*Sarah Palin, likely the nation's single least qualified candidate for national office, is not going away. That much is clear from her recent media interviews, fund-raising appearances and, now, this ridiculous brouhaha with David Letterman, in which she is intellectually overmatched and is simply using to play to her hard right base. Yes, even Letterman acknowledges bad taste in a couple of his one-liners about Palin and family. But for her to invoke "statuatory rape" and insinuate it wouldn't be safe for her 14-year-old to be around him, is the kind of reactionary rhetoric that's helping to kill the Republican Party - sort of like calling a Supreme Court nominee a racist.

*I'm not big on movie remakes, particularly those based on films I've enjoyed. So I haven't been holding out much hope for "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3". For me, the 1974 Walter Matthau-Robert Shaw-Jerry Stiller-Hector Elizondo original is the gold standard New York City thriller. But I've read decent reviews in several papers this morning of the newDenzel Washington-John Travolta version. Negative notices would have kept me out of the theater. Now, I'm willing to give this remake a look.

*TV sports broadcasting technology is highly advanced, so much so that directors refuse to let one or two replays suffice when they have a half-dozen more queued up (even if the others don't provide any additional insight). But the single biggest waste of your time is the "pitch-by-pitch" replay of a baseball at-bat. I know the games are long and down time is such that TV has to come up with some movement in between live action. But as a baseball observer with a modicum of sophistication accumulated over a half-century of watching and reporting, I'm here to tell you that the "pitch-by-pitch" replays offer nothing to the telecasts.