Just because you don’t follow football and will only be watching the big game Sunday for the commercials and waiting around for “Glee” to be on doesn’t mean you can’t sound smart in front of your judgmental (probably terrible) friends and family. As a public service, we’ve let noted liver-in-his-mother’s basement Jim Behrle once again collect some semi-brilliant things for you to spout out between nacho bites that might just make you sound like you’ve seen an American Football game before. He’s been locked in his man-cave listening to sports talk radio for the past six months: he has plenty of wisdom to spare.

NOTE: Concussion jokes will be very in this year, as at least 3 players will be peeled off the turf from swooning head shots.

PRE-GAME

“This could be the last NFL football game we see for a year or two. With the impending end of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, I think next February we’ll be watching Premiere League Football and not any kind of Super Bowl.”

“If Steelers Pro Bowl center Maurkice Pouncey can’t play in this game it could spell total defeat for Terrible Towel Team. He is the key to this game. No disrespect to back-up center Doug Legursky, but he was responsible for at least [maybe hold up two fingers for emphasis here] big problems with the exchange and one safety in the game against the Jets. The Steelers can ill-afford to make such mistakes in the big game.”

“Did you see that beatdown President Obama gave to Bill O”Reilly earlier? That’s what the Packers are going to do with the Steelers: Wipe the Matrix Artificial Turf with them.”

“With the ice storm and two of the most-followed teams in the NFL, this might be the Highest Rated Super Bowl in History. In spite of the Black Eyed Peas.”

“’Yins’ is Pittsburghese for ‘y’all.’ And just like ‘y’all,’ ‘yins’ should never be used by anyone.”

“The way to beat the Steelers is to spread the field with 5 wide receiver sets and use short passes underneath their coverage to slowly gain yardage. The way to beat the Packers is to throw to the opposite side of the field from cornerback Charles Woodson.”

“Did you see that beatdown Christina Aguilera gave the Star-Spangled Banner? That’s what the Green Bay Packers are going to do to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Make them walk around like bow-legged, tuneless tramps.”

“Did you know that in Pittsburgh they put French Fries in all their sandwiches? No, seriously! Inside them.”

“I’m glad the peaceful conditions our game is played in today are brought to us by horrible deals we’ve made with brutal dictators all over the world who we need to have repress their people and pervert democracy so we can consume so much food and resources getting fat and stupid.”

“Without cheerleaders the game’s underlying homoeroticism should be front and center this year.”

FIRST HALF

“I have a concussion just from watching all these commercials [slap knee]!”

“For a guy nicknamed ‘The Freezer,’ B.J. Raji did nothing but complain about the cold weather in Dallas this week. Maybe they should call him ‘The Air Conditioner.’ Or ‘The Big Fat Complaining Machine.’”

“If Aaron Rodgers is going to emerge from Brett Favre’s shadow it won’t be by throwing more touchdowns than Favre. It will be in being more proficient when the game is on the line and making sure he’s not trying to force the ball someplace in the defense it can’t possibly go.”

“If Budweiser is really owned by Belgians, how come they haven’t bothered to make it taste any better yet? I know Belgium will soon be two countries, but please fix our piss-foamy King of Beers, you Eurotrash whores!”

“Wherever Mubarak’s going, I wish they would send Joe Buck there too. In a hefty bag filled with his own poo. [All real fans of sports know that saying the announcer sucks is the truest sign of fandom. But Troy Aikman, with his multiple concussions, still calls a rather lucid and admirable game. Joe Buck is the son of a great announcer and a noted asswad. Feel free to tear him to shreds through out Superbowl XLV.]”

“It’s true: nothing is gayer than eating Doritos. I should know. Mom, I’m gay. Pass the Doritos.”

“Ben Roethlisberger shouldn’t be playing in this game. If the NFL was serious about eliminating violence against women from the league they would have banned him for the year. The Steelers would still probably be playing in this game without him.”

“I can’t believe that punt hit the giant scoreboard and they have to re-kick it. This has been an awful week for Jerry Jones. With the weather problems and now his insane ego-sized stadium flatscreen, the Super Bowl won’t be held in Dallas again until Willow Palin-Romney’s 2nd term as President.”

“If Troy Polamalu had short hair he never would have won the Defensive Player of the Year Award, which should have gone to the Packers’ Clay Matthews anyway. His hair is way better! But that hair makes his random, hunch-fueled sprinting into tackles look so much more impressive. Like the way Willie Mays wore baseball caps that were too big for him. And when he’d run they’d fall off, and people thought he was running faster than he actually was. Troy’s blustering long locks, wavering in the wind like a pirate flag, make him look much faster as he runs on his strained hamstring toward a possible tackle.”

“Rashard Mendenhall has an opportunity to become a superstar today. Because Ben Roethlisberger will need to throw around 500 touchdowns to win the MVP tonight.”

“If I was Coach Tomlin, I’d let Steelers’ cheap-shot artists James Harrison and James Farrior off the chain tonight. Although the NFL has been fining players for violent hits to the head of helpless receivers, that’s how they both play most effectively. You can always take the fine money out of their Super Bowl Championship shares.”

“They say the play doesn’t start until Ben Roethlisberger is hit, but actually the play doesn’t start until he’s hit and not wrapped up by a defender. If the secondary stays with their receivers and Packers wrap him up, it could be a long day for Big Ben.”

“Did Ozzy Osborne just bite the head off of Justin Bieber in that commercial, or is it just my concussion talking?”

HALFTIME

“They should just have Prince do the Half-time Show every year.”

“Eazy-E’s lasting legacy won’t be his outstanding work with N.W.A. Or even his iconic jerry curl. It will be destroying the Earth with the bullshit sound of these so-called Black Eyed Peas by allowing them to be signed to his Ruthless Records label in 1992. I do hope they play ‘My Humps’ though. And Fergie is kind of hot.”

“The most difficult thing for all the players in the Super Bowl to adapt to is the long halftime break in the game.”

“I wonder what Jets’ Coach Rex Ryan is doing right now. Maybe he’s played with the tint on his TV to make the Packers’ jerseys look green like the Jets. Wherever he is, he is probably guaranteeing a Jets’ Super Bowl victory in 2012 to his dog. And masturbating.”

SECOND HALF

“Expect the Packers to try to tie a bow on this baby by running out the clock in the second half. James Starks has really emerged at the right time for this. And perhaps, if the Steelers get in close, ‘The Freezer’ can punch the ball into the Endzone like ‘The Fridge’ did for Chicago against New England [Say “Aw Yeah” and head-butt whoever’s next to you].”

“People say that Defense wins Championships, but really, let’s be honest: Championships revolve around who can run the ball most effectively. And [insert name of whoever’s winning at the moment] has just been more effective so far.”

“I hope those old men from the Visa Commercials who have gone to every Super Bowl all fall asleep during this game. And the cameras catch them drooling onto their press passes.”

“Clay Matthews is carrying a chip on his little golden blonde shoulder today. You have to know that he can be a game-changer when the game is on the line.”

“It’s clear that the Replay System needs to be fixed in the NFL. It shouldn’t be up to Head Coaches to decide if plays are worth a second look down on the field by the referee. And losing a timeout is too stiff a penalty on some of these plays that are too close to overturn. The NFL needs to have an extra video replay judge or two in a booth above the field who can instantly make calls. And with all the TV timeouts the players are already subjected to, it wouldn’t be hard to give teams 4 or 5 challenges a game instead of 2. If they can figure out whether a 150 mph tennis ball hit the back line or not in less than 5 seconds, they can use goal line technologies to figure out whether a football broke the plane of the end zone in less than 10 minutes.”

“I’d be worried about going to an Overtime. With the new rules they instituted after last year’s Super Bowl, you have to think Offensive Coordinators would rather take a big chance for a trick play in the 4th Quarter than get into a weird Field Goal Kicking game of Chicken in an Overtime period. The Super Bowl has never gone to an overtime. No one wants to make a mistake in an extra period with a Billion people watching.”

“I’m sure the Super Bowl will be played in London in the next ten years. Taking the NFL truly global could be Commissioner Godell’s lasting legacy. As opposed to being treated like a bitch by Coach Bill Belichick.”

“Did you know that John Madden hates flying so much he had to quit calling football games? In fact, he’s been stuck in San Diego for two years, waiting for a lift home.”

“The Packers’ dominance should come as no surprise. They’ve been plagued by injuries all year and have somehow stayed in the hunt through it all. Cutting Brett Favre loose is looking like a super-smart move right now.”

“I think they should have Offensive and Defensive MVPs named at the end of each game. Because too often we’re wowed by the flashy offensive player when one of the guys in the trenches is the one who truly made the biggest difference in the Super Bowl.”

POST-GAME

“I usually DVR ‘Glee.’ So I can masturbate to it while everyone else is asleep. I love 27 year-olds playing teenagers, that definitely sends the right message to every kid that hates their body in America!”

“Thanks for having me! It was a great time. I’m sorry I won’t remember it tomorrow, but you know, this concussion…”

Jim Behrle will be appearing at Fake AWP tonight in Brooklyn.

This is one of my favorite corrections ever: “A report on Wednesday about the launch of Google’s Art Project was illustrated by a painting, The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and a detailed close-up of a scene in the background. The article and caption stated that this showed a family ‘enjoying a jolly Shrove Tuesday game of throwing sticks at the tied-up goose’. Several readers were confused about a Shrovetide game being played in what is, in the painting, obviously harvest time in August or September. To clarify, the pastime was known as ‘cock-throwing’ (the bird often being a rooster rather than a goose) and, while indeed associated with Shrove Tuesday, may well have been played at other times of the year.”

There was a lot wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s super-ballyhooed piece, “Small Change,” in the New Yorker last October. In it, he suggested that the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. took place without Twitter or Facebook, because they hadn’t been invented yet. Now that the same questions have come up again with respect to recent events in Egypt, Gladwell hopped right onto the New Yorker blog to complain some more about how not-important Twitter is.

But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone — and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years — and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.

We are free to disagree with Gladwell over what is more or less “interesting” about the Egyptian uprising. But he has continued in one crucial misapprehension that is worth correcting: the Egyptian protesters are not just “using some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.” They are using Twitter to take their case outside Egypt; to document their own experiences truthfully and fairly, themselves, before governments and big media can get a chance to put their spin on everything.

Gladwell, from the original piece:

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Except that the significance of Twitter’s role in the Iranian uprising had nothing to do with coordinating the protests; it’s more efficient to arrange phone trees and email lists and go door-to-door for that sort of thing, I imagine, in Iran or anywhere else. Inexplicably, Esfandiari, and Gladwell after her, failed to note that the point of twittering the Green Movement was to get the word out to the broader world about what was going on in Iran. Despots may have free rein in their own backyards, but even they are capable of being exposed and shamed in the world outside. So it made sense for Iranians to tweet in English, the lingua franca of the Internet — and not only in order to expose their government’s behavior to the world.

It is really hard to believe that a famous communicator like Malcolm Gladwell wouldn’t understand instinctively what it means to people simply to be heard. That goes double for people who are suffering in a just cause. It is strengthening to speak and be heard, and most strengthening of all to hear words of support in return, even (and maybe in this case, especially) from very far away.

Which brings us to another glaring difference between pre- and post-Internet revolutionary movements: the decreased ability of would-be despots to do their cracking down anything like as efficiently as they did before. Before one had heard the slightest word from official circles or news organizations of any kind, on Sunday night in the U.S., there were tweets out of Egypt from the protesters themselves claiming that two of the “looters” caught in Alexandria were found to have had state police identification on them. The same story kept right on emerging, too, from that point forward, from ordinary Egyptians who managed to get their views onto Twitter, all explaining how Mubarak’s forces had gone into state-owned factories and offered payment to anybody who would get on a bus to Tahrir Square and crack some heads for them. This is evidently a practice already familiar to Egyptians from other times of unrest, like the recent sham elections there.

Three nights later, on Wednesday night, I heard the same things reported on Warren Olney’s To the Point radio program.

This is why it has become necessary for today’s despot to shut the Internet down entirely and get rid of all the journalists, if possible, a feat which is becoming progressively more and more difficult, as recent events in Cairo have shown. In times past, men like Mubarak would have been able to crank up a spin machine pretty effectively in three days, a machine which could cook up a counter-narrative claiming that their “supporters” were the real thing and not bought-and-paid-for operatives, and then blow that narrative all over CNN and the BBC and the rest of the world press — if they were paying much attention at all. Just think how much easier to succeed in hoodwinking not just the foreign press but their own citizenry, too, in the complete absence of any readily available information to the contrary. We in the U.S. wouldn’t have heard a thing from any of the protesters themselves beforehand.

As matters stand, Omar Suleiman, the first Vice-President ever appointed by Mubarak in three decades, stands to inherit what amounts to the throne, so it would seem to benefit him to cool it, appear to be sane and moderate while still taking no steps to make the army protect the protesters. It could be argued that having to turn the Internet back on is worth a lot of Egyptian lives right now. Suleiman is the chief military spook, as Paul Amar, a UCSB professor, explained in a densely informative and worthwhile blog post yesterday.

The Vice President, Omar Soleiman, named on 29 January, was formerly the head of the Intelligence Services (al-mukhabarat). This is also a branch of the military (and not of the police). Intelligence is in charge of externally oriented secret operations, detentions and interrogations (and, thus, torture and renditions of non-Egyptians). Although since Soleiman’s mukhabarat did not detain and torture as many Egyptian dissidents in the domestic context, they are less hated than the mubahith. The Intelligence Services (mukhabarat) are in a particularly decisive position as a “swing vote.” As I understand it, the Intelligence Services loathed Gamal Mubarak and the “crony capitalist” faction, but are obsessed with stability and have long, intimate relationships with the CIA and the American military. The rise of the military, and within it, the Intelligence Services, explains why all of Gamal Mubarak’s business cronies were thrown out of the cabinet on Friday 28 January, and why Soleiman was made interim VP (and functions in fact as Acting President).

Amar explains that the different branches of the military and police have different historical affiliations and loyalties, the military is split, with some factions somewhat closer to the Mubarak regime than others. The outcome of revolutions is almost invariably dependent on which faction the army supports; one of history’s oldest lessons, unpleasant as it is to have to recall that here. Robert Springborg gave a gloomy assessment in Foreign Policy.

The threat to the military’s control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman. The military high command, which under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system, can now breathe much more easily than a few days ago. It can neutralize any further political pressure from below by organizing Hosni Mubarak’s exile, but that may well be unnecessary.

This is not a universally held view, though, which brings us to a final word on the potential value of Twitter and the Internet in general to the Egyptian revolutionaries’ cause. There is, to take one example, still the matter of over a billion dollars in American aid to think about. Because the protesters are taking their case not to governments or the press but to their fellow citizens of the world, there is hope that we can pressure our own governments to advance their aims.

This is a huge change in how global politics is beginning to be conducted and might be conducted in the future, if the world’s citizens are prepared to move in a concerted way on information provided. If the Egyptian protesters are tweeting and broadcasting photos and video to the U.S., proving that the Mubarak regime is killing them in Tahrir Square, isn’t it fair to argue that the Obama administration will become more reluctant to continue sending that regime our money? Because if many, many Americans are seeing such proof, it can, at the very least, reverberate in our next elections as well.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

“My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on ‘holy crap.’ It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying “dog-fucking son of a bitch” during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn’t try to speed up the process.”

by Chadwick Matlin

Last night in Fort Greene, more than a thousand people came to shout their way through a hearing. They were at the Brooklyn Technical High School to voice rowdy opposition to the shuttering of twelve more New York City public schools. Earlier this week, the city’s Panel for Education Policy — a body separate from the Department of Education, though filled with a majority of Bloomberg appointees — had already voted to close ten schools. So last night, everyone was back for a second helping — and the teachers’ union and its supporters came hungry.

Before the meeting, the union rallied its members along Dekalb Avenue for more than an hour. The union was here to protect its teachers’ schools, regardless of whether the Dept. of Ed. is right in classifying them as failures. The Dept. says these schools are better closed than salvaged: that a new culture is what’s necessary, and you can’t have a new culture without a new school. The union says the schools only “failed” because they were saddled with a great influx of special needs and non-English-speaking students. It believes Bloomberg rigged the system, and that the schools had no choice but to choke on their own hardships.

But this wasn’t just about the teacher’s union and an administration frustrated by it: there were hundreds of charter school advocates in attendance as well.

So the crowd’s passion was also laced with worry over charter schools’ role in the future of American education. Other schools — some of them charters — will move into the closed schools, which means, for one thing, that the union may not have as much influence as it once had. (For another thing, it means that a number of people will make a lot of money.) The charters — as people who have seen Waiting for Superman can attest — think the union’s intractability is part of the problem.

Both constituencies believe the same thing — the children are our future. But each side has so zealously protected their different methodologies that they’ve curdled into warring ideologies.

The auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School is a regal space: hundred-foot ceilings, a balcony with golden railings, four chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Many came dressed for a color war. P.S. 9 parents and teachers wore white shirts with a hand-designed logo. Brooklyn Collegiate East was in yellow; there was a swath of people in blue with shirts that read “Chancellor Black, Do Your Homework.” Jamaica High School’s beaver mascot — whose life is at stake, along with his school’s — waddled through the aisles. Students — just as plentiful as teachers — ran up and down the aisles blowing neon whistles that were even shriller than their screams. Somebody had an airhorn.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats, the meeting is about to begin” came over the loudspeaker. Another yelp went through the crowd, and if there was anyone who was seated before, they were now standing and chanting.

Four minutes later, she emerged: Cathie Black, up on the stage, her gaze focused on her seat. The boos were immediate, and the chanting turned to: “Black Must Go!” and “Send Black Back!”

Black and her colleagues sat at a concave semi-circle of card tables draped with cheap plastic tablecloths. Black was at the back of the semi-circle, at least thirty-five feet from the front row of the audience.

Her opening remarks were completely drowned out by boos, whistles and chants. She was more a captive than a scapegoat. Once the crowd quieted down — it took another few minutes — the true power dynamic revealed itself. She was, after all, the one still on stage.

Eventually the hearing began in earnest — and it was truly a hearing. For the next four hours, the panel spoke only to call the next speaker and then to tell speakers that they’d run out of their allotted time. No matter how severe the insult, the panel would not respond. 350 people had signed up to have their say. A sampling:

• “I never saw a more blatant example of racism.”

• “You have created the Lost Generation.”

• “Since I know you’ve already made up your minds, I’m not going to address you, I’m going to address the audience.”

• “As far as the UFT is concerned, this panel, this process, is illegitimate.”

Black was attentive throughout. She glanced down every now and then to read something, but her eyes most often remained on the speakers. A young man addressed her directly: “Chancellor, you have a chance to change this. The students are not stats. There is a human element.” (Black nodded.)

Once the elected officials — who received priority speaking slots — were done addressing the panel, a student spoke: “John F. Kennedy High School was set up for failure. This entire process is ludicrous. It’s a complete joke,” she began. And at the end: “Save our schools now!”

With this, the room was standing, cheering, clapping, whistling, airhorning. Someone was playing a djembe. And then everyone headed for the exits, cramming through three doors, even as the chairman of the panel was calling for the next speaker. “We’re going to keep running the clock,” he warned, but it was no use, the walkout was on. Black looked out at the crowd, one hand casually held in the air.

Outside, there was jubilation. One couple explained that the union walked out because the panel’s minds were already made up. What’s the point, they asked, of staying and voicing opinions if the results were preordained?

The walkout took at least fifteen minutes. “This is what democracy looks like!” yelled Carlos Martinez — Manhattan-born, Bed Stuy-raised and Bushwick-settled. He says this reminded him of the Egyptian revolution, and that’s inspired him to look at local politics differently. “Seems like our great mayor is becoming a dictator,” he said.

* * *

The rest of the evening was anticlimactic. After the walkout, only a few hundred people remained, and their numbers decreased steadily as the hours march on. A few people spoke out in support of the plan to close the schools. “If I had cancer, I would not be waiting for the treatments that are not working to heal me,” one testified. Most who remain debated whether a Prospect Heights school should be forced to let a charter school come in and share its space.

It was after midnight when the voting finally started. All the schools up for closure were, as expected, voted to be phased out — update: except one! Otherwise, the panel fell in line with the Department of Ed’s — and thus Bloomberg’s — recommendations to close the schools.

Black is not a member of the panel, so she didn’t get a vote. But she did get the floor for the final comment. It was precisely 1 a.m., seven hours after the hearing began.

“It’s been a long night, it’s been a productive one….” she said. “A great deal of time and thought and angst have gone into this, but we believe we have come out at the right place.”

She was speaking off the cuff, looking up into the auditorium. But the room was empty; there was no audience but a scattering of journalists and Dept. of Ed. aides. Everyone else who cared had already turned their backs on her.

Chadwick Matlin is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn. He’s on Twitter, but would far rather you just email him.

I cannot with any degree of authority answer the pressing question as to whether Knifecrime Island National Lottery presenter Myleene Klaas “ripped one” on live television, but I do want to note that I will be adding “drop a clanger” into my everyday vocabulary from here on out.

Here are a few thoughts on the decline of that stretch of 8th Street known as “Shoe Row.”

“Even though all my stripper friends are gonna be mad at me, I think we can stimulate the economy with a tax on strippers. They make all this money and don’t pay taxes. I’d take that cash and put it into a fund where it supports youth athletics for girls like cheerleading or softball. Or it can go to help pay for existing little girls programs that are struggling to get government assistance.”
 — It’s official. Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell is running for mayor of Miami-Dade County. Remarkable.

You know what? Miracles really are all around us.

We understand: you’re busy running your social marketing company/law firm/dying publishing establishment. Plus you’re besieged as well — by information overload and first world problems. It’s okay! Here’s a handy digest so that you can stay informed on Egypt without having to read 4000 blogs and newspapers.

• Today’s demonstrations are being called the “Day of Departure,” or “Friday of Departure,” which is a classy way to demand the immediate resignation of President Mubarak. Today has been described as peaceful and jubilant; for the most part, pro-government thugs have not been sent forth to create violence.

• Much of the city of Cairo is difficult to move through today, with odd checkpoints installed throughout the city, often manned by people of unknown position — no uniforms, etc. Soldiers are also searching people at the checkpoints. “Hundreds of thousands” of people are demonstrating in Cairo. (The Times says “more than a hundred thousand.”)

• One thing to note is that the protests are national. For instance, it’s estimated that 100,000 people are demonstrating in Damanhour. Damanhour only has a population of half a million. And there are “hundreds of thousands” of people demonstrating in Alexandria today. That’s Giza, in the video above. (And of course there are protest movements building in other nearby countries.)

• Great news! Now the U.S.’s talking point is that they want Mubarak to step down immediately!

• Less great news! They want the (unelected) “vice president,” Omar Suleiman, to take over! That’s sort of like having the head of the CIA take over the United States. (Oh. Right. We already did that!) He has been the point person with American intelligence for rendition of terror suspects to secret, torturey prisons.

• “It appears that journalists are being targeted by the Egyptian authorities in a deliberate campaign of intimidation aimed at quashing honest, independent reporting of a transformational event.” That’s the foreign editor of the Washington Post. In a 24-hour period this week, journalists in Egypt reported “30 detentions, 26 assaults, and eight instances of equipment having been seized.” Also the Al Jazeera office was burned today.

• Suddenly, for at least a moment, Al Jazeera is beating the Times on web traffic. (Warning: that is using sampled data, not the most accurate.)

• Speaking of data, here’s how you estimate crowds of demonstrators.