Galley friend B.F. passes on this unbelievable story from ESPN.com about an incident that recently took place at the Twin Cities airport involving Vikings star Onterrio Smith. As it turns out, Smith was found carrying “several vials of dried urine and a device called ‘The Original Whizzinator,’ which includes a fake penis, bladder and athletic supporter.”

Police originally stopped the running back because they mistook the urine powder for cocaine. (I really don’t want to know how they figured out it wasn’t.)

Buried in this story about the Under-12 ban on Dr. Who in Britain is this nugget:

The BBFC said 2004 movie Spider-Man 2 was similarly issued with a 12 certificate, rather than the less restrictive PG rating.

“It received a 12 because of its scenes of urban violence and the fact that role model Spider-Man used violence as a way of dealing with his problems.”

If only Spidey had tried dialoguing with Dr. Octopus. Or had sought a U.N. resolution.

P.S.: The new Dr. Who is pretty good, actually, even if it does lack Jelly Babies.

It isn’t every day that someone decides to reinvent the wheel, but that’s what the New York Times is doing now.

In September, the Times will begin offering “TimesSelect” (note to professional namers: that “sS” is awkward and off-putting), which will be a $49.95 subscription in order to get access to Times opinion pieces. How is this reinventing the wheel?

There’s only one major print entity making real money on the web: The Wall Street Journal. The Journal has done this by keeping an absolute zone of protection around its news product: If you want to read the news from the Journal online, you have to pay, and pay dearly (($79 a year). But the Journal long ago decided to give away it’s opinion pieces for free. To this end it created OpinionJournal.com.

So the folks at the New York Times Company have surveyed the marketplace, seen everyone else lose their shirts, locked onto the one winner and said to themselves, Hey, let’s just use the formula the Journal uses–only backwards! We’ll give all the news away, but charge them for the op-eds!

Maybe this will work out for the Times–I hope it does. But I have to wonder why they think they’ve outsmarted the only winner in the marketplace. TimesSelect has “bust” written all over it.

This brilliant Philadelphia Inquirer piece will be of interest to anyone who (a) remembers the Garden State Race Track (home of a certain Galley Slave high school prom) fondly; (b) is interested in real estate scams; or (c) anyone who likes to see the rich get their come-uppence:

Just 20 years after it rose phoenixlike from the ashes of a devastating fire, the glitzy Cherry Hill racetrack is gone. The ambitious entrepreneur who spent $170 million to rebuild it now spends his days eating canned tuna and microwaved oatmeal in a New Jersey federal prison. . . .

Only in Jersey.

Since last Friday, our gMail account has been getting bombarded with German–and only German–spam. Any idea what that’s all about?

John Podhoretz is bucking the critical trend–he hates Revenge of the Sith and puts it on his short list for “Worst Script Ever Written.”

(John’s review, by the way, is pretty great: “You should never have come to Naboo, Dooku!”)

Here’s what worries me, though: John loved Phantom Menace. At the time, he called it “a very good movie, lovely to look at, with an interesting and complicated story line.”

If that’s his baseline, how bad is Sith? I’ll let you know on Wednesday.

Update, 12:20 p.m.: Anthony Lane weighs in:

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. . . .

The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO . . .

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? . . . At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

Yeah baby!

Lots of hoopla surrounding the finale of Everybody Loves Raymond this week. I don’t really understand it, myself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a well-made, funny show. But name a TV series that’s been as highly-rated and long-running as Raymond that’s left a smaller cultural footprint?

You could make an argument that Raymond is one of the five or ten most successful TV shows of the last decade, yet it leaves behind nothing. There are no cultural artifacts left over from its run. It hasn’t launched anyone new into zeitgeist. And it hasn’t changed the TV industry or the sitcom in even a small way.

Can any of you point to shows with as much success as Raymond, but less influence?

Update, 11:15 a.m.: Galley Friend J.E. writes in:

Frasier. Dallas. And others. The influence of a show like Raymond should be measured by how it “inspired” other series. Raymond rewrote the utterly dysfunctional family (Married With Children) into something that looks and feels fresh and true. It wasn’t mean spirited, the way family comedies had been for at least ten years. Now there’s a bunch of shows (like King of Queens) that don’t paint all families as pathological. That’s a lot of influence.

I would say that Frasier was nowhere near Raymond in terms of commercial success–Raymond has been a top 10 show for almost seven years and an anchor for CBS, while Frasier was a critical darling that NBC had to shift around in the schedule to protect. And I would suggest that Dallas practically invented the modern cliff-hanger: “Who Shot J.R.?” captivated the entire nation like nothing else in pop culture and the reveal was, at the time, the highest-rated series episode in TV history.

But J.E.’s larger point, that Raymond has made it safe for television to love the functional family again, seems pretty spot-on, and is a very big deal indeed. Could this be Raymond‘s hidden legacy?

I like Rita Cosby, she’s seems like a nice lady. But she reminds me a little too much of Victoria Jackson.