This Sunday on FNiA, TKO Report will be about Eagles’ coach Andy Reid and the personal hell he is going through with his two oldest sons in jail on drug and DUI charges at the worst possible time: Dallas Week in Philadelphia, and the annual return of Terrell Owens.

The sex scene from Billo’s novel is the kind of thing we should read to teenagers to prevent them from having sex. “You see kids, sex is lots of fun, but it can also sound like this!” And they would all zip up until they were 21.

I think Keith’s novel would definitely be written for laughs. Intentional laughs.

Yes, Keith’s rebuttal to that Slate article is pure geeky Keith–and pure “on the defensive” Keith, trying to point out that the death-watch on his career back in 2001 might be ever the most slightly premature. Of course, ultimately he was proven right, even if he had to eat some of his words in the process.

The book of essays he refers to here is the one that never saw the light of day after he canceled his contract and returned his advance to the publisher–HarperCollins is a division of News Corp.–in high dudgeon over the role of Page Six in the Murdoch Evil Empire’s New York Post (oh, how we love it) in helping spread a rumor that Sandy Koufax was gay. Not because he felt it was a terrible thing to be gay, but because he was disgusted at how they tried to whip up a scandal about whether or not Koufax was gay, and then tried to blame it all on stuff in the Daily News.

As for Keith’s “novel about the TV news industry,” there’s a vast world of difference between finishing up a novel and getting it sold to a publisher who then puts it out. I suspect he finished the novel, but could never find a buyer. So he was counting his chickens a bit before they hatched there. Maybe he should be grateful–it could be that Keith is a better novelist than Bill O’Reilly, but Billo’s bilious novel on the TV news industry is out there for everyone to laugh at/be horrified by (you could call it the TV newscaster version of American Psycho) and I am not so sure he is the better for it. All it provides anyone with is a frightening insight into the man’s sense of frustrated entitlement (does he wish HE could murder all the people who have pissed him off in his career in various horrible ways?) and a source of unintended comedy at what are intended to be his bold and daring scenes of underworld degenerates addicted to sex and drugs. (”Hey, put that pipe down and get MY pipe up!”)

Yes, chances are Keith’s a better fiction writer than that, but still…

I just wish we could still read the Keith-penned Contentville stories this article once linked to, which are now essentially dead links.

Yeah, about that Slate article, I put a few words up over at Palaver about that as well, and I totally agree with Becky. DP has a lot of sports journalistic abilities that cannot be seen in his Outtakes column, and why a magazine as thoughtful as Slate would use that one silly example to sum up DP’s talents doesn’t make any sense. It would be like judging the journalistic worth of Countdown and Keith Olbermann by the “Oddball” segment.

And, re: that rebuttal. Is this the novel he’d mentioned from about seven years ago, give or take? I had no idea that was still even on the back burner.