Daytona Weekend
The Daytona 500 is this Sunday. I'm betting on the driver in the Toyota with a stuck accelerator pedal.



Vonn Out?
U.S. skiing star Lindsay Vonn may not be able to race in the Olympics. Not because she's injured, but because the Olympics are on NBC and Jay Leno wanted her spot on the team.



Clinton Okay
Bill Clinton is doing well after being rushed to the hospital for a heart procedure yesterday. The former president is cleared to go back to work, but not yet ready to go after all of Tiger Woods' newly available ex-girlfriends.



Higher Premiums
Blue Cross is raising health insurance premiums by as much as 39% in California. The company figures anyone still voluntarily living in California will probably make at least $100,000 worth of mental health care claims in the coming year alone.



Kennedy Quitting
Congressman Patrick Kennedy is not running for re-election. This may have something to do with the fact that happy hour at the Capitol Hill bar has now been cut to 45 minutes.





February 12th


1689: The British Parliament declares that King James II's decision to move to France constituted an abdication... and proved that James was a wuss.


1816: The Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest working opera house in Europe, is destroyed by fire... much to the delight of Europe's schoolchildren, who were sick of going there on mandatory field trips.


1974: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, is exiled from the Soviet Union. The punishment for being a weaker writer was not being exiled from the Soviet Union.