Up: It’s the Headline of the Week!: Ding ding ding!* Great news everyone: In an effort to save you time and mental energy on issues to which you devote neither time nor thought, I’ve decided that every week I’ll take it upon myself to search out the best news headline I can find. IT’S OKAY PEOPLE, I’ll bear this cross.

Our first official winner comes from the Reuters news wire: “Obama deficit panel wrestles healthcare ‘gorilla.'” You see, though most Americans were unaware of it, the Obama administration attempted to rally public support the healthcare reform bill in early 2009 by introducing an adorable mascot: Bonesey, an 850-lb Silverback Gorilla that was released into the House of Representatives and that has, to date, mauled 13 people to death. President Obama convened a panel of his top economic advisers headed by Larry Summers, told them to “sac up,” and tasked them with subduing Bonesey with pointed barbs about his stock portfolio. Finally someone is reporting on this.

Runner-up: “Secret U.S. spy satellite launches into orbit on huge rocket.”

*Ding ding ding?

Down: Yeah, but does she know any Halen?: I was calmly going about my typical Sunday routine of hurling curse words at my laptop as I complain about my fantasy football team (Sidenote: DO SOMETHING, Brian Cushing. If you need to start shooting up roids again, you have my permission.), when this commercial happened:

If you’re unfamiliar with Cialis, it’s but one more pill in a billion-dollar erectile dysfunction treatment industry. But you’d never know that from watching this commercial unless you were already familiar with the product; instead, you would assume, as I did, that it was depicting a Mamas and the Papas-style backwoods commune wherein people trip balls on LSD and play folk music all day.

There’s no doubt this is a terrible commercial, but really, what else can you expect from this kind of product? The ad agencies hired by the pharmaceutical company have to figure out a way to advertise for something that they can’t directly address, and thus have to develop all kinds of oddly suggestive euphemisms and metaphors (like the husband’s slow, methodical pumping of that water well — awwww shit!). In the end, these people are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with blockbuster ideas like, “Woman sings about preference for morning sex.”

Up: The fact that this guy had a shotgun handy in the first place: Sarah Palin may not be the brightest bulb on the national political scene, but here’s one thing she’s contributing to intellectual study: The Transitive Property of Palin. It’s a new math theorem wherein intelligent people are so frustrated with having to either listen to, or hear about vacuous idiocy of Sarah Palin that their anger transfers to anything associated with the former Alaska governor.

Case in point: The Associated Press is reporting that a man in Vermont, Wisconsin put an eight-inch hole in his TV with a shotgun after a heated argument with his wife regarding the success of Bristol Palin — Sarah Palin’s oldest daughter — on the ironically-titled reality show Dancing with the Stars. According to the story, Steven Cowan was so upset that Bristol Palin reached the finals of the show that he fired a shot into his television and then had a 15-hour standoff with police outside his house. I’m not shitting you. The story doesn’t make it clear whether Cowan was just expressing his rage, or if he believed that Bristol Palin was actually living inside his television set, which, as I’ve said many times before, is my number one fear (My number two is getting picked to be on House Hunters, and then not liking any of the three places that they show me. NOW WHAT THE HELL DO I DO? As far as I’m concerned, if a place doesn’t have granite counter tops, it’s a massive shit hole.).

Now, I have no good god damn if she can dance or not, but the Transitive Property of Palin falls under my rubric of acceptable reason to shoot a television and engage local police in an armed standoff. Other acceptable reasons:

-If the idiots on House Hunters choose a place without granite counter tops.
-If Guy Fieri is on anything, anywhere, ever.
-If Brian Cushing is fucking your fantasy team over again.
-If you need practice with your aim so that the rest of your backwoods Wisconsin militia doesn’t laugh at you again.

That’s it.

Down: Guy Fieri: It’s worth reiterating. He’s awful.