The Yuckraker

After months of hype and anticipation it’s finally here.

Monday afternoon, Gen. David Petraeus will debut to Congress his long-awaited report on how things are going in Iraq. As expected, the American public and the retailers that cater to them are in a last-minute race to get their “Petraeus Parties” in order.

“Our television sales are up about 23 percent from this month last year,” said Manny Macomber, a salesman at H.H. Gregg, 544 W. Main St., “You can say we’ve had quite a surge.”

Spokesmen for Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Amazon all said the DVD of the two-hour condensed version of the Petraeus testimony is second on their pre-order sales list, behind “High School Musical 2.”

Nationwide, 16 percent of workers are projected to use a sick day Monday, according to the outplacement firm of Fredrickson & Eagle. That’s comparable to first day of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

But perhaps the best example of America’s love of televised Iraq war news coverage came Sunday night at the local Kroger, 115 W. Main St.

The aisles were packed with folks wearing Petraeus t-shirts. Salsa, bags of Buffalo wings and cornhole games were all in short supply.

As one shopper put it, “This is like the Oscars, Super Bowl and Olympics all rolled into one.”

Anticipation is running high as commercial pitchman Peyton Manning begins the follow-up to his magical 2006 season tonight at 8 on NBC.

Manning is coming off a year that saw him produce such memorable spots as “Fake Audible In The Huddle For DirecTV” and “Pass To CircuitCity Salesman Is Too Hard.”

Debuting tonight, and running during every possible commercial break, will be a spot for Summer’s Eve in which Peyton walks a sandy beach with his brother Eli to discuss the benefits of douching.

Other ads will feature Manning touting Canon, Apple, Reebok, GE and Olive Garden, which will conclude with a hilarous punch line from Peyton as the Mannings sit around the table. Wear diapers, everybody!

Manning’s existing spots for Sprint, MasterCard and ESPN will remain. This means that Manning’s work will take up all of NBC’s allotted space except for the brief part of the Arbor Day Foundation commercial that sometimes slips through.

“I’m just trying to set a good example for the kids,” Manning said. “If I can move just one product, then I’ve done my job.”

In between Manning commercials tonight, his Indianapolis Colts will open their defense of the Super Bowl crown against the New Orleans Saints.

Normally, hearing your principal’s voice as you cut across the schoolyard to go to McDonald’s wouldn’t be a good thing, but to Washington High School junior Matt MacIlvane, it was like hearing The Fratellis coming out of his iPod.

In a risque search for a bite to eat Friday morning, MacIlvane traversed the closed campus in search of a Sausage McMuffin with Egg on the other side of Main Street. But he didn’t get that far, as longtime schoolmaster Tim Johnson busted him walking across the main lawn.

“Mr. MacIlvane, where are you heading off to!?” Johnson bellowed.

When MacIlvane mentioned that the principal should have said “to where are you heading,” Johnson made the student a deal: No in-school suspension, but no McDonald’s, either.

“Clearly, I got away with one,” MacIlvane said. “Now I need to apply my quick-thinking skills to finding another route to nearby restaurants that doesn’t attract as many eyeballs.”

Said Johnson: “He got off fair and square. What can I say? He’s absolutely right and, may I add, a real student of grammar. It’s the beginning of the school year and I’m not in spring-semester form yet. I blew it.”

Jimmy Antonelli, a Washington County resident who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, was indignant Thursday afternoon.

He took the day off from work to kick back and watch his beloved Yankees take on the Boston Red Sox in a matinee. It turns out he burned one of his 10 precious vacation days for nothing.

“I thought it was a given that the Yankee game would be on,” Antonelli said Thursday night after coming home from a local sports bar. “I mean, it’s nearly September and it’s the Sox. Why wouldn’t I think it was on?

“I tell you what, ESPN had better start showing the Yankee-Sox rivalry some love. I don’t know what the hell that was that they were showing, but it wasn’t the Yankees or the Sox, I can tell you that.”

Of his trip to the sport bar, Antonelli said: “Yeah, they had the game, but it was on NESN so I had to suffer through the yo-yo Boston announcers. What a joke.”

New York won, 5-0, to give itself a series sweep and inch closer to the Red Sox in the AL East standings.

Said Antonelli, who will be back behind the security desk at the Trust Bank Building today: “Are you listening, ESPN? We wear pinstripes and have Jeter and ARod. Look us up.”

Through extensive research, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dorothy Klein-Anderson has found that many of our most beloved presidents had nicknames most people never knew about.

“When I say ‘Ike’ or “Tricky Dicky,’ everyone knows about whom I’m talking,” said Klein-Anderson from her home in Princeton, N.J. “But there are some really fascinating monikers I hadn’t heard of until recently.”

Here’s a sampling:

President No. 3 — Thomas “Dark Meat” Jefferson
6 — John Quincy “Q&A” Adams
9 — William Henry “Nah, it’s nice out” Harrison
10 — John “Tippekayak” Tyler
12 — Zachary “It’s not Tyler, dick” Taylor
14 — Franklin “Last Call” Pierce
15 — James “Seacrest” Buchanan
18 — Ulysses “I’m buried there, idiot” Grant
19 — “Ol’ piece of chicken in his beard” Rutherford B. Hayes
22/24 — Grover “Two-fer” Cleveland
23 — Benjamin “Lunchmeat” Harrison
25 — William “What-archy rules?” McKinley
27 — William Howard Taft, “The Gentleman Anorexic”
29 — Warren G. “Teapot Dumb” Harding
30 — Calvin “Chatterbox” Coolidge
32 — Franklin “The Gazelle” Roosevelt
33 — Harry “The Hiroshima Dreama” Truman

Klein-Anderson’s complete findings will be published in The Journal of Presidential Stuff this fall.