and I try to...

Superheroes are having a good decade. The X-Men had a nice run, and Spider-Man, too. Batman and Superman rebooted themselves as younger, more conflicted personalities, and even the more cultish figures -- Hulk and the Fantastic Four, to name a handful--had (and have) respectable big-budget movies. In 2008, then, it's...

You may have thought the 2007 NFL Season ended on Sun., Feb. 3, around 9:30 p.m. ET, when Eli Manning found Plaxico Burress wide open in the left corner of the end zone with 35 seconds left in Super Bowl XLII. Perhaps -- and probably if you're a Patriots fan...

Since I'm planning on sitting on this couch for the next eight and a half hours or so, I stocked up on provisions early, and I may use the Internet to arrange for the hot-food delivery to arrive at approximately 8:45, around the dog days of the third quarter when...

On a recent trip home to Portland, Ore., I met (on two occasions, actually) a particular girl who was a heroine among her friends because she drank her Rainier Beer out of a sixteen-ounce tallboy can with a plastic straw. Widemouth pop-top notwithstanding, this girl sucked and sipped her cheap,...

The male body spray phenomenon is something I'll never quite understand, because unlike, say, a new Lexus that does the parallel parking for you (a feature that, in my opinion, engenders far more cheap ridicule than it really deserves), a VCR that records shows without actually being a VCR (called...

Now that Michael Vick is a convicted felon, another notch for the Eastern District of Virginia's famed rocket docket, we can now turn -- as ESPN has been doing incessantly since Vick's plea deal was announced Monday -- to the future, to the Atlanta Falcons quarterback's eventual release from federal...

Dog-fighting in football, point-shaving in basketball, and blood-doping in cycling have conspired to make it a rather rough week for sports, a week in which the smaller gems in which games and politics intersect can be ignored or relegated as coincidental or superficial. Still, though, the relatively "clean" sport of...

If American soccer hasn't progressed to the point at which American citizens take personal offense to their team's poor play (no soccer-related suicides or murders here -- yet), then perhaps all of us who hope and pray to bring the World Cup home to the U.S.A. by, say, 2050, can...

For a country that boasts such an impressive sporting heritage, the United States suffers from -- especially of late -- a dearth of nationally unifying sporting moments. Born in 1980, I was all of 25 days old for Mike Eruzione, Herb Brooks, and the Miracle on Ice over the Soviets...

In 1996's Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack's character, now a contract killer, returns to Michigan for his ten year high school reunion. Few people, if any, seem to mind his career choice. An ex-girlfriend's father, played by Mitch Ryan, tells him it's a real growth industry; at the reunion, a...