Galley Brother B.J. sends along these two bits of satisfaction.

Bit the first: ESPN.com is now getting blown out by FoxSports.com. This is good news not just because my full-time job is part of the Murdoch-Fox-News Corp Empire. I suspect that the next step in the fall of ESPN will be Fox Sports Radio overtaking ESPN Radio. Steve Czaban’s First Team on FSR is one of the best sports talkshows you’ll ever hear–particularly compared to the ESPN’s flagship Mike & Mike in the Morning, which is kind of like the Family Circus of sportstalk.

We can only dream of the day the Fox Sports network can seriously challenge the ESPN Family of Networks, which have become all but unwatchable.

Bit the second is more bad news for the PS3. Follow the link if interested.

The Kim Kardashinoplousanova tape is (finally) out and the Blog Crush thinks it might be the end of an era:

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this thing may officially kill the novelty of the “celebrity” sex tape. Not only is it boring, but the chick in it is only a celebrity because she has a celebrity sex tape. That’s circular logic, at best. A boat show in Iowa has bigger celebrities than this tape. And since she’s only famous because some dude fucked her after checking his lighting, I’m almost positive that makes her a porn star. So that’s how this needs to be judged, and on those merits, this chick would barely crack the top 100 (just after Jenna Haze but well before Wifey). Today’s porn has hotter chicks, more deviant sex and even more exotic locations. “Buttman & Rocco’s Brazilian Butt Fest” has everything this tape does, but with more star power and at one point they interview a girl next to a pretty fountain. Three minutes later they shove unspeakable things inside of her, of course, but the fountain was a classy touch.

Two things of note this morning. First is Matus with a primer on what Fred Thompson’s movies hint at for his presidency. Awesome.

Second is the AICN pointer that Gerard Butler is near being cast for Watchmen. They won’t say for which part, but the obvious choice would be Doctor Manhattan, no?

While doing other work, I stumbled across this old Tad Friend profile of Roy Lee. It’s miniature, and perfect. It may be the single most insightful look into the film industry since Adventures in the Screen Trade (not counting The Big Picture, which is enlightening on a financial, as opposed to personal, level).

Print it, read it, love it. You can thank me later.

Blog Crush has another video of Comedy Central darling and erstwhile pitchman Carlos Mencia stealing jokes–this time from Bill Cosby, circa 1983.

The funny thing is, Cosby is so much better that the whole thing is a little weird. It’s one thing to steal material from someone because you think you can make it better, but this is just plain weird.

Galley Friend M.C. sends us this fine AV Club rundown of the best opening credits sequences in TV history–complete with video samples of them all (except for the Taxi credits, which are recreated via the magic of GTA).

I was particularly thrilled to see Buck Rogers make the list, part of the Erin Gray double-feature that made me feel so funny as a young lad. But I’m a bit surprised they couldn’t throw some love toward BSG, which does a lot with their credits.

Following up on yesterday’s post on Sony’s PS3 sales we have this word from Deutsche Bank analyst:

To put the PS3’s situation in context, Patel said, “PS3 consoles are available at retail but sales are lackluster. Its 130K units sold in February was less than Xbox 360 sales last year (160K) and even less than the original Xbox sales of 140K in Feb-2002.”

That’s right: The PS3 isn’t just selling worse than xBox 360–it’s selling worse than the original xBox.

In the same vein, the Wershovenist Pig sends us this entry:

Nintendo changed the playing field in the handheld wars by taking risk – by changing the input (stylus) and introducing the two-screen layout – while Sony focused on graphics and processing power. The results thus far are conclusive – and damning – for Sony. The big question is whether or not the proposed changes are meaningful enough to tip the competitive balance, and if they are truly going to result in a handheld player with mass appeal.

As noted above, it appears that as goes the handheld market so goes the console market, with the Wii continuing to trounce the PS3 by a 3:1 margin. Further, another interesting tidbit are the latest web traffic stats for the “Big Three” native sites – Nintendo.com, Xbox.com and PlayStation.com. Nintendo.com is up 91% year-over-year, while PlayStation.com is down 8% over the similar period (FYI, Xbox.com is up a healthy 47% YoY). Conclusive of Sony’s defeat? Of course not. But are the trends disturbing for Sony? Absolutely. At some point Sony has to get the joke: is it super hi-tech and niche or mass market? Because right now it is straddling two worlds and not serving either one – or its shareholders – particularly well.

The great Seth Stevenson has a fabulous piece on the Geico Caveman ads. Stevenson groks that the spots are made great by the tiny, tiny details:

In one dialogue-free spot, we see a caveman riding an airport people-mover. He glides past a Geico billboard with the “So easy a caveman could do it” slogan, and he sighs in disgust. This surface joke is fine. But what I adore here is the sparkling precision of the art direction. The soundtrack is bouncy synth-pop from the little-known indie band Röyksopp. The caveman (en route to or from a vacation) totes a wooden tennis racket in a canvas shoulder bag. The implication of these careful cultural signifiers: The caveman has grasped not just literacy and reason but also the affectations of the modern hipster aesthete. (That knowingly antiquated racket might easily have been stolen from a Wes Anderson set.)

At the campaign’s ancillary Web site, CavemensCrib.com (it lets you poke around their apartment), we learn that the cavemen are into (among other things): blogging, Tolstoy, yoga, smoked Hungarian paprikash, and Paddy Chayefsky movies. They have poetry magnets on their fridge … in Esperanto.