God help us

• Morgan Freeman is one tough 71-year-old.

• Tuesday's Aurora Sentinel features a good AP story about how higher gas prices have prompted many people to opt for mass transit for their transportation needs, and how at the same time, transit authorities are cutting back on routes to deal with their own increased fuel spending. Lots of riders, not a lot of buses and trains to get them all where they want to go.

• Rick Reilly has really let himself go since leaving Sports Illustrated. Sure, he waxed familiar in his first column for ESPN the mag, a spiel about learning who his father was through the game of golf. But his subsequent efforts (Golfing with Charles Barkley, comparing Brett Favre to Cher, and making fun of other countries' national anthems) just don't seem to be up to speed with the kind of sports writing that made him his millions hundreds of thousands. Plus, he co-wrote "Leatherheads," and while I didn't see it, it's supposed to be one of those George Clooney movies that suck, like "Batman & Robin" and "Intolerable Cruelty" (Sorry, I just can't bring myself to besmirch a Coen Brothers film).

• Crude is getting cheaper, and the prices at the pump seem to finally be responding to the drop in trading prices we saw back in early July. This only means one thing: Time to stockpile as much fuel as you can while prices are so low, sending a surge of demand into the marketplace and triggering another record-breaking burst in prices.

• "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part." <--- I figured this was a much better quote than asking a fat kid if he smokes crack over and over again in "Lean on Me."