Punt. Pass. Kick right in the sack. Repeat.

It seems like West Virginia University's being hit over and over and over again with a tube sock full of quarters. I mean, one more good, solid whack to the daddy box and I'm not sure they're gonna be able to get up.

Today's "House of the Rising Sun" watch brought to you by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (and complete with supporting documents available on the home page):

WVU e-mails on degree opened
Show president's chief of staff directed response to M.B.A. queries

... And the hits just keep on' coming!

And, if that's not enough for you, enjoy this column by a CBS Sports writer who managed to call Gov. Joe Manchin a "jock-sniffing meddler."

Absurd, comical, over the top: Hey, if the Gov fits ...

I mean, at least Hawaii's governor took it up the tailpipe, too.

I loved the '80s as much as the next guy, but ...

G: "Shoot me now, Jacque."
Me: "I can't shoot you, George. I like you too much."
Sweet Ann (from behind the cubicle): "I'll do it, George!"

I just saw this story in the Daily Mail:

WVU adds four assistants
MORGANTOWN — New West Virginia University Coach Bill Stewart is turning his staff vacancies into a "Return of the Native" scenario.
Three former Mountaineer players and coaches — John "Doc" Holliday, Steve Dunlap and David Lockwood — have been hired to rejoin the WVU coaching staff, sources said today.

Is anybody else ready to dust off their "Up the Middle-O-Meter"? I'm not trying to be a Negative Nancy, but ... eesh.

Trust me, I look back on most of the '80s with a smile and a wisp of nostalgia and a dreamy, glazed-over glance. I'm not sure I'm ready to look back on THIS part of the '80s with that same look.

Who's in for a trip to Johnstown? I'm gonna need some hockey to put this out of my mind.

Anybody else see the end of "Casino"?

One of my favorite movies is this classic.

I'm fascinated by organized crime at all levels, from "The Godfather"-like behavior of the old school to the more modern "Sopranos" style of management.

"Casino" falls sort of in the middle. If you've never seen the movie, it focuses on the building of what we know as "new Vegas." It's the transition from the 1950s-1960s Dean Martin-Frank Sinatra kind of Vegas to what we see today ... the mega hotels, the roller coasters. The movie ends in the 1980s, so it ends with right where the serious changes start to take place.

But, I digress. Again. I'm always digressing.

Anyway ...

At the end of the movie, I guess with about 10 minutes or so to go, you can hear "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals start playing in the background and EVERYBODY STARTS DYING. It's kind of like falling dominoes -- one mob guy goes down, and starts to take everybody else down with him and it's nothing by 10 solid minutes of death.

So, you could imagine that when I read this story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today, I started hearing "House of the Rising Sun" play in the background:

WVU's provost unsure of records on MBA

This is a followup to an extensive story they did Dec. 21 about how, well, an MBA (and, oof, it just sorta happens to be for the governor's daughter ...) just sort of showed up. It's all very intriguing and if you're a conspiracy theorist, it's pretty much as good as Christmas.

This was the paragraph in today's piece, though, that caused me to kind of let out one of those long, ooooooooooooof kind of breaths:

Yesterday, Mr. Lang acknowledged that those records are lacking and that no other students have reported problems with their records since a Dec. 21 story by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette raised questions about how the university went about retroactively granting the degree to Ms. Bresch, a longtime friend and business associate of WVU President Mike Garrison.

Oh. Hell. Something on the inside tells me that probably wasn't the right answer.

It's almost like if you listen really carefully, in the background, you can hear it very faintly:

"... there is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun ..."

... Interesting.

SiteMeter is fun.

I used to be overwhelmingly popular in Parkersburg by a CityNet user.

But yesterday, after I wrote about the screenplay Jo and I did, I stopped being popular in Parkersburg almost immediately.

I'm now overwhelmingly popular by a generic ISP in Houston, Texas, by a user with the exact same computer specs as whoever was in Parkersburg using CityNet. They're also very interested in the comments on the post about the screenplay.

But I'm sure that's just a coincidence. It's probably also a coincidence that someone's been on my show page with all of those exact same specs ... Total coincidence.

That's really the last I'm going to say about it.

I know you're doing it. You know you're doing it.

You hate me. I think you're pathetic.

I love that I don't have anything stopping me from calling you out anymore. You'd think that alone would be enough to make me uninteresting to you and you'd be patting yourself on your back enjoying your "prize," but it's clearly not enough.

But until you want to stop hiding behind your Internet veil and address me directly, you're not worth the time I've already put into you. You're spending hours a day on this blog. Literally. If you're investing that kind of time in me, you have time to come out from your anonymous, sad little world. I'm putting myself out here because I'm not a coward. You've never been anything but a coward. And jealous. And knowing what I do know about you, you're justified in your jealousy.

As I close in on 11 hours at work today ...

My signature Demotivator really says it all at this point.

Follow up file: I'd f-ing kill him.

In today's edition of the best newspaper ever -- the New York Post -- they ran a follow up article to yesterday's Amy Fisher news.

In this latest article, Lou ... Remember Lou?
You know.

Lou.

And you shouldn't trust Lou because:

1. His name is Lou.

2. Hair!

3. Sunglasses.

Anyway ...

Lou says he regrets hawking their bedroom vids in anger. He was just mad that Amy was seeing Joey again (which, OK, I'm FOR you on that, Lou, I really am!) so he acted out in anger and decided that the only thing that would make him feel better during a divorce from a notorious woman would be cash and fringe fame.

Here's where I get real pissed ...

It's bad enough he sold it to a distributor. It's even worse that they got back together shortly thereafter and he didn't tell her about it UNTIL A MONTH OR SO AGO.

"I did it out of the heat of anger and passion," Bellera told The Post.

"We were estranged. She was seeing Joey. I was seething about the whole thing. It just came to a point where I was hurt and embarrassed by it . . . and it pressed the wrong button. I just used that as a vehicle to strike back at her."

You know what I'd use as my vehicle to strike back at you, Lou? A Sherman tank. With a big, giant, sharp, pointy knife on the end.

Fisher said she was willing to forgive her husband.

"We've been together for so many years and have had so many ups and downs," she said. ". . . I don't want to see it. It's better for me if I just don't think about it. I'm just going to hide in my house."

Amy, you're a better woman than I am. That man would be bleeding in the front yard in a few hundred pieces if I would have been on the receiving end of that. But, I'm hoping you take away a few lessons from this.

1. Videotape nothing ever, ever again. Lou hoses you once, Lou will hose you again.

2. Never underestimate guilt as a weapon.

3. You are totally in the clear to be as bad as you want for pretty much the rest of your life. If you're called out on it, you clearly have the response of, "Yeah, well, at least I didn't sell our sex tape."

Siiiiigh.

Sleeping with the enemy

OK, my love of Amy Fisher is both mocked and legendary. If Amy Fisher would call me tonight, I'd hang out with her this weekend. We could go to the strip mall, get our nails did, have some Italian food and polish off a bottle or two of pinot noir ... I really think we could be friends.

Meet my new enemy. This is Lou. Lou is Amy's husband.

Reasons to not trust Lou:


1. His name is Lou.

2. Look at that hair.

3. Those sunglasses.

But I digress.

Lou and Amy were in the midst of a fun divorce. Granted, it probably didn't help Amy much when she and Joey rekindled their Long Island love story for about 38 minutes this past summer, but after cooler heads and sobriety prevailed, Amy and Joey both went back to their respective spouses.

But according to today's edition of the New York Post, Lou took matters into his own hands. He was going to do divorce the American way. And as we all know, in America the one thing that can ease all pain and suffering is ...

Money!! Lots of it.

Lou and Amy, as wacky, in love, married couples tend to do, made themselves a video memento of their passion. Lou, scorned man that he was, decided to take revenge against his then-estranged wife by ... selling it.

But Lou didn't really think it through ... they got back together. And this company owns the tape.

That's gonna make the holidays a little awkward around the Bellara house.

That's right, kids. Now you, too, can own the Amy Fisher sex tape.

Here's the story from the Post:

October 29, 2007 -- The world soon could be seeing more of the Long Island Lolita - a lot more.
A sex tape of Amy Fisher and her husband, Lou Bellera, is in the hands of a Los Angeles porn distributor, and the onetime teen temptress isn't happy about it, her former business partner said yesterday.
Fisher and her husband apparently made the tape earlier this year, before they filed for divorce, according to David Krieff, a TV executive who has produced reunion specials with Fisher, her ex-lover Joey Buttafuoco and Buttafuoco's ex-wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco.
But in the time Fisher and her hubby were in Splitsville, Bellera hawked the tape to L.A. smut peddler Red Light District Video, which is expected to start selling their steamy footage next month.
"I was told she was a willing participant at the time it was made, as a private video with her husband," Krieff said.
It wasn't until August that Fisher, who has since reconciled with Bellera, learned of the Red Light deal and wants to stop the video's release.
"She's disgusted," Krieff said. "I'm disgusted by it, too, the whole genre. I can't believe in the United States of America things like this can be released.
"I feel bad for Amy and Lou," Krieff added. "I think they were having a fight and he made a bad decision that's coming back to haunt them now."

A bad decision? To me, a bad decision is eating Chinese food from a place called "Wok and Roll." A bad decision is seeing any movie with Christian Slater. A bad decision was the third "Major League" movie.

I'm not sure I could forgive him for this. If I were hanging out with Amy tonight, I'd tell her to send his goldbricking ass packing. I'd buy her some chianti and we'd rent DVDs and paint our toenails. She doesn't need Lou. She doesn't need any guy who'd do that.

But the lessons to be learned?

1. Videotape NOTHING. It's not a good idea. It's never a good idea. There is not a single shred of good in anything like that being videotaped.

2. Write nothing down.

3. Deny. Deny. Deny.

And don't date dudes named Lou with hair like that.

Hangin' (out) in the gallows

A nearly 1o-year career in news will do that to you -- you develop a fantastic gallows sense of humor.

Amber's phone rings and she answers it. It's her husband Sam asking her a question about something he'd heard over at his job at University of Charleston.

She looks up at me and says, "Have you heard anything about somebody jumping off a bridge and getting hit by a car?"

My response?

"No, but that's a shitty way to start your Wednesday."

I'm going to hell ...

The first step is admitting you have a problem

I can't believe I love the Brad Paisley song "Online."

If you haven't heard this song, you need to get your ass to YouTube and watch the video, which stars Jason Alexander, the George's Mom from Seinfeld and WILLIAM SHATNER.

And if for nothing else, for the hook:

"I'm so much cooler online."

Aren't we all? I know I'm MUCH cooler online than I am in real life. My own real life is pretty uneventful. Online I've got this, the show, MySpace ... all that crap. But just ordinary Jacque in sweatpants on the couch? Not all that cool. I'd hang out with me, but I'd probably want me to go home after a day or two.

The "I'm Not Sayin', I'm Just Sayin'" of the year

From today's Charleston Daily Mail:

State education official says his "redneck" remarks were taken out of context

by Justin D. Anderson
Capitol Reporter

A top state education official acknowledged that he used the phrase "four-wheel riding, dope-smoking, alcoholic rednecks" to describe a lifestyle that impedes student progress.

But Kenna Seal, who heads up the state Office of Education Performance Audits, said he was not talking about Lincoln County.

"I used those words, but I didn't call the people in Lincoln County that," Seal said. "I used those words to describe a lifestyle that I have noticed in places across the country and even in West Virginia."

Members of the Lincoln school board contend that Seal was harshly criticizing the county and have asked him to apologize.

Here's the thing -- he's not altogether wrong. And what they taught me at that fancy journalism school is that the best defense against libel is the truth.

He certainly doesn't get any style points on this one, and to be honest, it's not just Lincoln County. He should spend some quality time in Logan, Mingo, McDowell ... Wirt, Ritchie, Doddridge ... I mean, it's pretty much the whole state.

That's sure to piss off most West Virginians, but you know what? Prove him wrong. Because from where I sit, I can't see that he's saying anything that's patently false.