Over at www.esquire.com they have a neat little competition going on to determine 'The Best Song of the 21st Century". Looking like one-half of the NCAA brackets (which, by the way, start tonight - and, no, I do not count that game between the 64th and 65th teams in as part of the tournament), 32 songs from 2000 on are paired up in 16 groups. You pick your favourite of each pair, submit your choices, then the winners are matched up and you vote again, repeating the process until you pick the best song of the last six and a quarter years. Simple, huh?

Round 1 went fairly smooth, with the only real brainwork going into my selection of "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz over The Killers' "Somebody Told Me". Other good tracks knocked out this round included the Dixie Chicks' "Landslide" and Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman", although neither had a chance against Kanye and Green Day. On some of these pairs, I had to pick songs I really didn't much care for, either because I wasn't familiar with the opponent or disliked the chosen song less than the other. Round 2 was similarly easy, with all the pretenders knocked out. The one truly great tune that didn't make the cut was "Jesus Walks", but as time would prove Kanye's competition, Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out", had considerable staying power for this listener.

In Round 3, there were three easy wins: "Take Me Out", Coldplay's "Clocks" and "Feel Good Inc." (which, while a good tune, would have been a first-round loser if paired with different competition - a factor to remember when looking at the NCAA brackets also). The fourth pitted my favorite song of a few years back, 'Hey Ya!" by Outkast, against Green Day's "American Idiot". But in the end, this was just as easy, because even today I still search for "Hey Ya!" on my Dell, but the Green Day track only gets played if I play the whole album. Plus, for my money, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" is a much better song. Outkast moves on.

In Round 4, Outkast crushed Gorillaz without any hesitation. But now I had "Take Me Out" up against "Clocks". Until "Hey Ya!" was released, "Clocks" was my favorite tune of that year, and I fully believed in its Grammy win over the Outkast track. I still consider it an incredibly haunting and beautiful song, very evocative and richly cinematic in its suggestion of great and exciting events. But a week doesn't pass by when I don't listen to "Take Me Out" once or twice, and while "Clocks" is mostly background noise to me now, when Franz F. rips from my stereo, the girls and I are on the floor. It's still exciting to hear it, almost two years and depressing ubiquity later. In the end, an easy win.

Which put it up against Outkast in the finals. While Outkast would have beaten Coldplay, they are no match for Franz Ferdinand. No other recent tune hits me in the gut quite like "Take Me Out", and I feel a rush of energy when it plays. While "Hey Ya!" remains great, it's also starting to feel a little campy, while that will never be the fate of "Take Me Out", my champion.

However, I am rather alone in this opinion. While "Hey Ya!" presently sits in fifth with 6% of the vote, "Take Me Out" doesn't even register. The most popular choice? "Feel Good Inc.", with 21%, proving that most people, or at least esquire.com voters, have short memories. While a good tune, an honest appraisal of how songs made you feel when you first heard them and how long they stuck with you would lead you away from the current flavour-of-the-month. On the other hand, this could be temporary, as the current print issue of Esquire shows that as of January 30, 2006, the leader, with 14%, was Johnny Cash's "Hurt", followed by U2's "Beautiful Day" at 11% and "Hey Ya!" at 10%. So much can still change.

Now, go vote!

A guy on the subway this morning, roughly my age, was wearing leather pants. (Well, they looked like leather. It might have been faux leather. I wasn't about to touch them to find out for certain.) Leather pants have never looked less than ridiculous on most men. In fact, in this day, on a woman they look slightly pathetic, as if the lady involved has been forced to dig into the back of her closet for something that fits. At a minimum, she has missed the style train by a good decade or so. (On the other hand, leather skirts and dresses remain acceptable, simply because they are skirts and dresses. And the hotter a woman is, the better leather looks. Let's face it - a hot woman can wear whatever she damned well pleases.) This guy wasn't obviously gay (let the arrows fly), so I can't imagine his intentions. After all, you don't even see young guys in leather pants these days in public. The only men who should be allowed to wear leather pants are rock singers, and even they look pretty silly in them. For everyone else, it isn't radical, it's embarrassing.

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24 SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

Yet again, 24 has proven why it is such a great show, first, with last week's death by nerve gas of techie Edgar and with this week's death-by-drug-overdose-from-a-needle-wielded-by-a-former-CTU-agent-who you-wanted-to-kill-but-couldn't-do-it-because-you're-a-better-person-than-that of Tony. The actor who plays Edgar was in the paper this week complaining that the producer said his character became more vulnerable as his popularity increased. His rationale was why would you kill off a popular character. But in the world of 24 it makes perfect sense. This show keeps you off balance, and even a popular character isn't safe from the business they are in. Witness the death of Teri at Nina's hands in Season One, Jack's killing of Chappelle in Season Three, and the deaths in the first 10 minutes of Season Five of Palmer and Michelle, and many others. It's a dangerous world, and if your job is to fight that danger then you are never safe. Edgar's death, sad though it is, is a reminder of that.

As for Tony, this brings home just how alone Jack is in the world. In Season Four, when his back was against the wall, Jack called on the one person he knew he could trust - Tony. (And what a rush that arrival was.) Now, having lost three of the four people he relied on to save his own life, and rejected by his daughter, Jack has only the mission left. When Jack gets angry, people die. Let the slaughter begin.

This whole Tim Horton's thing is just crazy. If you're Canadian, I'm sure you've heard the story. 10-year-old Quebec girl pulls discarded coffee cup from garbage, intending to roll up the rim to see if it's a winning cup. Has trouble with the rolling part, so she recruits a 12-year-old playmate to help her. Voila! She wins an SUV. Only now the parents of the older girl are insisting they should be sharing the prize. Lawyers have been retained.

My instinct on this, having nothing to do with my employment in the legal field, is that the 10-year old should get the car. Actually, there is an age restriction on this, so the car should go to her parents. If I have a 6/49 ticket and ask you to read me the numbers, are you entitled to a share of my winning ticket? Of course not, and that in essence is what the 12-year-old contributed to the victory. She assisted the girl with the winning cup. Arguably, her role is greater because of her physical action; however, the girl could just as easily have carried the dirty cup home to have her parents do it, and none of this would have ever happened.

Adding to the madness is that the teacher who discarded the cup has now retained a lawyer as well, seeking a share of the prize. Said lawyer has gone so far as to write Tim Horton's demanding that the SUV not be delivered until DNA testing is completed on the cup. This is just greed at its ugliest. About all that teacher has a right to do is to beat himself over the head for stupidly throwing away a cup worth over $30,000. This seems really simple to me. If you throw something away, you are making a statement that it has no value to you. If someone else chooses to retrieve that item and find value in it, how can you suddenly come back and claim it. If your car engine dies so that you abandon your vehicle by the side of the road, and then another guy comes along and fixes it, can you suddenly ask for your car back? (A weak analogy, I know.) If that 10-year old had never picked the cup out of the garbage, the teacher would never have known his loss. Was he intending all along to go back and pick up the cup? Would that make a difference? Not to me.

The law is shaped by the things you do and the things you fail to do. It is rarely guided by your intentions to do or not do things. If you intend to kill your wife, but don't - hey, no crime. You're a bad person, but the law doesn't care because you didn't act on it. Likewise, if you do not intend to kill her but do so accidentally, you will still be caught up in the legal system's web until cleared or after serving time. The little girl who retrieved the cup is the only person in this pathetic exercise who acted in accordance with her intentions. Give her the damned vehicle.

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Four movies since Friday. Holy crap! The NCAA men's basketball tournament starts this Thursday, so I probably won't watch much other than that over the next few weeks. Here are my capsule comments:

Miracle: Kurt Russell was a great Herb Brooks. But it's a pretty stilted film, manipulative as all hell and jingoistic to the extreme. And I really hate it when a movie plays fast and loose with history. The U.S. gold medal win in 1980 was a great story. Why play games with the facts for dramatic reasons? The truth had drama to spare.

Welcome to Mooseport: Ray Romano is too goofy to be a movie star - he has only one expression that rings true, being a sort of mesmerized goofiness that makes you root for him, even when behaving badly. But this was perfect for this movie, and I really enjoyed it. Gene Hackman is okay as the retired U.S. President. But the real strengths are the supporting players, mainly Rip Torn and Fred Savage as members of Hackman's election team. The final scene between Torn and Romano is priceless.

Monster: Crude and dirty, and possibly brilliant. Charlize Theron is amazing and almost unrecognizable as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. What's fascinating is how this film makes clear that Wuornos started as a victim, defending herself from assault and certain death, but quickly became a predator, enjoying the thrill of killing men, until in the end regret overwhelmed her, but not enough to stop the killing. Then, facing death, she lashed out at the world as if it somehow wasn't her fault. Powerful stuff, and very depressing, but with a strong love story involving Theron and Christina Ricci's characters at the centre.

Monster-in-Law: Weird, huh, how I saw these last two consecutively? Better than I expected, especially Wanda Sykes, who had all the good lines as Jane Fonda's assistant/friend. But Fonda was dreadful, embarrassing really, and JLo and Michael Vartan just dull. Adam Scott is good as JLo's gay friend, and I laughed more than I am willing to admit at Sykes, who has never done anything but annoy me previously. Director Robert Luketic has a good touch for light comedy, as demonstrated previously in Legally Blonde and Win A Date with Tad Hamilton!.

Bring on the roundball!