"Welcome to Wichita!" ... alt. title: "Those aren't pillows!"

So I've been watching "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" last night/this morning. (How can you not at Thanksgiving if you own the DVD and a working DVD player?)

And I have a question for anyone else familiar with the film. For as uncomfortable as the situation was that led Neal Page (Steve Martin) and Del Griffith (John Candy) to start talking macho about the play of the Chicago Bears, how is it that Neal didn't notice that nearly all of the towels in that Wichita motel-room bathroom - including all of the full-sized bath towels - had already been used by Del (implied) before Neal began taking a shower?

For everything leading up to that Chicago Bears moment - "I am sorry. I had no idea those beer cans were going to blow like that." "What did you think was going to happen? You put them on a vibrating bed." - wasn't it a creepier thought that Del would have gone to use the sink and almost all of the towels while the guy sharing his room - a near-total stranger at that point in the story, really - was in the shower?

Thankfully, of course, they both made their way back to Chicago as better people and were welcomed by a family for Thanksgiving dinner.

An even field?

Is the National Football League's AFC still superior to the NFC in both achievement and potential?

For many years running before this season, AFC teams had handily won a majority of the regular-season games they had played against NFC competition. In 2004, the interconference series was so bad for the NFC that both the St. Louis Rams and my Minnesota Vikings snuck into the conference playoffs with 8-8 records. (It was questioned whether they belonged, yet both teams won their first-week wild-card playoff games on the road -- memorably in one of those games, then-Vikings receiver Randy Moss pantomimed, uh, leaving some excrement in an end zone at Lambeau Field.)

Are things changing for the NFC? For weeks this season, we rarely heard anything but Patriots and Colts, Colts and Patriots. Only recently have the Dallas Cowboys snuck ahead to No. 2 in most power polls, ahead of all other teams in the NFL save for the undefeated Patriots, since the Colts fell to New England on Nov. 4 and then to San Diego just one week later.

Through nine games each, the AFC's six playoff teams as they would be right now - Patriots, Steelers, Colts, Chargers, Jaguars, Titans - do have a better combined record (40-14) than those who would be the NFC's playoff teams - Cowboys, Packers, Seahawks, Buccaneers, Lions, Giants (38-16). But add in the records of all other teams from each conference, and see that thus far in 2007, the AFC and NFC have identical records in interconference play. (The year's series was tied up last Sunday in a win for the Chicago Bears over the Oakland Raiders.)

For weeks through the early part of this season, most "experts" were already chalking up the AFC's eventual champion as the Super Bowl winner; now, most are giving it directly to New England - with seven weeks to go in the regular season!!! - without a second thought.

The AFC teams have now won four Super Bowls in a row -- to be honest, NFC teams had won 13 Super Bowls in a row over one stretch, including over all of my years in high school and college -- but for as superior as we've been told that the AFC still is this season, I would love to see the AFC's streak broken this season.

I am a true-blue fan of the Vikings (now 3-6) and have been laughed at in recent weeks whenever I point out that, mathematically, they could still come back to win enough games to reach the playoffs (especially when four of their remaining seven games will come against the Giants, Redskins, Lions and Bears -- oh my!!)

But even if, gulp, the Packers should officially make the playoffs and end up representing the NFC in the Super Bowl, I would love to see the Pack wallop the Patriots, if that were to end up being the championship match-up.

We've still got many weeks including the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays to go before the conference playoffs will arrive this year, but I just hope that the Vikings will keep the NFC competitive vs. the AFC by winning at home tomorrow over the Raiders. (It will be, incidentally, the first Vikings game I'll have attended in roughly two years. Look for me in an end zone -- I plan to be wearing a blue hoodie KFAN Radio sweatshirt.)

Man, that's cold, Jay ...

I saw a TV news clip today "assuring" viewers that the in-force TV writer's strike will not affect "reality" programming.

Yes, and the longer the strike continues, we may forever lose sitcoms and hour-long crime dramas as we ever knew them in favor of nothing but reality TV through all prime-time hours.

Oh, we'll still have the late-night talk shows, but not all of the recent working writers could be expected to cut it in late night. The likes of Kevin Eubanks are pretty discerning as to what they'll laugh at.

"Miss Hoover, which one is one?"

Am I smarter than a fifth-grader? Assuredly no smarter than the fifth-graders on the FOX prime-time game show bearing a similar name.

Where do they get those kids? They don't take a random sample from any school; there are no Ralph Wiggums in the bunch.

The other night, on "Celebrity Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader," Regis Philbin didn't know what the "ordinal" of the number 10 was, nor could he identify Robert Frost as the poet who had penned a certain verse (something about a road less traveled). Regis needed the help of one or two of the "average" fifth-graders in the bunch to get those questions right in order to raise more $ for his favorite charity.

I would have needed their help, too. Of course many adults don't have brain vaults like the likely-to-be-alienated-for-their-super-intelligence kids on that show do.

My Goddaughter is a fifth-grader and is very bright, many rungs higher than the Ralph Wiggums of the world, but I doubt she can tell you without hesitation about the ordinals of numbers and/or the work of Robert Frost.

That show is nothing if not misrepresentative.