Don't make trouble for Rahm Emanuel. Ton. Of. Bricks.

Top three stories:

1. Phelps. His quest for eight gold medals roped in more non-sports fans in my acquaintance than any other story. If the measure of "bigness" is the number of people following the story as it happened, this has to be number one.

2. The Chinese gymnasts. Same rationale, only with greater cultural significance. If someone had broken the story open to the extent that the Chinese government was forced to admit some of the girls were underage, this might have usurped Phelps.

3. Tiger. Different year, new legends, always news.

Under-reported

I'll go with the recent trend of major college football programs appointed open-ended heirs apparent, and how this may represent an end run around the requirement to interview minority candidates for job openings. The old-boy network going proactive.

Is a helluva writer for my hometown paper. I didn't know until today that he's the president of the BBWAA, but I'm not surprised to see this happen under his stewardship. The new additions live and breathe baseball (not just stats) -- even moreso than many other members whose duties are split among several sports.

...do what you wanna do...

was a catastrophe, to be sure. Placing holders of unsecured debt in front of those holding secured debt was a victory for lobbyists and a defeat for anybody who thought that lenders bore some responsibility for the risk associated with the extension of credit.

The lack of regulation of home loan products is another well-chronicled cause of the present situation.

The supposed failure of the bailout, though -- excuse me for saying so, but the returns aren't in yet. Yes, the gub'mint is dithering about how to target the cash. And yes, the recipients are dithering about what to do with it. But the situation that had arisen was very real -- stories have abounded of how legitimate borrowers could not raise capital because otherwise willing lenders couldn't lay off their cash position. This is the system by which an economy expands and creates jobs.

Sorry if you don't like it -- I don't like everything about it, either. But to decry government intervention in a liquidity crisis is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem at best, and to play dice with millions of jobs at worst.

In a dusty corner of my brain I seem to remember a year when you could perform a similar exercise and conclude that Slippery Rock University held claim to the national title. Can anyone confirm this?

Cheney..."retiring from public life". There are a lot of words one could use to describe Cheney's mendacious, cloistered tenure (a couple of my favorites -- mendacious, cloistered), but "public" ain't one of them.

Sports journalism...tends to be a bit of a ghetto where the less intellectual members of the journalistic profession gather.

While you can certainly come up with examples of less-than-brilliant sportswriters, I don't think that blanket statement is true at all. Think of all the other beats that comprised what we used to call the "newspaper": business, opinion, lifestyle, politics, law and order, obits, etc. A good sportswriter covers all those beats through the prism of sports -- which is why, in my opinion, sports actually attracts more than its share of the best writers.

But you have to use it, not hide behind it. If you have some productive business dealings, or merely pleasant communication, with any of these business partners, make it a point to say so out loud. Not in direct response to your boss's snark. Not even necessarily in her presence. Just be the person who will occasionally say the nice things.

It might eventually curb some of your boss's worst impulses in your presence. But even if not, being nice is your proactive defense, and can lead to other, better opportunities down the road. You won't impress anybody who rolls their eyes at "pollyannas", but there are lots of other people (perhaps even in other departments of your company) who will seek you out as someone they enjoyed dealing with.

Steve Phillips is The Great Gazoo of Sunday Night Baseball.

(Which, I admit, I stopped watching years ago)

but it did conjure up (for me) an image of Phillips sitting between, and slightly behind, Miller and Morgan, piping up with the occasional distracting inanity....

Yes, that's long been a euphemism for Democratic capitulation. However, the recent Obama olive branches and subsequent Republican whitewash on the stimulus package brings to mind a new possibility -- when you know your calls for cooperation will go unheeded, all the more reason to make the call. It exposes Republicans as obstructionist, at which Dems can shrug their shoulders, say they tried, and pass their agenda. One hopes, anyway....

The "25 Random Things" is the perfect exercise for us relative oldsters who've descended upon Facebook recently. I've found dozens of well-remembered old friends whom I'd lost touch with, and many of them have posted lists that include anecdotes I'd forgotten, along with heartfelt truths I'd never known. It's brought me closer again to people I liked way back when, and even given me a better understanding of people I now know, some of whom wrote things I couldn't imagine hearing them say. FWIW, I've linked to my attempt.

...is to find love for "vanscendant" of Salon Personals fame. Day after day, her intently smoldering visage haunts my quest for the latest headlines. And I am forced repeatedly to confront the same syntactic dilemma -- is achieving the inevitable "sexy"?

More to the point, can something which is inevitable be considered an achievement at all? This, it seems to me, is a crucial question to answer. Only then (and only if answered in the affirmative -- a dubious proposition, at best) should we endeavor to characterize said achievement on some sort of cultural scale of relative desirability.