THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT SHE'S NOW BEEN ADMITTED TO PRINCETON: Brittany Eldredge of West Barnstable, Ma., sometimes you don't just have to say, "What the f*$&."

I GUESS YOU GUYS AREN'T READY FOR THAT YET, BUT YOUR KIDS ARE GOING TO LOVE IT: No, I think the world's still just getting started with Brokeback parodies. New: Brokeback to the Future.

BECAUSE THE SEASON-ENDING BIG GAME IN DETROIT INVOLVING TWO FOOTBALL TEAMS IS COMING SOON: I think it's time for us to make our predictions public for Sunday night's Seattle-Pittsburgh XL showdown.

My co-bloggers and all our readers are invited to show up in the comments and make four predictions:

1. Final score.
2. Super Bowl Official Game MVP. (Whoops! Almost violated the copyright.)
3. Company responsible for the commercial receiving the highest rating in Monday's USA Today Ad Meter survey.
4. Name the three songs that the Rolling Stones will play during the halftime show.

Here's mine: Seattle 27-17; Darrell Jackson (140y, 2tds); Anheuser-Busch; and Start Me Up/Honky Tonk Woman/Jumpin' Jack Flash.

Step up. Closest on all four receives Fame and Glory Forever.

THEY GOT EVERY DOG IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD...THEY GOT SPUDS MCKENZIE, ALEX FROM STROH'S: Well, actually while Spuds is No. 48, Alex didn't make Retrocrush's list of the 100 Greatest Dogs in Pop Culture History (done so in honor of the Chinese New Year, which welcomed the Year of the Dog). It's a pretty thorough list, featuring dogs both classic (Toto, Lassie, Old Yeller), contemporary (Triumph, Gromit, and the beloved Poochie), and everything in between (McGruff, Ubu, and the JYD).

THE KINDNESS OF ALOTT5MA READERS: Two questions for you on a Friday. First, have any of you switched to Comcast for your phone service? I switched today from Trinsic and if what they say is right, besides the one month free, I should be saving over $70/month for my two lines. I'm getting unlimited local and long distance on two lines, plus all those features like call-waiting, 3-way, and literally a dozen other features for $39.95/month, plus unlimited calling for $10/month on the second line. I keep thinking there must be a catch. Please share any experiences you've had with them for phone service, good or bad, in the comments.

The other, deals with an old IMac I bought secondhand from my sister-in-law's school district for my kids to play games on. It is not booting, giving me the old folder with a question mark icon. I'm pretty sure I just need a Mac system disk to boot it from, but it came with no such disk. It's running system 9.x. Any Mac experts out there who can tell me where to find a disk or if that even sounds like the real problem?

SIX BLOCKS AWAY, HE CAN HEAR HER HEARTBEAT LOUD AND CLEAR: I suspect that many of you have encountered the following problem. I am wondering if anyone has come up with a simple way to fix this. Let's say you create a song list in iTunes and export it to your iPod. Occasionally I encounter the not so pleasant phenomenon of having one song be much louder (or softer) than the song before it. When you are wearing headphones, especially the standard "in ear" headphones that come with an iPod, the contrast can be painful.

For example, Lucinda Williams' brilliant "Six Blocks Away" must be 20 decibels louder than Jorma Kaukonen's transcendent version of "Red River Blues". If I am burning the song list to a CD, I have found a nice way of dealing with the problem -- a free software progam called "Audiograbber" which can equalize the volume so each song on the CD is approximately as loud as all the others. But I am not aware of an easy way to do this when you export the song list to an iPod, short of the semi-laborious process of using the "song info -- volume" feature to make a rough adjustment to each song's volume.

Does anyone else know of an easy way to deal with this problem?

PERHAPS VIOLET'S MOMMY COULD HAVE TAKEN A LONGER MATERNITY LEAVE: Uh oh. ABC's announcement of its midseason TV schedule does not seem to include the final episodes of a little show called Alias. Rather ominously, ABC's official Alias site states that "the next episode has yet to be scheduled."

I'm not panicking. Yet. ABC has been remarkably savvy over the last couple of years, and it seems out of character to me that the network would give JJ and the All-Spy Gang many months notice of the show's demise, thereby permitting a well-plotted (and populously cast, from what I've been hearing) sendoff, and then not give that demise its moment in the sun.

Not panicking. Not panicking.