Recently I decided to check in with Glenn Beck. (I do this semi-regularly with all the various cable news talk shows out of a sense of responsibility, though I never last more than about 10 minutes at a stretch.) I was not optimistic. Based on the clips I'd been exposed to by people who don't like Glenn Beck, I expected a mix between a revival meeting, a Klan rally, and the McCarthy hearings. Instead, I got Glenn in front of a blackboard, lecturing about...Calvin Coolidge. READ MORE

Have you ever looked at a Wikipedia page for a specific calendar year? Not only is it a very poor way to get a sense of what happened in a given year, but it's also depressing as hell – it's essentially a more-morbid-than-average local news broadcast for the entire world, only with the odd chance that some joker plugs "CHAD IS A FAG!!1!" in for a few minutes before it gets corrected. I found this out when I made the mistake of looking up the Wiki page for the year 2007 before writing this column. I did this because I wanted to see if there was a reason why I remember '07 as being a singularly shitty part of the low, dishonest and just-concluded decade. And it turns out, per Wikipedia, that 2007 was pretty freaking terrible – a succession of mine disasters and suicide bombings and cyclones, punctuated by puzzling, faintly bummerish mundanities like Vladimir Putin being named Time's Person of the Year (really) and the UN declaring "The International Year of Languages." READ MORE

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Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger signed a number of bills. The one in the spotlight was SB1449, which decriminalized marijuana possession. But he also signed SB435, a far more controversial bill empowering police to cite motorcycles for noise pollution. The bill will also require a motorcycle to display its stock or aftermarket exhaust system's EPA stamp, certifying compliance with federal laws that have been in place, if unenforced, for a quarter century. Similar legislation has recently been passed or is pending in other states including Oregon and Maine and individual communities from Denver to Green Bay. READ MORE

The NFL was rocked today by news that the New England Patriots' Randy Moss is returning to his old club, the Minnesota Vikings-a club helmed by QB Brett Favre, who has openly pined for Moss since before "Guiding Light" was a hit soap opera. We asked Jeff Johnson and David Roth to make sense of it all. READ MORE

There's no real reason why the town where I grew up needed to replace the grass on the high school's varsity football field with the expensive and aesthetically jarring sport-carpeting known as field turf. But my North Jersey hometown has apparently decided to rebrand itself, from the (incandescently carpeted) ground on up, as a Jersey-accented analogue to "Friday Night Lights"' Dillon, Texas. The process is going well, judging by the high school team's wins and losses (and, anecdotally, judging by the increases in reported incidences of high-school bullying and the number of middle-aged males in the local supermarket rocking the windbreaker-reliant Offensive Coordinator Look). That the town is doing this maybe shouldn't be surprising – no place so ruby-red in its Republicanism could stay fired up about soccer forever – but it feels strange all the same. I may be deep in the weeds of early-onset curmudgeonhood here, but I remember my hometown as, in keeping with its general tone of apathetic idyll, a place that held football and its related manias at a sensible remove. I was raised a knowledgeable but casual Giants fan among other knowledgeable-but-casuals. All of which I suppose makes it strange – and I want to be very careful about how I phrase this – just how much I fucking hate the Philadelphia Eagles. READ MORE

Of the three main drivers of internet culture-blogs, social networking sites and forums-most people in the media and in the general Internet-using public only understand two. Blogs work in a very obvious way: they're like magazines or newspapers, but light. Information spreads from blog to blog up and down the food chain, but it's pretty traceable. Social networks work in a different but equally obvious way: they're like real-world word of mouth, but easier to track, though still much tougher to control or predict than blogs. READ MORE