SIDE SALAD - Everything crunchy is good.

LIKE SOMETHING ON A BOAR HOG

Did anyone see the Fox NFL Sunday pre-game show? More specifically, the weather segment with Jillian Barberie featuring "guest meteorologist Pamela Anderson.

The reason I ask:

Could someone please explain the Frankenipples signaling for help under Anderson's blouse?

We were watching at our house when a woman watching with us who shall remain nameless noticed the protrusions pointing in asymmetrical directions and asked, "Are those her nipples?"

I made my best estimated guess but figured that if someone who actually owns the enhanced version of the equipment couldn't get a bead on them, it was a deathtrap for me to even attempt an answer. (Barberie here seems to be nonverbally telling Anderson that one of her compass points is indicating southeast while the other is decidedly aimed northwest.)

The only thing I could muster:

"It's not a good thing when your nipples point higher than your I.Q."

It's usually at moments like this that Salad Wife and I are walking through the mall. We'll see something of this ludicrous magnitude, exchange glances, giggle immaturely and do our best Bronson Pinchot as Serge in "Beverly Hills Cop":

"That's not sexxxxxy."

Coincidentally, Anderson is breezy and mild and showers late.

She's also 59 percent humid and has a temperature of 74 degrees.

UPDATE: Anderson's appearance was so eventful that Richard Sandomire of the New York Times covered it.

An exerpt:

This wasn't just any ordinary Fox star strategically positioned in the stands for a promotional hi-de-ho during the World Series. This wasn't Bernie Mac, Mischa Barton, Jeffrey Tambor or Nanny Stella.

This was Miss Pamela Anderson, working overtime for Fox.

Oh, the corporate imperatives that viewers endure to please networks. Last season, Nicollette Sheridan's bath-towel striptease for Terrell Owens opened ABC's "Monday Night Football" to serve the insatiable needs of "Desperate Housewives" - and of many desperate men in front of their giant screens.

"Fox Pamela Sunday" is part of the fabric of televised sports promotional inanities like the AOL icon sprinting through baseball games, Joe Buck calling Robin Williams in a box seat during a postseason at-bat to peddle Sprint, and the ESPY Awards, the apotheosis of network self-love.

To observe Pam Anderson in Fox's pregame studio locker room - and not in an Internet-circulated sex video - is to grasp how far we have traveled since the pregame days of Brent, Irv, Phyllis and Jimmy the Greek.

How long were we expected to wait until a network showed the mindless chutzpah required to connect a blonde bombshell to our national sports passion?

Fox Sports is accustomed to favoring the use of the buxom in its N.F.L. studio; since 2000, it has assigned Jillian Barberie, a mini-Pam with a purse full of double entrendres, to give the weather, a special position that would be unnecessary without her, regardless of how trim Al Roker gets.

Anderson and Barberie delivered the goods: two giggling girls at Fox's football pajama party, as if Mae West and Theda Bara had crashed a World Series radio booth. All that was missing was a pipe-puffing Rupert Murdoch in a silk robe, flanked by the cooing Coors twins.

Here were Pam and Jillian, joking about barometric frontal systems (as Pam posed in profile), primping each other's hair and getting stoked about the continuing voting for Fox's sexiest man in the N.F.L. poll.

In this capacity, they provided more than Terry Bradshaw and his pals could; they spoke of the "sexy Freak Jevon Kearse," Michael Strahan's smile, Coach Herman Edwards's older-man charms and Lawyer Milloy, about whom Pam expressed a desire to cross-examine.

Along the way, the word "stacked" was cited seven times and a 55-second clip of the premiere was shown. Last season, the six episodes of "Stacked" produced the 50th-ranked prime-time rating; imagine the boost it will receive from Anderson's campaign stop in the studio's testosterone stew.

Posted by Jeff at November 7, 2005 07:21 AM