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Adamle refuses Zeus offer of wife Hera, holds out for symbolic 2016 torch lighting

The front page headline in today’s Tribune  about the Chicago marathon said “Cool running.” The front page headline in today’s Sun-Times said “Cool runnings.” So much for the need for two newspapers in this town. Both papers buried the lede. The coolest running? Mike Adamle, who did 26.2 miles this weekend basically to cool down.

After he biked  112 miles. Which was after he swam 2.4 miles.

And today we’re celebrating that mere cruise by Columbus?

Adamle, at age 60, took 14 hours, 7 minutes and 39 seconds to complete the elite Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii on Saturday.  And he saw it was good. And on Sunday he rested.

The lord of lords Zeus, sitting atop Mt. Olympus, was so taken with Adamle’s accomplishment that He immediately tried to congratulate Adamle by overtaking Adamle’s iPod. But Adamle doesn’t use one, according to a story by David Haugh in the Tribune. Instead, Adamle likes to think about things while he’s exercising.  So Zeus had to send Hermes on winged foot to offer congratulations and a prize, Zeus’s wife, Hera.  But Adamle politely declined.

“With all due respect, everyone knows Hera’s a bitch,” Adamle said. Hermes then tried to throw in dinner for two on Olympus. But Adamle declined again. “They say I’d get nectar and ambrosia. But I’d probably get the leftovers of  Pelops, whom Tantalus tried to serve to the gods,” Adamle said.

Instead, Adamle countered. He asked that he become the torch-bearer for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago. Adamle will be 67 then, but it doesn’t matter: Chicago lost out on its Olympic bid. “True,” Adamle said. “But then we exist in the realm of imagination here in Chicago. The mayor has a reading program in which he exhorts children to take on such classics as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ when we know, in fact, that the mayor never read anything more than the Cliff’s Notes to the Harper Lee classic.”

Upon hearing of Adamle’s desire to be the imaginary torch-bearer, the ever-competitive Michael Jordan, hitherto bored by the Olympic quest, demanded that he get to light the imaginary Olympic torch, and then use the torch to light the cigar he would have been running with.

This was the second Ironman Adamle competed in.  He also competed 11 years ago. “This was the hardest thing I ever did,” said Adamle, who finished 29th in his age group and 1,449th overall in a field of about 1,800.  He did the 2.4-mile swim in 1:33:51, the 112-mile bike ride in 7:09:48 (and would have been 40 minutes faster but he had to fix his own flat tire), and the “marathon” in 5:14:04.

“The conditions were amazing,” he told the Tribune. “The tire made me adjust on the fly, but it was something special everyone should experience once.”

Adamle has now experienced it twice.  But then Adamle has always dwelled outside the realm of ordinary extraordinary existence.  He is the greatest football player to come out of  a school  that wants only to flirt with football but is still a University of Chicago wannabe that snubs the game.  He competes in a triathlon in the Pacific Ocean while everyone else stays here and does a mere marathon.   And he is  the only person ever to start a game in place of the greatest of them all, Walter Payton.  Maybe they ought to erect a statue of him in this town.

“It’s a shame that Walter doesn’t get a statue at Soldier Field,” Adamle said by phone from Hawaii. “But given Walter’s devilish nature, and the park district’s offer to give Walter his due at just about any other park in Chicago, why not just place a statue of him on the underside of the statue of General Sheridan on his horse just off Lake Shore Drive near Wrigley Field? You know, that very statue underside that the San Francisco Giants ritually paint orange. Every year the Giants can come by and put a paint brush in Walter’s hand. 

“It was an honor to be goosed by Walter. If you were lucky enough to get that treatment, you wished that you had more than another cheek to turn to him.”

Adamle was believed to be suffering from an extreme endorphin rush when he made that comment, the likely result of his second once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Mike Adamle is also a sportscaster for NBC5 in Chicago.

Bruce with greatness: “I met a future CBS anchor”

Bruce Wolf, former host of NBC5’s “Barely Today,” says he just realized he had a brush with greatness that’s almost as great as his recent appearance on “Dateline: NBC” in which he acted as an expert on the Shaun Gayle love triangle and was seen and heard in a five-second tease right before really famous NBC personality Ann Curry introduced the show.

The new brush is actually three years old. “I just found out that I once was in a car with CBS Morning News anchor Michelle Gielan,” Wolf said.

Gielan was featured on Sunday in a filler story for the TV Prevue insert in the Sun-Times.

“I read the story about her meteoric success, and then it dawned on me. She was in the car when we both were assigned to the auto show three years ago for Fox.  We chatted. Then when we got to the show she went out and did a feature  inside McCormick Place. I stayed outside and did an innocent little feature, too.

“That got me fired.”

The “innocent little feature” involved the keying of someone’s car in a stunt gone wrong.  Wolf was later exonerated in an arbitration procedure. And the man who tried to fire  him recently left Fox after alienating about every person who ever laid eyes on him there.

“But it’s not about me. It’s about me getting to be by Michelle. She turned out to be a star. And a star on national network news. Morning news yet. I know how tough that is,” said Wolf, who was the host of the aforesaid “Barely Today,” which started at 4:30 in the morning.

“From what I read, Michelle is working very hard, and according to the story, she ‘sometimes breaks major stories. She was the first newscaster to inform CBS’ audience of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s recent death.’ I mean, like wow.  The last CBS newscaster to inform the audience of a Kennedy death was Walter Cronkite, right?  Although maybe Charles Kuralt was on the road in Los Angeles when Bobby died. I don’t know,”  Wolf said.

“The point is, as the story says, she broke the story. It doesn’t say how, but I’m thinking that maybe she jumped off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and recovered a message in a bottle placed there by the Kopechne family admitting to the murder. That’s just my best guess,” Wolf said.

“It’s funny. Look at how our careers have diverged since that fateful ride in the car. It’s kind of like the the Harry Chapin song ‘Taxi,’ except she wasn’t my girlfriend and I wasn’t a cab driver, but she did take off for the footlights of Broadway, and I took off for NBC5.”

President promises more gay sex on “Entourage”

(AP) – President Barack Obama restated his campaign pledge to mandate more gay sex scenes in the HBO series “Entourage,” but left many in his audience of gay activists wondering when he would make good on the promise.

“I will end ‘don’t ask, you’ll make me gag,'” Obama said Saturday night to a standing ovation from a crowd of about 3,000 at the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay civil rights advocacy  group.  He offered no timetable or specifics and he acknowledged some may be growing impatient.

“I appreciate that some of you believe we have not moved fast enough,” Obama said. “Do not doubt the direction we’re headed in. The days of being satisfied with a once in a blue moon scene in which Ari’s wife comes home to see Lloyd (the gay Asian character) having a party with a bunch of naked men in her pool are over.  If Vince can have a three-way (a woman riding him while he is on his cell phone) every week, then we can certainly see much, much more gay sex, and make that explicit gay sex, on the show. The current ratio of hetero- to homo-sexual sex is, quite frankly, an abomination.”

Some advocates say they have already heard Obama’s promises and now want a specific timeline.  Activist Cleve Jones said it is preposterous that a show such as “Entourage” should be permitted to cater to heterosexual prejudices when even the military is now on the cusp of allowing gays to openly serve next to their heterosexual brothers in combat.

“In warfare you’re talking about a straight guy facing enemy bullets. And this straight guy has actually volunteered for this duty because his whole idea of masculinity is tied up with not being ‘queer,'” Jones said. “You’re talking about upsetting long-held ideas about military unit cohesion. About life and death situations. And all the audience of  ‘Entourage’ can stomach is a little comic relief courtesy of a fat gay Asian?  Give me a break.”

Jones pointed out that as much as 10% of the military has vowed to quit if gays are allowed in combat and another 14% are thinking seriously about leaving. A skeptical Jones says he suspects that if up to a quarter of the military dropped out, there wouldn’t be enough troops for the United States to honor its commitments, “which would sure make the decision on Afghanistan pretty easy,” Jones said.

“It does make you wonder about the President’s agenda,” Jones said. “It’s like he’s not as pro-gay  as he is anti-war. He may be using us a battering ram against the military.  That he gets all hepped up about. But something that could really help transform the culture, the insistence on explicit sex on ‘Entourage,’ well, he’s dilly-dallying on that.”

Government experts say Obama could very easily effect a change in the scripts on “Entourage.” One way would be to attach a change as a rider on the health care legislation. Another would be to appoint an openly gay member of the Supreme Court. But the President is concerned that should Justice John Paul Stevens retire, there would be no openly Protestant members of the Supreme Court, and in order to maintain minority resentment against the dominant WASP and gay-bashing culture, it would help to have at least one token Protestant.

But a gay-friendly court could be the best route. According to one court observer, “it takes a fine legal mind to obliterate the distinction between brotherly love and erotic love. Brotherly love, the ‘band of brothers’ love, has always been needed among soldiers in combat. It’s what will make you face those enemy bullets. You don’t want to let your comrades down, or worse, let them die. Erotic love, though, has always been viewed as something different. It’s what a man has for a woman. Or in the case of homosexuals, what a man has for another man. For generations the notion of that has made heterosexual men queasy. The idea of the guy next to you in the foxhole desiring you in that way could take your mind off the bullet headed for you, and him.  But that was then. Now, thankfully we’re over that.

“But ‘Entourage’? Nothing short of judicial fiat is going to change the heterosexual couch potato. The Supreme Court is the way to go.”

SCRIBBLES, DRIBBLES AND QUIBBLES, AND IS EVERY WEEK A BYE WEEK NOW FOR THE CHICAGO OLYMPIC COMMITTEE?

KYLE-HIGH STADIUM

Rick Morrissey of the Tribune, in Denver for some reason (to get an exclusive on the Rockies pulling a Charlie Finley and trying to employ orange baseballs that could be seen in the snow?) actually tried to do a, er, snow job on the readers with the thesis that Kyle Orton could be the franchise quarterback the Broncos have been waiting for.

Um, this was premised on Orton’s 4-0 start and the fact he’s always been a winner. ‘Tis true. “Tis also true that Orton’s first Broncos’ win came on a last-second tipped pass that went 87 yards for a touchdown. And that all four of his victories were made possible by a defense that had allowed a total of 26 points.

And then today’s game. Once you got over the Broncos’ throw-up, er, throwback uniforms, inspired by either the old San Diego Padres or the residue of drug test samples,  Orton looked pretty decent.  And not just as a receiver in the “Wild Horses” formation.

Yes, despite the yellow and  brown mustard uniforms and Rex’s jersey number 8, (the only more revolting sight was that of  Bill Belichick stuffing his sock with the red challenge flag,  the bloodiest-looking Boston sock since Curt Schilling),  Orton showed he can play quarterback.  A 98-yard drive to tie the game in the fourth quarter  (sure, a taunting penalty and a great offensive line helped), and then the drive in overtime to beat the Patriots and one of the all-time franchise quarterbacks, Tom Brady.  But Orton was a bit lucky. He almost threw an interception on the play before the winning field goal.

It also helps to have  Josh McDaniels, outcoaching his mentor, one of the all-time franchise coaches, Belichick.  

The Broncos are 5-0. The last time they started like that was in 1998, and they won the Super Bowl. So Orton might have a chance to show if he’s a franchise quarterback. Right now, you’d still have to say that Orton is to Cutler as Cutler was to Elway. Maybe in February Orton will show otherwise.

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CEDRIC TRESDOS COMPLEMENTS CHAD OCHOCINCO

And speaking of  players who were expendable here, the Bears face Cedric Benson in a fortnight (er, late afternoon, 3:15 start), and all he did today was become the first rusher to gain more than 100 yards in the last 40 games  against the Ravens. He had 120 yards.  So he’s flourishing in Cincy. Maybe the Cubs can trade Milton Bradley to  Cincy and save Dusty Baker’s job there.

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THE 40-YEAR-OLD VERSION

Yeah, Brett Favre was fine but look at the opponent. The Rams don’t even know how to do throwback uniforms right.  Vintage uniforms from 1999?  Shouldn’t the uniforms be at least as old the opposing quarterback? This won’t happen when Immediate Rush Limbaugh takes over.

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OLD STEEL ON ICE

Yes, it was great to see good ol’ numbers 21, 35, 9 and 18 on skates at the United Center for the home opener.  This, after the red carpet treatment (carpet diem is John McDonough’s marketing strategy. He doesn’t miss an opportunity to showcase the old-timers. In fact, since the Blackhawk blackout of home games has been lifted, we’ve seen more of Stan, Tony and Bobby at home than we ever did back in the day of the roar.  But Bobby and Tony had a hard time skating. Would be better to have them each drive a Zamboni and joust with their sticks. Bobby would try to flip off Tony’s mask. Tony would try to make Bobby go toupe-less.)

But ain’t it great that we can still call a 70-year-old man “Bobby”? He’s not 70.  It’s 1970, and Bobby and Tony and Stan are beating the Montreal Canadiens 10-2 in the last regular season game because the Habs had to pull their goalie midway through the game to try to score enough goals to get into the playoffs. I think that was before the roar.

Please tell me how Kris Versteeg saw Duncan Keith on the pass that set up the tying goal.  Does Kris have “spinorama-vision”?

Shouldn’t McDonough have been in charge of the city’s Olympic bid? Michael Jordan? McDonough would have gotten the ghost of Red Grange to gallop into the IOC’s dreams.

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SEETHING IS BELIEVING

Which is the greater case of denial?  One man, left field foul line umpire Phil Cuzzi not seeing what was right in front of his face, that is, Joe Mauer’s fly ball dropping into fair territory in the top of the 11th Friday night?

Or 50,006 fans, two innings earlier wildly cheering Alex Rodriguez, steroid cheat, as he trotted around the bases with the game-tying homerun?

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TAMPA 2 SCHEME: LOU, THEN LARUSSA?

Tony LaRussa says after a Cub-like exit against the Dodgers, he doesn’t know if he’s going to come back for a 15th year with the Cardinals. Anyone can win a World Series in St. Louis. Jim Essian could win one. Jerry Reinsdorf said the biggest mistake he ever made was letting Tony LaRussa go (and Jerry’s a guy who let Phil Jackson go). But Jerry hasn’t really paid dearly enough for letting Hawk hack Tony. Nothing short of the Cubs under LaRussa winning it all will do.

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THE GREAT DEWAYNE ROBBERY

Is Dewayne Wise, who just opted for free agency instead of accepting a demotion to the minors, the best White Sox center fielder ever?

Because all I know is that while Landis and Berry and Rowand were terrific,  Wise’s 3-D image will forever be embedded in our imagination as we gaze upon those other flat illustrations of  Pierce, Minoso,  and company.

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COMMIT TO THE INDIAN, BUT WHICH ONE?

The Gila Indian river tribe is trying to steal Cub Nation from Mesa and move it south of Phoenix during spring training.  I have a mind to make a Solomon, er, Sitting Bull-like decision, and order the Cubs to move to Florida, which is also wooing the team.  Arizona could lose $52 million a year if the Cubs move out of state. Maybe we should give Milton Bradley to Arizona.   And Cincy. Now that’s Solomon-like.

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WE RUNNETH OVER WITH CUPS

Any golf tournament called a “Cup” isn’t worth watching. Okay, maybe the Ryder Cup. But the Fed-Ex Cup followed by the President’s Cup? The President’s has all the luster of an off-year election.  And did you know golf has been added to the Olympics? Yes, for 2016. 2016! Not to worry. Tiger will have retired by then with the record in majors. And, besides,  wouldn’t you rather see golfers playing out of a sand trap on Ipanema beach?

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THE TOGETHERNESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNERS

I would have watched the Chicago marathon if the Bears had entered as a team during the bye week, with ball boy Darryl Magee taking the final leg.

Yo Roe! Mo’ news ho’s, mo’ dough, bro

Author’s note: Roe Conn wooed my alter ego, Bruce Wolf, whose ego was crushed at the altar in ’04 after Bruce thought he was going to replace Garry Meier as Roe’s partner on WLS-AM. Bruce is still bitter, I’m sure. I am not. There is no schadenfreude whatsoever motivating the following suggestions.

Roe Conn, who makes a reported million or so dollars a year (that is, until the company he works for, Citadel, goes bankrupt in a few months), has disappeared in the radio ratings. Actually, the station he works for, WLS (890AM), vanished in the September ratings period. This is amazing since WLS is a conservative talk station, and though anti-Obama fervor probably peaked in August, you’d think there would have been at least some trickle down benefit in September.

Maybe it’s because with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, WLS isn’t really very conservative at all. Mancow is a libertarian. And Roe, well, he’s more a rock ‘n’ roller than anything else. And can you really blame him? Rush Limbaugh has succeeded nationally because he pounds away like a Top 40 radio disc jockey.  He mentions the “drive-by media” as often as Felicia Middlebrooks gives the time and temp on WBBM (78o AM)(see WBBM radio news anchor to be hoisted up to Wrigley building clock, a previous post in this blog), and almost as often as Howard Stern of blessed memory mentions the word “breasts.”

But Roe is too smart and too eclectic to be yoked to such formats.  And recently he lost two of his on-air staffers because of budget cuts. So he’s probably very lonely now. No listeners. No one in studio. (well, there is Jim Johnson, who can be fun.)

So to help Roe out I’d like to be his virtual friend. He can pretend to converse with me. (Conversation is pretty much a one-way thing with Roe anyway.) He can use this column for ideas. He can even steal these ideas if he wants. Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I always say. So herewith some suggestions for today’s Roe show:

1) Playboy is going to have Marge Simpson as its centerfold. No, I’m not kidding. I’m not the boy who cried “Bruce Wolf” on this. She’s scheduled to be featured in the November issue. Aside from your garden variety double entendres (the magazine is going “blue”;  shouldn’t  the name of the magazine’s new  CEO be Ned Flanders, not Scott), what are the cultural ramifications? Have we come full circle-jerk to Esquire’s “Vargas girl” illustrations?

2) Clewless Lazare in today’s Bright One reports that the local Emmys are being downsized to the Park West, with a cash bar yet. Why doesn’t Emily Barr, the only tv news exec with cash (she’s WLS-TV’s general manager),  have the Emmys in a bigger venue, say Mark Giangreco’s tie closet at Channel 7?

3) Or speaking of the Park West, why not combine the Emmys with your own Newsapalooza, which was held at the very same Park West just last weekend, and according to Pulitzer Prize-winning gossip columnist Bill Zwecker (see Zwecker wins Pulitzer for outing William F. Buckley, Jr., a previous post in this blog), featured news anchorettes Amy Jacobson, Marion Brooks, Natalie Martinez and Ginger Zee doing a version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” dance number? Wouldn’t such a number have jazzed up the Emmys? It could have been the best moment in local Emmy history since the offstage announcer bouyantly proclaimed, “And the winner is: the Laurie Dann massacre,” and the band jubilantly struck up  “Hold on, I’m coming” as several tv newsbeings came to the stage to accept the award for their breaking news coverage of a mentally ill woman who shot four schoolchildren, killing one.

4) Speaking of the newschicks dancing, Zwecker reported that your web site, roeconn.com,  had more than 250,000 views (at least 125,000 of which were not from Andy Avalos), and your site even crashed. But a cursory check of the site shows that you have no advertising on the site, Roe. Did you actually blow a chance to reap revenue? You have to be portable nowadays. You have to go where the audience is at any particular moment.

5) How’s about blackmail? Why don’t you threaten NBC5  with greater exposure of the video of their  leotarded newscastresses? Yes, the video seems harmless enough. But then NBC5 actually fired Amy Jacobson when she was innocently caught wearing a bikini top by a Peeping Tom camera from Channel 2. NBC was absolutely right in firing Jacobson. NBC5 appeals to many women viewers. Women, after all, are the ones whom advertisers are trying to reach. And though women like to say they are thoroughly modern Millies, their visceral reaction is to abhor such displays. Especially if the women viewers themselves don’t look as good as the anchorettes.  You could capitalize on this, Roe. I’m thinking there’s at least a nightly commentary in this  for you on Channel 5 if you play your cards right. And if you can bring in a sponsor.  Have you thought about contacting General Electric about buying time on its own station? Might be more worthwhile than the money they’ve spent lobbying for cap and trade legislation.

Anyway, these are just suggestions. I know it can be lonely these days on the radio. But you can use me as your virtual friend. Kind of the way zaftig Oprah uses svelte Oprah as a friend now that Oprah’s imaginary friends (that is, viewers) are abandoning her. (see 7-year-old schizophrenic interviews Oprah, a previous post in this blog)

Best of luck, my dear Wormwood, er, Roe.

Immediate Rush: Limbaugh vs. Obama in new Reality Football League

A little-known earmark to the Baucus health care bill before Congress would award the President of the United States a National Football League franchise so that he could compete with conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who is expected to purchase part of the St. Louis Rams.

It’s a pilot program, similar to  current plans for a small tort reform experiment, and is designed to determine what is the most productive way to run life in these United States,  “life being,  after all, a metaphor for football,” said Donald Trump and Rep. Barney Frank in unison. Trump and Frank are expected to oversee the experiment, which is tentatively titled “Celebrity Government Apprentice” and will feature well-known people who have absolutely no experience running a football team or a government.

While Limbaugh will be purchasing an interest in the Rams, the President will receive federal funding to take over a controlling interest in the Washington Redskins.

“This is going to be something,” said Mitch Rosen, program director of WSCR (the SCORE), a sports radio station. “The two things men like to talk about are football and politics. And you can’t really talk politics. You can only shout it. Which is why Mike North alienated so many people in Chicago. And why we get skittish when our hosts try to talk politics.

“But now we’ll have no choice. This is going to be explosive,” Rosen said.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the match will hearken back to a time when kingdoms would decide disputes via a chess match instead of a war. “Actually, I don’t know if that ever really happened because the history I’ve studied goes only as far back as FDR’s first term, but it sounds good,” she said.

Limbaugh will succeed if he  practices what he preaches, that is, if he hires the right people and then stays out of the way, according to football expert Geoffrey Norman of National Review Online.  Norman said he expects Limbaugh’s Rams will play “hard-nosed, fundamental football.”

As for the President’s team, the first order of business would appear to be having a dialogue on the team name, the Redskins.  The President is expected to ask  a number of people over to the White House for a beer to discuss the problem. Among participants will be Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Oprah Winfrey, Janeane Garofalo, Regina Lasko, Tony Rezko,  Michael Moore and Saturday Night Live Obama imitator Fred Armisen.

There are no other plans for the team but the President is apparently confident that the current owner, Daniel Snyder,  will eventually succeed with his hands-on approach and Mao Tse Tung-style approach of constant revolution. “Eventually he’s going to get it. It’s just a question of spending enough money. And he’s gaining more and more experience each year as an owner,” said David Axelrod, White House senior advisor.  Axelrod pointed out that the Redskins recently came very close to beating the Detroit Lions.

7-year-old schizophrenic interviews Oprah

In perhaps one of the most stunning moments involving a child in tv history since a 3-year-old Tiger Woods sank a putt on the “Mike Douglas show” with an amazed Bob Hope watching, a 7-year-old schizophrenic interviewed Oprah on  Oprah Winfrey’s “Oprah” show and got the host (Oprah) to admit that she has as many as seven million imaginary friends.

“Actually, the seven million is down 7% from last year, and I’ve had fewer and fewer friends watching me in recent years,” said a sad Oprah to Jani Schofield, one of the few children who has been diagnosed with a severe case of  schizophrenia. Only one in 40,000 children under the age of 13 is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and it’s even rarer to diagnose a child as young as Jani with the disease. Jani lives in an imaginary world called “Calalini” and hallucinates that she sees numerous friends, enemies and animals.  Her story and her parents’ struggle to deal with it made for compelling and heart-rending viewing on the “Oprah” show Tuesday.

But startling in its own way was Oprah’s revelation during intense questioning by Jani that Oprah actually believes the millions of people who watch her are her “friends.” With fewer and fewer watching, Oprah says she’s beginning to think she is not as loved as she thought she was.

“What do I have to do? Have my own ‘cash for clunkers’ program and give everyone in America a Pontiac?” said the host of the show that is now in its 24th season.

Oprah took the occasion to point out that sometimes she believes her so-called “friends” are like “Jay Gatsby’s entourage in ‘The Great Gatsby.’  They’re just there for the entertainment. Like when I bring on a one in 40,000-plus guest. Like a Republican precinct captain in Chicago.”

Oprah said she is so troubled now by her dwindling base of friends that sometimes she believes she has only one person she can trust, and that is either zaftig Oprah or svelte Oprah, depending on which one  she isn’t at any particular moment.

She added that she plans to talk to Dr. Phil when he appears on the show for the first time in seven years to help boost Oprah’s sagging morale. For his part, Dr. Phil said he would much rather speak to Oprah in private and then abuse the doctor-patient privilege of confidentiality as he did when he visited an overexposed Britney Spears in the hospital and then went public with what he learned from the visit.

“It’s better if I divulge something. It’s more cathartic for the public than if Oprah and I have an open discussion on the air,” said Phil, who added that his primary duty as a therapist is his relationship to his public.

Meanwhile, veteran tv analysts said that the interview of Oprah by the 7-year-old girl will rank as one of the most memorable moments involving children on television. “It’s got to be right up there with the time the 5-year-old boy said to Bozo ‘cram it clown’ during the Grand Prize game,” said the late tv analyst Paul Molloy. “And that didn’t even happen.”

Daley: I wish we’d had Bears ball boy in Copenhagen

Mayor Daley, playing Monday morning quarterback, said he now wishes he would have had the young man who plays catch with the Bears quarterback rather than the president of the United States at the city’s pitch for the Olympics in Copenhagen last week.

The young man, Darryl Magee, a junior at the University of Illinois, achieved 15 seconds of fame on Sunday when he was seen running on the Soldier Field sideline to keep up with Bears player Johnny Knox, who was in the process of returning a kickoff 102 yards for a game-changing touchdown. Magee is a Bears ball boy and part of his responsibility is to retrieve footballs after kickoff returns.

“I just wish we’d had him in Copenhagen. He represents the ‘I will’ spirit of the city,” Daley said. “The president was off his game. But this kid, he’s like all of us. He’s about the Olympics.  He was literally chasing the dream.”

Magee, who wears jersey number 1, may have eclipsed Ronnie Woo-Woo Wickers as Chicago’s most famous uniformed wannabe. Wickers, of course,  is the pseudonym of former Cub great Ernie Banks, who simply cannot stay away from the park or the limelight.

Still, Magee  is a distant second to former Blackhawk star Tony Amonte, who once bought a Tony Amonte jersey number 10 at Hawkquarters on Michigan Avenue, put the jersey on  and then walked up and down the Mag Mile to see if anyone would recognize him. No one did even though his name was on the back of  his uniform.  He was a wannabe who wanted to be himself  but no one cared.

Magee has gained such fame that he re-created his sideline run for photographers at a park near his home in Champaign. In other words, he was, as the Doobie Brothers once said, re-creating what had yet to be created, that is, an actual touchdown run.

Magee, though still at Illinois, is 24 years old. He took time off from school but has come back to study kinesiology, the study of human movement.  It is not known whether he received independent study credit for his anatomical feat on the sidelines.

And at 24, the ball boy is actually two years older than the ball man, Knox, who ran back the kickoff.  As such Magee is reminiscent of famous Cubs employee  Marla Collins, who was the Major Leagues’ first ball girl. She was forced into retirement at age 28  but not because she was older than many of the players.  She was dismissed when she displayed her friendly confines in Playboy.

Magee also has become the city’s most popular person to wear jersey number 1, ahead of the Bulls’ Derrick Rose, who recently insisted that he took the ACT even though it was the SAT that he was accused of cheating on, and the Cubs’ Kosuke Fukodome, the Japanese-born player who fled to the Phillipines  immediately after Chicago was eliminated from Olympic consideration and before Tokyo was knocked out of the competition. It is not known yet whether Fukodome was informed that the war is over, and both sides lost.

President hires ESPN reporter’s Peeping Tom to fix Homeland Security mess

In what many MSNBC commentators are dubbing a masterstroke of ingenuity, President Obama has granted a pre-emptive pardon to the Westmont man accused of secretly videotaping ESPN reporter Erin Andrews and has assigned him the task of fixing Cook County’s anti-terrorism program.

The man, Michael David Barrett (no relation to the former Cubs catcher), has been arrested for allegedly surreptitiously videotaping Andrews in the nude. But the President, who had just seen “The Dirty Dozen” on AMC, has decided Barrett’s talents are too valuable and so the President has placed Barrett in charge of Project Shield, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security program that is supposed to equip all 128 suburbs countywide with state-of-the-art video cameras to combat terrorism but has been dogged by cost overruns and technical problems, according to a Future Comcast (nee NBC5)/Future Tribune Insert (nee Sun-Times) investigation.

“Michael Barrett knows how to track down people and get them on video. We have to think outside the batter’s box, no pun intended. Because it’s not that Michael Barrett,” said the President.

The Homeland Security Department also announced that while Barrett is busy re-tooling surveillance techniques for area law enforcement agencies, Red Light camera video will be used to catch terrorists.

“Not for acts of terrorism per se. But for traffic violations. That system is fantastic. People are getting nailed all over the place for not making full stops at red lights when they’re making right turns,” a spokesman said. “And you can bet a terrorist is going to be a little fearful about leaving plans to blow up a building on the dashboard what with Big Brother perched somewhere overhead.”

Meanwhile, though some government anti-terrorist plans are proving to be boondoggles, some private efforts have paid off in reducing terrorism. At FoxChicago studios, for example, in downtown Chicago, security personnel were doubled after September 11, 2001, and there have been no terrorist incidents.

“We used to have one security guard sleeping in the vestibule to our studios. But after 9/11 we doubled our force and had two sleeping, ” said Pat Nellum, former general manager. “We figured that no terrorist would hazard stepping in the crossfire of the guards’ snoring. The interruption of the sound waves might have stirred one sleeping guard to wake up.”

And indeed there have been no terrorist incidents at FoxChicago since 9/11.