First off, I'm thrilled that Albert Pujols received his second MVP award.  If Barry Bonds didn't destroy the baseball (and his body chemistry) during the 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 seasons, Pujols might have four or five MVP awards.  He's that good.  As for the AL MVP, I'm still going with the pick from my first Fanzak rant, Francisco Rodriguez.  Fortunately, his less-than-stellar showing in the postseason will not affect the results of the MVP ballotting.

Secondly, who here is dumbfounded after Donovan McNabb's admission that he didn't know NFL games could end in ties?  I've never played organized football and even I knew that.  There were a couple of ties in 2002, and, the last time I checked, McNabb was a starting QB that year.  Unbelievable.

But what's got me most excited right now has nothing to do with sports.  It has to do with democracy ... Chinese Democracy!!!  It has been 15 years since Guns N' Roses released an album, the woeful covers collection The Spaghetti Incident?  Since then, every original member of the group has left except for frontman Axl Rose.  In 1999, there was a brief re-emergence with the Nine Inch Nails-influenced cut "Oh My God," which was featured on the soundtrack to the abysmal film End of Days (starring the Governator).  In the meantime, Axl (that's right ... I'm on a first name basis with him!) has reportedly been working on perfecting every last note of the upcoming album for 14 years.  You know what this means, right?  The album will be a glorious, beautiful disaster, filled with overwrought, overproduced tracks so busy with unnecessary instrumentation and digital effects that it's bound to be the greatest album ever!!!

Confession time: In the summer of 1988, I was watching MTV late one night when I caught the video for "Welcome to the Jungle."  The track was brash, bombastic, powerful, and it rocked like nobody's business.  The next week, it was topping all the MTV video shows during the day.  I became a GN'R convert immediately.  That year, and well into the next, Appetite for Destruction was the soundtrack to my headbangin' world (along with Metallica's ...And Justice for All).  A few years later, the double-threat Use Your Illusion came out.  By this time, though I liked many of the songs spread across those completely average albums, I was over GN'R mostly.  The misogyny of their lyrics and the lack of musical growth didn't really impress me, and it was time I moved on ... to alternative rock.  Once I fell in love with Nirvana and their politics, GN'R and all that metal I listened to became a thing of the past.

Now, things have changed.  The notion of a pent-up, reclusive, rich, jaded Axl Rose, going crazy, growing paranoid, with nothing better to do than to write songs and brutalize quality musicians with his dictatorial band-leading style, seems irresistable.  Have you heard any of the new songs?  "Chinese Democracy" is mediocre, but "Shackler's Revenge" (featured on Rock Band 2) embodies all that I dreamed these sounds would sound like: Marilyn Manson-via-Korn by-the-numbers hard rock riffs with a ridiculous amount of vocal overdubs and a guitar solo seemingly played to another song.  It is so bad it is crazy awesome.

Do you know what you're doing November 23?  I sure do.  I'm going to Best Buy to purchase the undisputed album of the century!  And I don't care what you Radiohead fans have to say about it :)