People assume NFL cheerleaders are within some vague sniffing distance of the good life, but a Ben-Gal is paid seventy-five bucks per game. That is correct: seventy-five bucks for each of ten home games. The grand cash total per season does not keep most of them flush in hair spray, let alone gas money to and from practice.

Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.

One cheerleader per season per NFL squad is chosen to attend the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. All season long, the cheerleaders speculate about who will be chosen.

One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.

Whether we buy into the rhetoric or not, one thing has been made clear: Illegal immigration is a problem reaching a breaking point, and something must be done.

Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.

Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world. The woody plants occur naturally in the sandy gravel understory of Maine's coastal forests, where little else bothers even trying to grow.

Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It's exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy.

Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.

The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.