Really, there are lines that even I won’t cross. Here’s Mickey Kaus with what is the end of his friendship with Andrew Sullivan:

Sullivan: HIV Made Me More Modest! Oh, wait. Sorry. What he actually wrote was:

HIV transformed my life, made me a better and braver writer ….

That’s one big Rubicon. Something must have transpired between them in private, no?

My colleague David Skinner must really hate me, for he just left in my office an unopened copy of America’s Funniest Home Videos: Volume 1 with Tom Bergeron. This prized package includes 12 episodes on 3 DVDs, plus the bonus disc with the anniversary 300th episode (parts 1 and 2!) and, best of all: “A Thousand Guaranteed Laughs!”

A thousand, really? The liner notes describe America’s Funniest Home Videos (or AFHV) as “an American institution…. From practical jokes to home improvement plans gone awry, from animal mishaps to just flat out strange behavior…” Enough already. Things went downhill ever since the first few seasons of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. Remember the “practical joke” played on Shirley Jones involving a talking parrot that was really a robot? Or the melting ice-sculpture of Jerry Lewis? Or the knock-off show Bloopers, Bleeps, and Blunders hosted by Steve Lawrence and Don Rickles? And why did I waste so many precious hours of my youth watching this instead of reading porn?

This latest DVD should come with a warning: That watching these shows will numb the brain, that whether it be Tom Bergeron or Bob Saget, root canal is still preferable. These tapes should be sent to Guantanamo. Interrogators can then pose the ultimate question to a terrorist:

Either tell us who is in your network or one more episode of “CAT FALLS OFF TV!!!”

I’ve always been skeptical of the glossy magazine tendency to rank things. Atlanta’s Top Doctors! Missouri’s Best High Schools! New England’s #1 Chowder!

These rankings must be a crock, right? I mean, how could some dopey editor actually survey all the doctors in the Atlanta metro area? Or, for that matter, all the chowder in New England? These exercises must be bogus, right? I’ve suspected as much, but now I have proof.

Money magazine has just ranked America’s “Best Places to Live” for 2005. Yup, these geniuses have performed the Herculean task of surveying every town, from sea to shining sea, compiling a careful set of metrics, and ranking the towns accordingly. I’m sure the editors at Money are all very nice people, but they’re also frauds. Gigantic, stinking hacks. How do I know this? Because I grew up America’s #1 Town (for 2005)–sunny, beautiful Moorestown, New Jersey.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with Moorestown. It’s a perfectly pleasant little berg. It has a nice main street, reasonably good public schools, and an unbelievably kick-ass program of girls sports. (During my time at Moorestown High, the girls’ soccer, field hockey, tennis, and lacrosse teams all won multiple state championships. Those programs are all still dominant today, as is the girls cross-country program, which has also added a couple won state championships. If you want your daughter to get an athletic scholarship to college, Moorestown might well be your #1 town.)

But Moorestown’s best days are behind it. In the last 15 years the township has been plagued by sprawl as the town council granted virtually unlimited rights to the Toll Brothers to develop every last inch of land. Moorestown used to be stately houses, well-planned subdivisions, and acres of peach orchards. Today you’re hard-pressed to find a single tree where the farmland used to be. McMansions huddle next to each other on itsy-bitsy parcels of land. The quaint demeanor the Money editors admire is now indistinguishable from nearby Marlton or Medford.

The town’s infrastructure is set to buckle under the population boom–there simply aren’t enough roads to get new residents quickly from their homes to Route 38 and I-295–which most of them will take to their jobs. The school system, once one of the best in New Jersey, has been passing a series of ill-advised bond measures to fill in the gaps as the school-age population has just about doubled in less than a decade. The system’s shortcomings have been papered over so far, but only just, and the biggest glut of kids is on the horizon. Yet the town still has no long-term plan. Anyone who spent even 36 hours in Moorestown researching the community would uncover this problems easily.

(And what type of people are living in these McMansions and sending their kids to the schools? Remember Blair Hornstine, the girl who, at the urging of her father, sued her school to be valedictorian? That was Moorestown.)

Moorestown, in other words, has, for years now, been passing the buck through bad management. It has a nest of problems all beginning to manifest themselves. Did I love growing up there? You betcha. Is it still a great place to raise kids? Sure. But is it the “#1 Town in America”? Absolutely not. It isn’t even the #1 town in South Jersey. (That would be Haddonfield.)

The goal of this, mind you, isn’t to knock Moorestown, for which I have a great deal of affection. The point is that the people at Money don’t have any idea what our country’s “best town” is. And by pretending that they do somehow “know” this great unknowable cardinality, the editors and their sham rankings only reinforce to the world how arrogant and idiotic and intellectually bankrupt most journalists are.

Like we needed the help.

There have been a good number of reporting pieces and op-eds published lately (such as in this week’s Weekly Standard) about the London bombings and their aftermath. Unfortunately, Candida Crewe’s column in the Washington Post is not one of them. The author expresses no surprise that the attacks occurred: “I mean, why should our country, with Blair so much in Bush’s pocket, and so much a part of the Iraq fray, have continued to get off scot-free?” Crewe panics when she thinks her au pair might have been on that double-decker bus. Thankfully she wasn’t and Crewe considers her experience “piffling.” But she goes on to say that “I suspect that Blair’s co-dependent love affair with George Bush and our repellent involvement in Iraq is largely responsible for today’s ‘inevitable.'” Repellent indeed.

Crewe admits that “our ‘stiff upper lip’ is quivering a little. With full-blown anger as well as low-burn fear for the future.” I think it’s clear where she directs her “full-blown anger,” and it’s not at the Finsbury mosque.

Incidentally, the title of Crewe’s memoir is Eating Myself, which I am fairly certain is banned in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The book, that is.

Galley Friend B.W. emails this story:

My mother-in-law swung by and babynapped our son Billy this morning to take him to the park along with a friend of hers and the friend’s grandkid. The little girl’s name? Camden.

Galley Mom AMJCL calls in with a report that today is the 40th Anniversary of the Slurpee. Excellent news for all.

The Slurpee is a favorite of my youth, and was nearly always consumed as post-tennis or basketball refreshment, along with a bag of Smartfood. Oh, the joys of a growing up in New Jersey idyll.

Of course, you don’t care about that. But you may care that 7-11 is serving up free Slurpees all day in celebration. Go. Enjoy. And if you can, mix the Cherry and Coke flavors, and pour some for your homey.

Last Friday I was unkind to Marvel’s theatrical version of Fantastic Four and I closed my review by predicting confidently that there was no hope of a sequel ever being made, as the movie would likely be a career-ender for director Tim Story.

As of this morning, Fantastic Four has grossed $56 million, exceeding Fox’s wildest expectations and all but guaranteeing both a sequel and a never-ending stream of work for Mr. Story. Look who the genius is.

Still, I stand by my review–or at least the non-falsifiable parts of it. Fantastic Four is the worst-made movie I’ve seen in theaters in at least two years. The film promises nothing and delivers even less. That this dreck is able to open wide is immensely depressing.

Andrew Sullivan finishes his Karl Rove wrap-up with this pointer:

Kinsley differs from the NYT in an interesting piece of counter-intuitive reasoning here.

But of course!