…from using Twitter? What’s next, no text messaging or posting on message boards for the only thing standing between Sarah Palin and a no.1 best-seller?  “Bill’s communication regarding WEEI fell short of those standards. So we’ve taken appropriate measures,” writes ESPN.com’s Rob King, essentially giving radio windbags across the nation a free shot at Simmons whenever they feel like it.  Provided they’re working for ESPN affiliates, that is.   My long-standing scorn for the 90210/Counting Crows scholar is well established, but it’s hard not to sympathize in this instance.  This is how they thank the only guy on the payroll that’s managed to keep it in his pants?

Whether Newsday’s Wallace Matthews has become an acolyte of Fantasy Pros911’s Patrick DiCaprio or he merely prefers the idea of Omar Minaya doing a Donnie Walsh impersonation, I can’t say for sure.  But Matthews might’ve actually penned a column rational Mets fans might agree with, the Amazins-baiter citing “the illusion of being competitive without being competitive at all”.  It’s time, argues Wally, for Fred Wilpon (above) to compose a statement like this rather than instruct Minaya to rearrange the Titanic’s deck chairs ;

“We apologize for our atrocious 2009 and ask our loyal fans to bear with us for a year, because even though we promise to play like hell, we’re probably not going to be very good in 2010. And rather than waste money – your money – on a subpar free-agent crop and be held hostage once again by bad, immovable contracts, we’re going to sit this winter out and come back stronger in 2011.”

A proclamation like that, of course, would require a quality that the Mets don’t seem to possess – humility – and a concession the Mets are never going to make, namely a deep ticket-price cut.

Instead, they are saying things like what Minaya said at last week’s GM meetings: “In the past we’ve always been at the forefront of going after the players we need, and I think things will stay as they have been.”

The last part of that quote is perhaps the most chilling thing a Mets fan can hear: ” . . . things will stay as they have been.”

That means more cosmetic surgery for a patient bleeding from more wounds than any doctor could hope to fix. And once again, they ask you to pick up the tab.

Absolutely, positively, not part of Reebok’s AFL throwback line.   $11.99 from these savvy businessmen, though if you ask me, they ought to give J.P. Losman a substantial discount.  They couldn’t have done it without him.

Though I’ve never been asked who I’d like to dine with if I could choose from any 3 individuals living or dead, I’ve no trouble selecting the trio off the top of my head ; “Iron” Mike Doskocil, the late Laura Carter and former Knicks PF / Charles Oakley.   Slam’s Nick Rattner interrogated Oak recently on a number of topics including, but not limited to, Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech, cooking, and Tim Donaghy.  Though you should check out the entire interview, here’s a few highlights :

SLAM: Would you be disappointed if Michael Jordan hadn’t spoken his mind in Springfield?
CO: At first he said he wasn’t gonna say nothing. I knew he was going to say something. A lot of us [were] in the hotel, just talking about basketball, about life, the NBA, and this moment… For me it’s a statement that you did something nobody else could accomplish along the way. Somebody might have got 10,000 rebounds but you might have got 8,000 offensive, that’s something special… And look, I told somebody on Facebook, they keep asking when the Knicks are going to retire my jersey. They probably will never retire my jersey. The only way they’ll retire my jersey is if I marry Dolan’s daughter, and I never see that happening in life. People ask me that, but I don’t know.

SLAM: Masks?
CO: Yeah, but we’ll be talking mess while we’re playing. Get chips, buy in. You know, tape it. It was just something fun. So people wouldn’t know who was playing. They’d probably figure it out. It was just something different.

The Daily Revelle’s Xerxes A. Wilson writes the Klu Klux Klan are coming to Oxford, MS for tomorrow’s LSU / Ole Miss clash, and they’re not looking for Jevon Snead’s autograph.

Shane Tate, the North Mississippi great titan for the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, confirmed via e-mail the KKK will rally on Ole Miss’ campus in protest of the Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones’ decision to remove “From Dixie with Love” from the Ole Miss band’s song selection.

The controversy began last month when the Ole Miss Associated Student Body passed a resolution in favor of discontinuing chanting “the South will rise again” to replace it with “to hell with LSU.” The resolution was never fully enacted because it was not signed by the proper officials after passing the senate, said Peyton Beard, Ole Miss Associated Student Body director of athletics.

The student section largely ignored the resolution and other attempts to stop the chant, continuing the chant during “From Dixie with Love,” said Ole Miss English junior Dean Julius.

“We are coming to Ole Miss to say enough is enough on attacking our Christian, southern heritage and culture, and it’s time for every person to have a right to freedom of speech,” Tate said.

“We aren’t coming there to cause problems or cause trouble,” Tate said. “Trouble has already been caused by a handful at Ole Miss, including the black student body president, who wants to shape Ole Miss into yet another liberal sodomite college.”

Bruce Pearl, while not unavailable for comment, probably isn’t very surprised.

The viewpoints and role of Casson, the league’s primary voice trying to discredit independent and league-sponsored evidence that has linked N.F.L. careers with heightened risk for dementia and cognitive decline, were a particular point of contention at last month’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on football brain injuries.

That study has been criticized by several outside experts in epidemiology and dementia research, who said the study’s 120 subjects would be too few to find any link, and that Casson’s role in it — he is conducting every player’s neurological exam personally — was improper as a matter of medical ethics.

Not to condone the allegedly abusive behavior of Kansas head coach Mark Mangino — especially the stuff that seems creepily directed at players who come from tough backgrounds — but the large & (at the moment) in charge educator’s methods just happen to be under scrutiny when he’s in danger of losing 6 games in a row. The Lawrence Journal-World’s Dugan Arnett details the latest charges :

Two former players, meanwhile, confirmed a Rivals.com report that during a practice confrontation with former receiver Raymond Brown, whose brother had recently been shot and hospitalized, Mangino told the player, “Don’t yes sir me, or I will send you back to St. Louis so you can get shot with your homies.”

When he returned to Lawrence, Mortensen says, he was subjected to three months of early-morning drills that involved putting significant pressure on his good leg. Eventually, he tore his left ACL, an injury he attributes to the amount of strain he was forced to put onto the leg as punishment.

Former NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer is really coming into his own as ESPN’s new ombudsman, particularly if you believe said role oughta to involve shameless shilling for his new employer. “Storytelling at its best…dynamic tales filled with heroes and villians” is Ohlmeyer’s frothy assessment of the network’s “30 On 30″ documentary series, and in a similar display of team spirit, the recent L’affair Phillips/Hundley is characterized as an overzealous news media looking to tar the entire Bristol campus with the same sex-crazed brush.

Salacious stories about celebrities generally focus on the principals, not their employers. When David Letterman was dragged into the muck of an alleged extortion attempt surrounding his affair with a co-worker, Letterman was the story — CBS was an afterthought that’s only involvement was it airs his show.

“Stories involving us are angst-ridden, and we recognize that we don’t always do our best work on them,” said Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior vice president and director of news. “It’s tough to be objective when we’re involved in some way. We tend to do the minimum that allows us to say, ‘We covered it.’ Fortunately, these types of stories don’t come along too often.”

Oh really? While I don’t endorse AJ Daulerio’s scorched earth policy towards ESPN, there’s a number of persons — Ms. Hundley’s attorneys most notably — who might be very interested in how often these types of stories seem to come along. Huggy Harold. Schlong-Snapping Sean. Zipper Problem Steve.

Seriously folks, I don’t actually expect Don Ohlmeyer to come right out and say ESPN is the most dangerous place in America for a young woman to work east of American Apparel’s headquarters, but D.O. must assume his readers are pretty gullible. Erin Andrews aside, no one at ESPN is a household name you’d associate with stalking (sorry, Steve). But some ESPN employees might end up as casualties in the high stakes pissing match between NewsCorp. and Disney, again, not the sort of thing Ohlmeyer is going to talk about publicly. Who knows, he might want to work for Rupert Murdoch someday?

MLB’s umpiring crews aren’t alone when it comes to wildly blown calls on a huge stage. The Times’ Tony Cascarino can barely contain his scorn for France’s Thierry Henry, insisting the above incident — which catapulted Le Blues into 2010’s World Cup finals in South Africa — “has tarnished his reputation forever.”

What a tragic missed opportunity. What a chance to be a hero Henry had — not to his home country but to the whole game. Cheating in all its guises is slowly killing football and if Henry had held his hands up again and admitted to the referee that he had handled the ball and the goal should not stand, he would have earned the admiration of the entire sporting world.

Cheating in football is commonplace now because the authorities cheat us all by their spineless failure to punish the perpetrators. Will Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, or Michel Platini, the Frenchman who is his Uefa counterpart, condemn Henry, or float the idea that the tie should be replayed? Of course not. They will turn a blind eye, and another piece of football’s credibility, another little part of its soul, will quietly die.

Normal service will return to CSTB shortly — you’d be surprised how many people get upset when I try to drive a school bus and blog at the same time. But for now, here’s an unhappy item from the Sacramento Bee’s Bill Lindelof that serves as a reminder the restaurant business is a tough one.

The game is apparently over — at least for now — for Center Court With C-Webb, the sports restaurant opened by the former Sacramento Kings basketball star three years ago.

The star burger was the “Fab 5,” touted as Sacramento’s biggest burger with 44 ounces of choice Angus beef and selling for a princely price of $29.50.

I’m no expert on this industry, but there’s no way Don Nelson’s frequent, negative Yelp reviews were helping Center Court’s bottom line. But if Chris Webber could have a theme restaurant in the California capital this long after he left town, maybe there’s still a chance for Aubrey Huff to open a bar in Baltimore?