Because deciding who leads America is a little too boring to take straight or because football is a little too repetitive to take uncut, Fox News has decided to meld its football and political coverage into one large undifferentiated goulash. On February 3rd, FOX anchor (top/vers, we think) Shepard Smith, who looks more and more like a young Frank Sinatra, will kick-off a three-hour broadcast from Arizona all about the Superbowl and how super it is whilst FOX News anchor Bill Hemmer chimes in from New York about Super Tuesday which is February 5th. Roger Ailes is clearly onto something here. We can't wait for their coverage of the Russian presidential elections melded with the Canadian men's curling championship in early March! [NYO]

Kelly Tilghman—an anchor at the most exciting channel on TV, the Golf Channel—was suspended for two weeks because of a crude and racist remark. Just how crude and racist was it? "Lynch him in a back alley," she said, referring to young players challenging Tiger Woods. Well hell, we all let things slip sometimes. Woods' agent didn't much care, because the two are actually friends, but no matter—now Al Sharpton has jumped into the fray! Which means we have about three more days of crazy-talk on this particular story. [AP]

Tonight: the Iowa Caucuses. Also tonight: The Orange Bowl! As the Iowa caucuses require quite a bit more evening activity from participants than simpler primary elections, we can't help but wonder which candidates' supporters are most likely to skip the caucuses to watch a nationally televised, sure-to-be-thrilling bowl game between Kansas and tragedy stricken Virginia Tech. Huckabee, who already earned a bit of ire in the heartland by telling Iowans that the game would be boring, seems an easy bet, as does fellow good ol' boy Fred Thompson. But as the GOP require only a straw poll, unlike the more involved politicking of the Dems, it might be Edwards (who would love nothing more than to appeal to the type of Iowans who love college football) who's hurt most. Of course caucusing is so archaic, annoying, and inconvenient that no one turns up to do it any year regardless of what's on TV. Besides the same couple thousand old white folks who've chosen our terrible leaders and their ineffectual challengers for the last century or so. [KansasCity.com]
Photo: "Iowa Bus Tour: Football Break" by John Edwards 2008

According to today's Variety, the relentlessly versatile Jake Gyllenhaal will soon pad a resume filled with iconic turns as dreamy-eyed cowboy bottoms and disaffected, clothes-averse Marines by taking on the role of flamboyant Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath, who delighted NY sports fans of the 60s and 70s with his guaranteed Super Bowl victory, sideline modeling sessions of the latest in fur-coat fashions, and scene-stealing Brady Bunch cameos.

Sometimes, even in polite society, the topic of baseball comes up. So here are some fun facts about the brand-new Yankees manager that you can use when talking to "straight" men! (Straight men are the guys on Craigslist M4M who are out of shape.)

When I was younger, we had to stand outside in the cold for hours to buy World Series tickets. Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we can buy them online from the comfort of our pajamas. At least, that was the theory when the Colorado Rockies decided to offer World Series ticket online only. A nice idea, if you're prepared for it. The company that was serving up the tickets for the Rockies had an "unspecified problem" and its servers are offline. In the 90 minutes after the sale started, 8.5 million connection attempts were made for 60,000 tickets. (Photo by AP/Ed Andrieski)

Did I anger the instant-messaging gods? First, Facebook sends IMs asking me to join up when I'm already a member. Today I received three separate IMs from Major League Baseball. All three said the exact same thing. While not yet the scourge that junk faxes, spam, and ads on text messages are, IM spam, also known as "spim," is increasingly a problem. I get two to three spim messages a day, most of them on MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Most of them tout porn and pump-and-dump stock scams. Have you received any interesting spim? Send it our way. MLB's contribution to the genre comes after the jump.

Advertisers are realizing that the blogs written by pro athletes are an attractive advertising platform — at any rate, as far as blogs go. They have a built-in audience of rabid and loyal fans. Many of the most popular athletes tend to be outspoken and controversial, drawing in a wider audience. Mere talk of on-field or locker-room disputes can generate buzz. Likewise, non-sports talk builds interest. The downside: Advertisers are leery of controversial athletes being associated with their brands. But everyone knows the mainstream media ignores blogs, so they're safe, right? Best of all, while bloggers in the self-righteous tech world are vilified for pitching products, fans expect pro athletes to be walking billboards. The occasional awkwardly inserted product pitch may rub a few readers the wrong way, but it doesn't lead to an angry horde with pitchforks and torches.

On Saturday afternoon, in a dusty softball field behind the East Hampton Waldbaum's, media mogul Mort Zuckerman was stretching his calves. For a captain of industry, his legs were remarkably rickety. On his right calf, a messy bandage alluded to some frailty. But this was Zuckerman's day. For 25 years he'd played in the East Hampton Artist and Writers Annual Softball Game; he is also often a sponsor. Today he and his fellow "writers" (clad in blue jerseys) were squaring off against the Hamptons Artists; that squad, in red, included noted artist Christie Brinkley. Amelia Bauer was there to catch the action.

Yahoo has turned over its corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, to Chad Johnson, the NFL superstar and wide receiver. Why the long bomb to spice up the usual corporate blather? Why, it's a promotion to advertise a video contest promoting Yahoo Sports and Chad Johnson himself. We hope Jerry Yang, the mild-mannered CEO of the beleaguered Web property, is reading. He could learn a thing or two from the blustery sports personality known as Ocho Cinco: If you can't actually lead, at least sound like you do.

This weekend Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley took a trip to the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in horseracing's Triple Crown, blah blah blah. What did the equestrian betting set look like? Let's just say that if you like watching douchebags cavort you won't be disappointed.

Last night was Box NYC, the third annual boxing, dinner club, poker event and model show, produced by Jed Weinstein at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Sponsored by Trump Vodka and Poker Life! We've long been of the opinion that testosterone untempered by a little gayness is a horrifying thing. Last night, we were vindicated. The sidewalk in front of Hammerstein was covered in a red carpet with a roped off area within which various divans and settees were arranged for smokers. From 8th Avenue, one could already see a dense cloud of cigar smoke. Walking into a room of dudes who are richer, older and more aggressive than oneself is a discomfiting sensation. Great shafts of light fell onto the Paul Stewart suits and bald spots of successful i-Bankers who paid up to $8,000 for a table. Downstairs, on a hideous carpet, men played poker. In the bathroom, dudes drank Scotch, peed AND talked to each other all at once. My mind was blown. And then the boxing started.

Despite a deal reached last November to post game highlights on Youtube, the National Hockey League has apparently requested that Youtube disable the embed codes for their newer clips. A strange move. Either the NHL wants to force clip-watchers to visit the NHL Youtube account in some exercise in branding, or they're unhappy with the whole Youtube deal and are intentionally crippling it ahead of pulling their video entirely.

UPDATE: Though no one wants to go on record or issue a release, the NHL assures a grieving public that this was merely a temporary glitch. Embed codes have been restored to NHL clips on Youtube. Go with God.

For those of you who haven't been following the postgame analysis, Tom Brady is the Patriots quarterback who dumped longtime girlfriend, Six Degrees 'star' Bridget Moynahan, for supermodel Gisele Bundchen—and who was none too pleased when, over the weekend, the world learned that Moynahan is three months pregs with his baby. (Shades of the Billy Crudup dust-up!) This morning's Page Six smackdown upped the ante in the Brady vs. Moynahan stakes considerably.

We've always imagined that, like most publishing types, Publishers Lunch/Marketplace head honcho Michael Cader spent his high school years holed up in the library, writing vengeful poetry, not trying out for the football team. So we weren't surprised to see this telling typo in today's Publisher's Lunch email newsletter:

Ahh, the wisdom of crowds: so far, the vast majority of you have responded to the question we posed in our Blind Item Guessing Game by asserting that American Idol winner loser (and child-hater) Clay Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Times A Million Gayken wouldn't even know which NBA team he'd prefer to be butt-serviced by, as he is a gay and thus doesn't know the names of the teams that play the sporty-ball games. And according to a helpful tipster, you're probably 100% right:

Ben Widdicombe tosses us an extraordinarily puzzling blind item today:

The apparent legacy of Time magazine choosing "You" as their 2006 "Person of the Year" seems to be a growing list of other outlets also choosing You for their "X of the Year." The latest is Fox Sports' Kevin Hench, who names You as Fan of the Year, however vaguely tongue-in-cheek (ETP points out there's no mention of Time in his article itself, just a brief note regarding same on the foxsports.com home page). Hench's piece is really just a laundry list of bad sporting from the past year, tacking You on to the front of each bullet point as examples of what 2006 fandom has endured. Let's all just calmly step away from this joke, please? Haven't You done enough?

In a Black Friday column bemoaning the state of patriotism and consumerism (or something, it's Clyde Haberman, so it's hard to tell), Clyde Haberman mentioned an excursion

Even though more than a month has passed since Yankee relief pitcher Cory Lidle fatally crashed his plane into the Belaire apartment highrise on the Upper East Side, the trauma continues: