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George Carlin, who passed away yesterday, was funny because he understood how language works. His running commentary on the relationship between language and culture was the foundation of his comedy.

I’m lucky - I did see Carlin perform in Honolulu on New Year’s Eve 2004. At midnight Pacific Time, he whipped out his mobile phone, made a call and had the audience scream “Happy New Year!”

We also shared the same hobby - WheresGeorge.com. It turns out that Carlin was the long-rumored “celebrity Georger”. His identity was revealed on the site today.

This YouTube video includes my favorite Carlin monologue - his comparison of baseball and football.

Funny: John Dvorak presents a brief list of advertising, sports and movie cliche sites. My favorite movie cliche is the fruitcart, which Roger Ebert named. Loud music in the stadium is a great sports cliche, along with hockey teams skating to a tie.

Sports: The Rays are 45-39, if you don’t count the games they’ve played against the Yankees and Red Sox. This season, the Rays play 19 games against each team. A good article in the Tampa Tribune.

Sports: From the New Bern (NC) Sun-Journal, a sensible reaction to the ACC expansion debacle. I remember the Pac-8:

Why not put a relatively low cap on the number of schools allowed in a conference? Eight’s a nice number. It makes for even brackets in a postseason tournament in any sport, and in football it allows teams the opportunity to schedule five compelling non-conference games that can generate just as much revenue.”

Sports: From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, A list of traitors and backstabbers:

I can almost see Mike Tranghese grabbing Frank Beamer at the next Big East coaches luncheon, planting a big wet one on his cheek and saying, ‘I knew it was you Frank. You broke my heart!’ Or, to paraphrase another Roman who was stabbed in the back, ‘Et tu, Hokie?’