And They Are Indisputable

These are the facts:

• I was 5-1 on the playoffs through Saturday but missed on Dallas and San Diego on Sunday. It's a huge surprise though that Wade Phillips and Norv Turner came up small. We'll all enjoy watching them coach Brees-less and Manning-less, respectively, Pro Bowl teams in a couple of weeks.
• With all due respect to Vikings fans, there is such a clear-cut good guy and bad guy in the NFC Championship game that I'm waiting for the NFL to hire Vince McMahon to do the hype.
• Fox's new show, Human Target, is decent. Reminds me of '80s action shows. The kind of thing you can pop in and out of and enjoy when you want.
• 24 is starting out pretty well. I like the psycho Renee thing from tonight and they're giving Chloe a chance to be a total ass, which is always good. My two biggest complaints so far: a) why Herc from The Wire had to beat the crap out of Jack in the basement when the cop was found dead, it seemed too over the top; and b) Mykelti Williamson's posture. He's perpetually hunched over.
• There is a whole mess of recognizable people from other TV shows on 24 this season. The aforementioned Herc from The Wire, the Russian hitman is Horace Goodspeed on Lost, David Anders (Sark from Alias and Kensei from Heroes), Starbuck and Leoban from Battlestar Galactica. We're this close to finding out that Jennifer Morrison left House to be the criminal mastermind this season.
• I have previously recommended the "Written in Bone" exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and will continue to do so; it is tremendous. This weekend, among other places, I spent a little time at the original Jamestown fort from whence some of the bodies came. What struck me is that the fort is mostly buried and has had to be excavated, with the original structure from 1607 a few layers down in the dirt (they have been re-covered so that visitors can walk around). Some of the fort has eroded into the James River. The nature of this dig makes it seem so ancient. Yet, Caesaria, on the Mediterranean Coast of Israel, dates to 22 BCE. There are differences -- the climate, wood structures in Virginia instead of stone in Israel -- but so much of that site has been uncovered and it is sixteen centuries older than our oldest settlement. It is hard to process that age difference.