Bob Barker is retiring after 35 years as the host of Price is Right.

Whitney Houston made a surprise appearance at the 17th Annual Carousel of Hope Ball on Saturday night escorted by none other than Clive Davis. She was all about the photographs on the red carpet and and said, “I feel great,” she looked great too.

It definitely looks as though she’s gained back a lot of weight after getting off the daily crack diet she was on. Now the big questions are 1) can she stay off the crack long enough to release an album? and 2) have the years of sucking on crack smoke deteriorated her legendary vocal chords? Surely many have brushed her off as a has been by now and don’t believe that a comeback is possible.

She has to release an album, a good album, in order to make believers out of all of us.

The NBA season starts tonight with a TNT double-header. The first game will be the Chicago Bulls vs. Miami Heat and the second game will be Phoenix Suns vs. Los Angeles Lakers. I am looking forward to see if the Lakers have what it takes to make it all the way this year.

We are back from attending a beautiful wedding which was held at the breathtaking Hans Fahden Vineyards in Calistoga. Here are the photos from the the event for your viewing pleasure. Congratulations to Maria & Francois as they begin their life together, may it always be filled with peace and happiness!

We are heading up to Napa today to attend my best friend’s sister’s wedding.

At least that’s what the Bush Administration thinks. Bush signed a bill today that authorizes the building of 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border, a border that is actually 2,100 miles long. What he didn’t mention is that the measure signed doesn’t fund the project, which nobody, including the President, knows how much will ultimately cost. Ridiculous.

The Bush Administration apparently didn’t get the memo on the fact that walls typically don’t work at protecting national borders. It didn’t work for China against Mongol invaders (it was too expensive to finish and Mongols could “go around” it), it didn’t work in Berlin (shooting people on sight was the major deterrent there), it doesn’t work in Israel (except to inspire more suicide bombings), and it won’t work here.

Since funding for this project is not likely to ever happen, the signing of this bill is just pre-election posturing by the Bush Administration in trying to garner ultra-conservative Republican borders that want the fence. Meanwhile, they are alienating conservative Republicans that think that a fence is an unnecessary expense and a bad idea. Whatever.

NBA Commissioner David Stern urged his players to leave their firearms at home when they leave their homes. He continued, “It’s a pretty, I think, widely accepted statistic that if you carry a gun, your chances of being shot by one increase dramatically.” Damn, how bad are things when your boss feels that he has to have a press conference to tell you to “leave your gun at home?”

The median home price in the U.S. fell 2.2 percent to $220,000 last month. This is the sixth straight month of price declines and the largest year-over-year decline on record. The bottom may be falling out now.

Kurt Cobain was the top-earning dead celebrity last year, earning $50 million. Elvis is usually at the top of this list, but the king has been dethroned. Needless to say, Courtney Love and her daughter won’t be hurting for cash anytime soon. That’s more money than even Courtney could squander on drugs, or is it!?

Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron, was sentenced to 24 years in prison today.

In this episode, teams made their way from India to Kuwait. That’s right, just one small border cross away from Iraq, where U.S. troops are blown up daily. All the teams were bunched up in Mumbai and arrived in Kuwait at the same time.

Kuwait proved to be a hard place to navigate, with many teams getting lost in between tasks. Team Alabama, the Asian Brothers, and the Coal Miners had an alliance and consider themselves friends. So much so that the Asian Brothers let the Coal Miners “take” the Fast Forward because the Coal Miners were marked for elimination. Dumb move.

The Coal Miners came in first with the Fast Forward. I thought for sure that the Asian Brothers would be gone after their mistake, but ultimately it was the Triathletes inability to read a map that would eventually do them in. I’m sad to see Sarah go, but Peter was such a dick that I’m glad he’s gone. Buh-bye!

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The Halo feature film which is currently in development is now in limbo because Universal backed out of a co-financing and distribution deal with Fox. The film, which according to trade papers now has a budget of $200 million, was supposed to be released next summer. Now, it may not.

Gavin Newsom says he’s “absolutely not convinced” that he will run for re-election for mayor of San Francisco. He says he’s tired of sitting “at bars and restaurants doing homework and getting food to go” and wants more balance in his life. I am sure that also means he’d like to date 20-year-olds without being scrutinized.

In this episode, teams made their way from Vietnam to India. Teams were immediately all bunched up on a train on the way to Hanoi, Vietnam. On the train, the Asian Brothers decided to annoy the hell out of Peter of the Triathletes team by faking that they were using a cell phone to book flights. While this *did* annoy Peter, it inspired to find a real cell phone to arrange for reservations. The Triathletes and Miss America called ahead to a hotel travel agency to book tickets to Chennai, India. There was a lot of drama with all of the teams making different flight arrangements to get to Chennai.

Ultimately, the Asian Brothers got the earliest booked flights to Chennai through Hong Kong and Dehli that put them into Chennai three hours before other teams. The Asian Brothers quickly shared their information with the Coal Miners and Alabama, who changed their reservations at the airport to get to Dehli and fly standby to Chennai. This proved to be a good move, but they didn’t beat Miss America and the Triathletes who got better flights to Chennai from Bangkok.

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Oracle bought the naming rights to the Oakland Arena, but the Warriors *still* suck.

After Steve Irwin’s death, stingrays were innocently killed off the Australian coastline. Apparently, after a month of planning, today the stingrays fought back by sending a “suicide stinger” onto a boat to stab a man in the heart. The Stingray Revolutionary Army (SRA) quickly took responsibility for the attack that has left an 81-year-old man in critical condition.

A spokesman for the SRA, a speckled stingray only known by the name “Barbie” spoke with a reporter for The Daily Nugget at an undisclosed location. She said, “We will not sit back and do nothing while our innocent brothers and sisters die at the hands of ignorant humans! We continue to maintain that Irwin’s death was an unfortunate accident. Nonetheless, we have thousands of stingrays training all over the world to jump onto boats and we will continue the use of force until the senseless attacks on our species stop!”

The Department of Homeland security could not be reached for comment at press time to discuss how the U.S. Coast Guard will deal with this new threat from the seas. Robert Hornsby, an Australian fisherman from Queensland had this to say, “I had warned some kids last month about messing with these animals because I knew of their complex worldwide communication network. They are smarter and more cunning than the ‘crab people’ and we should stop messing with them.” We should all heed this warning before it is too late.

The closure of Howard Street due to the Oracle Open World conference starts tonight and will run through October 28th. My advice is to avoid driving within at least three blocks of this mess at all costs. Traffic that normally flows through Howard Street will be redirected to Mission, Harrison, and Brannan Streets. The closure will also increase traffic on Third and Fourth Streets and, maybe to a lesser extent, Second and Fifth Streets. Let’s see what happens next week when the conference is in full force and the additional lane is closed on Fourth Street.

Foreclosures were up 89.2% and rental prices were up 8.2% in the nine-county Bay Area for the third quarter compared to the same period last year. Overall, demand for rentals have risen as people realize that buying a home may not yield the high gains that have been seen in the last few years. It’s hard to gauge the San Francisco average rental price because official stats include buildings with 50 units or more, and half of San Francisco’s rentals are in buildings with 10 units or less.

A school in Massachusetts has banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they’ll get hurt and hold the school liable. What!? School playgrounds are for playing! Is it any wonder that kids are shooting up their schools!? Maybe they should let the kids run and play, they’d be less dangerous.

Besides, aren’t kids in America fat enough even *with* the running at recess? Maybe they’re just going to ban recess altogether. Or ban schools and have kids just sit in front of televisions with a steady dose of edutainment, from the Edutainment Channel of course, and soda pumped directly into their bloodstreams. That would free the schools from liability, wouldn’t it? Big ups to Dave for the link.

A U.S. District judge erased Ken Lay’s criminal conviction citing an earlier case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals extinguished a defendant’s entire case pending appeal due to his death. The reasoning was that the defendant hadn’t had a full opportunity to challenge the conviction and the government shouldn’t be able to punish a dead defendant or his estate. This means that that Ken Lay’s estate is off the hook for the $43.5 million in ill-gotten Enron gains that the U.S. government would have received as restitution as part of his conviction. The U.S. government must now sue the Ken Lay estate like any other litigant in civil court.

I guess that if you steal hundreds of millions of dollars and fail to get away with it, you can always kill yourself while on appeal and leave your heirs a pretty nice nest egg. Who knew? Some people claim that he either killed himself or faked his own death. It turns out that he may have “died” on the advice of legal counsel. Surely laws will have to be changed going forward to deal with this, since many CEOs are old farts that may die before the legal process is through with them.