VBVW for November 3, 2006

• The Very Best

Every dog has his day. And this is it, thanks to Bob Barker announcing his retirement. Pets everywhere patted their crotches and sighed in relief on Tuesday when Barker, who began his career in 1956 hosting Truth Or Consequences, said he will not come on down in 2007. At the conclusion of every airing of The Price Is Right, Barker reminds viewers to have their dogs and cats spayed or neutered. The party in the pound is already in full swing.

American law enforcement agencies haven’t played nice together since 1963, when they got together to assassinate JFK. But now governmental and local law enforcement have developed Intellipedia, a resource for logging and sharing gathered intelligence. The technology is based on Wikipedia and similar web services that school kids have been using for years. The privileged-access resource allows the CIA, FBI and others to share the kind of intelligence that may have prevented such tragedies as the attack on the Cole and the success of Dancing With The Stars.

If you’re a drunkard and fat as a Sumo, we have even more good news for you. Harvard Medical School and The National Institute on Aging have discovered that heavy doses of red-wine extract given to obese mice helped the little pests live longer. The research dangles the prospect of living a longer life without having to diet or exercise. Plus, you’d be lit all the time. The wine extract, called Resveratrol, has worked so well on couch-potato mice that scientists are ready to try it on monkeys before trying it on humans. But where on this good earth will they ever find wine-loving slugs willing to be force-fed a nice cabernet? Researchers, please contact these candidates.

• The Very Worst

In the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus Rex, our hero unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. The tragedy yields a timeless lesson about self-awareness and respect for family. In Albertville, Alabama, 19-year-old Gary Helms, Jr. was arrested for raping his mother while she was passed out, reportedly to get revenge on his brother. The attack yields a modern day lesson about living south of the Mason-Dixon and looking for tail inside one’s own double-wide. Oh Junior, you rascal.

One thing the Dems should have figured out two years ago is never to let John Kerry ad lib. “The wooden one” drifted from a script that was supposed to blast President Bush and essentially told his college audience to get good grades so they wouldn’t have to go off to Iraq with all the kids from the short bus. Kerry wouldn’t apologize but backpedaled faster than Floyd Landis during a random drug test.

No more sushi? A paper published in the journal Science predicts that there will be no more seafood in the ocean by 2048. Currently, the fishing industry catches some 7,784 different species, not counting baby whales. Yet, human-inflicted aquatic nastiness such as pollution and overfishing is wiping out fish species at a remarkable pace. At this rate, Chicken Of The Sea™ will actually have to be made of chicken.