Here I come

I've been grappling with the idea of writing a blog in the style of a late night monologue for a few weeks now. Basically the idea is to talk about a bunch of snippets of news content and follow each with a joke. I'm going to write it like a Conan O'Brien monologue – with his speech patterns and such – because I watch his show the most, but I'm guessing it'll turn out to be about as funny as a Jimmy Fallon monologue. We'll see.

As you probably know, Michael Vick has served his sentence and is now looking to return to the NFL. And insiders are saying that Vick is very close to signing with an NFL team. Some football experts are saying that Vick would be the perfect fit in a newly popularized formation: the wilddog offense.

Speaking of the NFL, the newest version of the Madden football game will be released this Friday. That's right, and nerds, dorks, and geeks across the globe are really excited about this. Not because they'll get to play the newest video game, but because it's the one weekend a year when all the jocks will be playing video games, so the nerds, dorks, and geeks can roam the streets freely.

Xbox Live just released a mandatory update for all Xbox 360 consoles connected to Xbox Live. One of the new features is the avatar marketplace. How it works is that Xbox Live subscribers can pay real money just to dress up their virtual selves in new clothes. Well, now this business model has begun to attract some attention, and other stores are following Microsoft's lead. Earlier today, I tried to go into a Banana Republic, but it cost me $50 just to get in the door.

Another new feature of the update is the ability to purchase and download full versions of recent Xbox 360 games. It turns out some of the games are actually priced pretty fairly and are actually pretty good deals. Yeah, but the problem is that the digital games are so huge and take up so much hard drive space that to you actually have to buy a new hard drive every time you want to download another game.

Some of you may have heard of the scandal surrounding Louisville men's basketball coach Rick Pitino. It turns out he had an affair and then gave the woman money to help pay for an abortion. Yeah, this is true. Pitino said he didn't want to pay for an abortion, but she threatened that if he didn't, she would raise their kid to be a Kentucky fan.

How many of you watched the show Prison Break. (Hold for applause.) Wow, there were like six of you. Well anyhow, the show has been canceled but it looks like the series might continue in a video game. But unlike in the show, the goal of the game is to actually break into prison. This is true. Yeah, the goal of the game is to find the only place in the world where people actually watched the show Prison Break.

As some of you may know, gaming magazine EGM recently stopped printing their traditional magazine. So, to fulfill their existing subscriptions, they sent the men's magazine Maxim to all of their subscribers instead. Well, it turns out, that some mom's weren't so happy about their sons receiving Maxim in place of a magazine about video games. Yeah, apparently, they didn't want their sons to stare at unrealistic and unattainable women all day.

Tonight 37-year-old Pedro Martinez makes his return to Major League Baseball when he starts a game for the Philadelphia Phillies. He's 37 years old. But the crazy thing is that he's replacing Jamie Moyer, who's even older than Martinez, in the Phillies' starting rotation. It turns out Moyer isn't too happy about being replaced. Yeah, Moyer said he hasn't been this upset since his team lost the World Series to the Chicago Cubs.

Quote of the Week:

Hank Hill: "Bobby, vegetarians can't be trusted. Just last week we caught one of them siphoning gas out of a company truck."

This isn't a particularly recent quote, but I heard it on King of the Hill last night and decided it was a go.