The theme behind this week’s Humanoids is tying up loose ends. Or at least that’s generally the idea.  Everyone has loose ends that need tying up at some time or other. Most of my subjects of ridicule had some loose end that is being tied up or just coming to light. I know that I have some loose ends that need tying up. Actually, I can’t find enough time to tie up all of my loose ends. Despite their public loose ends being tied up, that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg for my victims.

Just a reminder that The Lowdown radio show returns next Tuesday at 6:30 PM on 94.9 FM in London, ON, and on CHRWradio.com. It’s going to be a fun half-hour of laughs and excitement that you don’t want to miss. We’ll have the downloadable versions of the show online around 7:00 PM including the first ever Lowdown Extra broadcast.

Danica Patrick
I know, it’s Danica again. But this time there is a good reason. It looks like that this will be it for the Danica rumours. It looks as though she will run the full 2010 Indy Car Series schedule. I don’t know if it will be for Ganassi or Andretti but it doesn’t really matter. The more interesting thing is her NASCAR plans. It looks as though she will join Tony Stewart’s Stewart-Haas Racing. However, Danica, as I have recommended in the past, will not jump straight into to the Sprint Cup Series. She will instead jump into the old Tony Stewart program. When Smoke made the move from Indy Car star to NASCAR legend, he spent a year learning the ropes in the Nationwide Series. Now, when she’s not running an Indy Car, Danica will be running a Nationwide car, a Camping World truck, or an ARCA car. Thank god that we’ve finally settled that so we don’t have to talk about her as much. The downside is that I don’t know where she’ll find time to do the SI swimsuit issue if she’s racing full-time next year.

Football
The National Football League is back. We had the annual kickoff game on Thursday night. I couldn’t stay awake for it thanks to starting a 9-to-5 this week. It’s a matter of getting into that new routine. I suppose the same could be said for the stars of the NFL. Every year, things change and players have to catch up to that. For example, this year, the wedge has been eliminated. That’s the group of blockers that work kickoff returns. If you want to see big hits than it’s good for you. If you’re a kick returner, you might want to leave the ball on the ground so you don’t get killed. Speaking of which, I think it was Carson Palmer who was quoted in SI as saying that someone was going to get killed someday because the defensive players are so big and fast. This begs the question if it’s a case that the equipment isn’t safe enough (like baseball helmets) or that the players are too big. I don’t know what the NFL’s drug testing policy is but you would have to imagine that they can’t test for Human Growth Hormone right now. If I have my facts right, it’s essentially a virtually undetectable muscle building agent. That’s exactly what the stars of the NFL could afford to buy to get an edge over everyone else. Not accusing anyone, just speculating.

Glee
Could there be a better new show on TV? Well, Community probably will be better when it premieres. For now, I don’t think anyone will have a problem with Glee. The acting is great. The comedy is well written. And they didn’t cheap out on the songs. For those that haven’t kept up with Jackie’s hype on this show, it’s about the glee club at an Ohio high school that no one wants anything to do with. The club is the last refuge of the social outcast for the most part. I don’t know what else I can say about this show except that it trounced every other show in the key demographics. If you haven’t seen it yet, then hit up iTunes or another download website where legality is a grey zone… Not that I would recommend that… Solely for liability purposes.

Health Care
I don’t understand the attacks of America’s republicans and conservatives on Barack Obama. They keep saying that he’s a fascist for trying to institute a government controlled health care insurance system in the States. How is that fascist? Isn’t fascism on the extreme capitalist end of the political spectrum? See, this is socialist health care. The Americans are worried that Barack Obama’s health care mean that people would have to wait ages to get health care like in Canada. Do you know why wait times are so long in Canada? It’s because there is a doctor shortage. And where have those doctors gone? To the United States. If there is a problem with the US health care system, it’s not the government, though maybe it’s their inaction that caused it. The insurance companies are the problem. They do anything they can to deny claims so they can keep your premiums in their pockets. I’m sure that’s drawn from the rare example from Michael Moore’s Sicko. However, all the bad examples of Canadian health care are taken from the rare examples. I’ve gone in to emergency rooms and been in and out in under two hours with an x-ray for a partially torn ACL. I’ve been in and out in under 40 minutes for a concussion and pink eye. Canadian health care is fine when there are doctors. But there aren’t any in Canada. That would be the only pitfall that could derail a good American public health care system and they should be fine.

PGA FedEx Cup
You’ll notice that the Chase for the Sprint Cup follows this entry. The FedEx Cup is the fake playoff that the PGA invented for the PGA Tour to keep interest up after the four majors were played. That’s all people ever cared about in golf. The players want to win majors. The fans want to watch the majors. The sponsors want to get exposure in them. It’s pretty easy to see that the big money is in the majors. The PGA Tour can crown a champion based on one tournament but nobody will remember who won the FedEx Cup the week after where as we remember who won all the majors. That one tournament thing isn’t an overstatement by the way. The FedEx Cup points are carried over from the regular season with the points being reset for the final forty combatants at the Tour Championship so anyone can win the title. Basically, one tournament win could be worth $10 Million. That’s absolutely ridiculous. The PGA Tour and their facilitators at FedEx have tried to use money to turn the Tour Championship into the fifth major. It’s prestige and history that will make a tournament great. For now, the FedEx Cup will just be a joke that no one, not even the players, care about.

NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup
Unlike the PGA’s unlicensed knock-off of the Chase, the original made up playoff in professional sports is still the best. Accept no imitators, especially if someone could win it while taking one event off like Tiger did in 2007. While the final race in the Chase for the Sprint Cup suffers from the same problem as the Tour Championship in that it isn’t terribly prestigious, its problem is that the title is essentially decided by the time the series reaches Homestead rather than NASCAR trying too hard to make the race important. Now if you want an important race, then this weekend’s race is it. The whole NASCAR world is actually excited to see which drivers make the playoffs. Unlike the FedEx cup, fans actually understand the points system. They also get to see the Chase drivers fight with non-Chase cars in the playoff so none of the big names are out of the shuffle. In other words, you still have drivers running for the championship while other drivers are trying to prove that they can run with the big dogs. It’s a great drama throughout the playoffs. And that’s not counting the 11 drivers with a shot at the final eight Chase spots on Saturday night.

Caster Semenya
I’m sure everyone remembers Semenya as the South African 800m runner who was undergoing a battery of tests to determine if she was actually a woman. Well, earlier this week, she was on the cover of a magazine in South Africa in which she was photographed in a black evening dress. Actually, I put it on the left. Look at that and tell me with a straight face that this solves all your concerns that the IIAF is dragging her through the mud for nothing. Hell, I’m convinced she has a five o’clock shadow in that picture. Anyway, if that wasn’t bad enough for her, now Australia’s Daily Telegraph is saying that it Semenya is actually a hermaphrodite. Their report says that she doesn’t have a womb or ovaries but she does have internal testes. That doesn’t make her a hermaphrodite. According to The Science of Sports, she is technically intergender because a true hermaphrodite would have both sets of genitalia. The IIAF is set to release their ruling in November but if past precedent is anything to go by, we don’t know what they’ll do. They could strip her of her gold or they could let her keep the medal but ban her from further competition because she has an unfair advantage. All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be her right about now.

Dany Heatley
Speaking of athletes that I wouldn’t want to be, here’s Dany Heatley. He was so happy playing for a coach that would let him go out and play offense that he demanded a trade out of Ottawa. The guy can’t play defence but seemed more than happy to play for the defensive minded Craig Hartsburg. He was rumoured to be going to Edmonton earlier in the summer but whether he invoked his no trade clause or the deal was never finalized, we’ll never truly know. I would assume that it was blocked using the NTC because nobody wants to go to Edmonton voluntarily. I have no idea why you wouldn’t want to join the franchise that Gretzky built. Clearly, most hockey players don’t have an appreciation for the history of the game. Anyway, last night, ESPN posted a rumour that had Heatley going to San Jose with Patrick Marleau going to Los Angeles and Jarrett Stoll and Alex Frolov heading to Ottawa. Yes, the rare three-way trade. All put together for Ottawa’s biggest villain. The good news for Heater is that he can’t get more hated than he is now in Ottawa… Unless he goes to Toronto. Then he becomes even more hated than Prime Minister Harper. Oh, and that ESPN three-way trade report appears to be a fabrication.

Charlie Sheen
Sorry for the short entry but I had to ask a question here. WWTDD and The Big Lead posted links to this fake interview transcript between Charlie Sheen and US President Barack Obama. I’m assuming that it has to be faked by the author of the website. However, the two websites I mentioned seem to have taken this seriously. I don’t know if everyone was in it together to do a tongue-in-cheek series of links to each other to build off the buzz of Charlie Sheen making accusations that 9/11 was an American government conspiracy in a fake interview. Given today’s date, I’m not going to do any of my own conspiracy theorizing but where was the plane that hit The Pentagon.