While the ratings for whichever evening news show Katie Couric hosts has dropped, the fall hasn’t been nearly as dramatic as the one the XFL experienced. So while the ill-fated league started out stronger, Ms. Couric has better legs. But we already knew that.

Katie Couric’s debut show with CBS News recorded a 9.1 Nielsen rating. By comparison, the XFL’s first game on NBC scored a 9.5 rating.

Just saying.

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Anne Appelbaum contrasts the pathetic lies of James Frey - whose fabricated “memoir” has become a major embarrassment for Oprah Winfrey, the high-priestess of self-obessed emoting - with the pathetic lies of Lillian Hellman who in 1973 published her supposed memoir Pentimento, in which the author cast herself as heroic anti-Nazi fighter.

Appelbaum’s compares Frey’s made-up lie of victimhood to other recent faux memoirs whose writers created tear-jerking stories of personal hardship:

These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

And the trend continues: In the past few days, yet another prize-winning author, who calls himself “Nasdijj” and claims to be the son of a violent cowboy and an alcoholic Native American woman (and who, as a child was “hungry, raped, beaten, whipped and forced at every opportunity to work in the fields,” he told an interviewer) — has also been “outed” as a white writer of erotica named Timothy Barrus.

A parallel development is the absence of real-life military heroes in public life. Event though many have been minted in the our current wars overseas, none of them have been embraced much by the wider public, and certainly none of them has become a household name. They aren’t invited to latenight talk shows to discuss what they did and why, and they aren’t held up as role models.

To be more specific: Sales of these faux memoirs are driven by women. Why is it that women prefer lies about pretend bums over true stories about knights in (metaphorically speaking) shining armor?

By leading the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl victories in four years (2001, 2003, 2004) Bill Belichick has established himself as one of the greatest coaches in the history in the National Football League, and his team’s recent loss to the Denver Broncos doesn’t change that, especially since it was the players who fouled up, rather than Belichick.

Belichick is at least superficially quite unlike most of the great NFL coaches. He keeps everything close to the vest, he puts great emphasis on team work and dicourages star systems. He is not an emotional or charismatic leader, but rather a planner, scouter, schemer, and, above all, teacher. He wins through exhaustive preparation and meticulous execution. He isn’t married to any particular system or philosophy, but instead will devise whatever combination of formations and plays necessary to win any given game.

Needless to say, none of that is half as important as the fact that he won three Super Bowls in four years, and with today’s celebrity culture (which puts the ‘cult’ in culture) and a publishing industry that is always on the prowl for a sure thing, it is remarkable that Belichick hasn’t spawned a small industry of how-to-succeed books. Instead of adding his name to slap-dash hagiographies, Belichick has limited his book-industry foray to giving access to Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam of The Best and the Brightest fame. In turn, Halberstam’s book, The Education of a Coach, focuses less on Bill Belichick’s many recent successes and more on the process that led him to them.

That process begins with Belichik’s grandparents who in 1897 moved to America from Croatia, then a part of the slowly decaying Habsburg Empire, which finally imploded during World War I. Belichick’s grandfather was an illiterate, but a man of tremendous work ethic. He ended up in the heart of the Ellis Island-era immigration experience: The steel mill and coal mine towns of western Pennsylvania and central and eastern Ohio, where football quickly, almost instantly, became an ecumenical church of sorts for people from all over Europe who were trying to find their way in an unforgiving but promising land, a time and place captured so well by James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

The Ohio - Pennsylvania axis of football excellence is an important piece of America’s identity, a shining example of toughness, can do-ism, and assimilation. It is fitting that the latest, and maybe greatest, of football’s masters can trace his American roots to that region.

Halberstam’s book on Bill Belichick is not great, but it is good and it offers a detailed description of how Belichick was molded, what people and institutions molded him and how. The book has received a lot of praise, and I would say that all of it is deserved.

However, it is somewhat surprising that one little aspect of the book has gone, as far as I can tell, unnoticed by the media. In chapter two, Halberstam writes the following:

The entire region of western Pennsylvania and eastern and central Ohio was great football country, both high school and college football. Everyone seemed to care passionately about the game. This was, after all, a part of the country where tough men endured great physical hardship to earn a living - only the strong succeeded, and not surprisingly, they produced big, strong, athletically gifted children who had no fear of ferocious physical contact - indeed, they seemed to relish it. In the era before the coming of the great black athletes, when power was blended with speed and game stayed just as physical but got a lot faster, no area produced as many great football players or as many distinguished coaches as this region.

Compare that to the, reputedly drunken, outburst that cost Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder his job at CBS in 1988:

“During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid—that’s where it all started.”

Essentially, Halberstam makes the same argument, only about ethnic Whites rather than African-Americans.

…our retail-sales reps had some problems last year. Jill in Accounting - wow, did she ever have a brutal third quarter or what? I’m not taking anything away from our competitors, they really out did us with excellent customer service and superior products, but, yes, we did have some problems in our warehouses. When we landed the General Widgets contract, that was definitely big, I put in a coupe of key phone calls to some movers and shakers over there at GW, that really helped our numbers, but we just couldn’t over come the slow first quarter, the even worse second quarter, the all but disastrous third quarter, even though the fourth quarter worked out very well, I mean it wasn’t enough, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that Sally at Inhouse Sales should be the only one to get the blame for that, but it just didn’t work out for us. You know, I’m passionate about what we do, and we didn’t fail because I didn’t work real hard, I can tell you that, but, yes, it’s true, Andy over at HR underestimated our staffing needs.

(Inspired, of course, by everybody’s inspirational leader Peyton Manning)

I just saw Heather Mitts play sideline reporter for ESPN’s Miami - North Carolina telecast. She sounded like a super-earnest college freshman as she told a pointless anecdote about one of the team’s watching the Chicago Bears loss to the Miami Dolphins in 1985, their only one that season. Zzzzz. It was borderline embarrassing to watch. She certainly did not change my opinion of sideline reporters. But at least she is pretty, and that’s generally good enough to be on a television.

Who hasn’t been thinking about clobbering spammers when finding one’s inbox cluttered with junk? A Russian spammer was recently found beaten to death, but his murder probably didn’t have anything to do with his spam activities. eXile editor Mark Ames writes about the death of Vardan Kushnir:

Initially, it was suggested that one of his many pissed-off spam-victims might have gone vigilante and done society a favor. But the truth of the murder — at the hands a trio of sluts he met at the Hungry Duck last Saturday night, who slipped him a mickey in his drink — shows that a very un-hi-tech obsession is what drove his life…and death.

“He liked to fuck whores in the ass, and not wear a condom, and then brag about it,” said a former acquaintance who asked not to be identified. “And he did it all the time.”

So not only do spammers clolg your mailbox, they also have lots of sex.

Bastards!