GateHouse — Barack Obama is a better human being than me for a number of reasons so large that it was discovered only last year by researchers in Denmark. These reasons include, but are not limited to:

1. His teeth, which are awesome, and which I would like to paint, even though I’m not a painter and never have been. I just, I don’t know, want to commemorate them. Maybe on, like, a plate.
2. He can call Scarlett Johansson if he wanted to — not that he does, or would. But he could, which makes me hate him with seething jealousy, much like how I feel about Clooney.
3. Everything else he knows about and can do.

But the most pressing reason that Barack Obama is better than me is that apparently he can prepare for the idea of abandoning his BlackBerry and not explode in hysterics. Like a 4-year-old boy when you tell him he can’t have his third chocolate milk of the night while he reads night-night books because it will most likely cause him to assertively expunge said chocolate milk directly into his bedsheets at some point in the evening. And Dad is tired of doing sheet laundry three times a week, not that this something I have a lot of precise experience with right now or anything.

Indeed, it is highly probable that when Obama takes office in 60 or so days, he will be forced to relinquish his prized BlackBerry. There are various and legitimate reasons involving security, scrutiny, presidential record-keeping and the always-percolating desire to check your Facebook during important briefings regarding which greed-soaked failing giant Wall Street company needs a government handout this week. Sorry, did I say handout? I meant bailout. My apologies.

I would never pretend to be a professional political commentator, because that would cause me to want to perform self-directed dental surgery with those little two-pronged deals that you use to hold corn on the cob. But that Obama can operate a BlackBerry might be one of those generational details that set him apart from John McCain, who carved important messages into slabs of dinosaur.

But he can do this and get by just fine, because of many reasons, most of which are those teeth. I, by contrast, would lose my damn mind. I obtained a BlackBerry earlier this year for the very simple reasons that I finally became able to escape from the clutches of my mobile-phone plan, and also BlackBerrys are very shiny. Also, some other people I knew had one.

I was instantly wrapped in a warm loving embrace of the BlackBerry’s goodness. The device can do a great many pretty astonishing things, exactly none of which I take advantage of. I use it mostly to check for e-mail I do not have and to regularly avail myself of the Facebook statuses of people about whom I am only slightly interested (if any of you are reading, let me offer this advice: your simply being “tired” does not constitute an important enough development to trouble the bulk of your life contacts with).

Well, that’s not true, exactly. Twice I needed to use the map function to find out how lost I was (turns out I was extremely lost), and a few times I’ve used the phone’s camera to take terrible pictures of rock concerts, all of which come out looking like some sort of graduate-level art-school project in Things That Are Unbearably Blurry. So it’s probably best for Obama to ditch it anyway. Think of how many Facebook friends he must have.

Billboard — Last year, Mavis Staples released a revelatory collection of protest songs (”We’ll Never Turn Back”) that, though such a thing was hardly needed, reaffirmed her vitality in the current music scene. “Hope at the Hideout” is her victory lap, a joyous house party that benefits from a wonderful alignment of the stars: It was recorded in her return to a cozy, sold-out blues house in Staples’ Chicago hometown and released on Election Day. At 69, Staples’ power-train voice is close to rugged perfection throughout, and she’s wonderfully fired up. And while the studio versions of these tracks are driven by a singular purpose, their live cousins shimmer and shake. Nowhere is that clearer than on a lively and soulful “For What It’s Worth,” a soaring “This Little Light” and the singularly majestic “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

• Mavis Staples — We Shall Not Be Moved (live).mp3

Billboard — Sammy Hagar isn’t all tequila and sunburns on his first solo disc in eight years: This new set kicks off with a lightly industrial collaboration with young Iraqi songwriter Steven Lost that finds him reviving the “Right Now” approach to addressing deeper issues than the nation’s unreasonable speed limits. Hagar spends half the record in such uncharted waters, but before things get too serious, there’s “Loud,” a Spandex-and-codpiece rocker that teleported in from 1986; a cover of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!),” which did the same; and a country track called “When the Sun Don’t Shine,” basically a tribute to Jimmy Buffett, rock’s other premier tequila pitchman. The second half of the record depends on how you process the phrase “album-closing nine-minute unplugged version of ‘Dreams.’ ” But if you’re a 61-year-old beach bum with a pretty decent day job, what else would you do?

• Interview: Sammy Hagar aims to ’slap some sense’ into audience.

Island Packet — If you are a regular runner in the Lowcountry, there’s a reasonably solid chance that you will, at some point, be attacked by an animal that will try to eat you, probably with its teeth, for three reasons:

1. Because of the stretchy nature of their muscles, joggers are chewy and delicious.
2. The economy.
3. We have a lot — A LOT — of animals roaming around here, mostly because of the swampy, low-lying nature of our surroundings and the fact that many animals’ homes are regularly being plowed down to make way for what appears to be a sovereign commonwealth populated entirely by Outback Steakhouses.

There really aren’t many places you can go enjoy a nice, animal-free run around here, except on your treadmill in a gym that’s inside a building, but whatever. For instance, if you jog in Sea Pines, you run the risk of seeing a salivating alligator, which — and I say this as someone who’s been running around here now for years — is not something that you EVER GET USED TO. You are NEVER NOT BLOWN AWAY BY DISCOVERING THAT YOUR RUNNING PATH IS GATOR-ADJACENT. It makes you WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS FOR LIKE THREE CONSECUTIVE SENTENCES.

When this happens to me, which it often does, because of my resemblance to Captain Hook, I generally turn around and sprint the other way, although I have occasionally been tempted to try to hopscotch over their heads like in “Pitfall!,” which is apparently not a good idea, according to the jerks at the zoo. (I do that instead of running in a zig-zag fashion, which, in a commonly accepted urban legend, is supposed to trick alligators into thinking you’re not there, because their primitive eyes cannot process zags. It doesn’t work, and will only make you look like an idiot in the last few moments before you’re eaten by an alligator).

There also are snakes, which wriggle across the bike paths, sun themselves on the sidewalks and drop out of the trees onto forest paths in front of you, which is something that you really have to only experience one time before the arrival of the night terrors. There are deer, which are oddly fearless around here. And, of course, Pinckney Island has a diplodocus.

The point is this: The dangers are lurking and very real, although if I ever found myself being chewed on by a rabid wild animal, the chances of my keeping that animal attached to my arm while I ran for another full mile to safety fall somewhere in the range between Slim to Palin-in-2012.

And yet that’s exactly what happened last week in Prescott, Ariz., where a runner was attacked by a rabid fox while out on her regular jog. But instead of doing what I and most rational people would do, such as punch the fox in the mouth, the jogger RAN A MILE TO HER CAR WITH THE FOX STILL ATTACHED TO HER ARM. By its teeth. I am sure that was insanely painful and sort of horrifying, but even that does not take away from the hilarious Looney Tunes image that’s in my head right now.

Anyway, once she got back to the car, she pried it off, tossed it in her trunk and drove to the hospital. And herein is the crucial difference between her and me: If I were to tell my friends that I was attacked by a fox, then ran for another mile with the fox still dangling from my forearm, then removed the fox from my arm and jailed it in a car trunk, they would look at me as though I was doing so while producing a live chicken out of my mouth. (There are people who rightfully wouldn’t believe me if I said I did two miles without an iPod.) These sort of stories just fascinate and baffle me, which is why I like to run mostly at Pinckney these days. It’s actually not very difficult to hide from a diplodocus.

GateHouse — First of all, let me say that yes, I know that when at the movie theater, the food available for purchase come in absurd, gigantor sizes that make you want to slap your head and call your momma. And keep in mind that I’m using “food” here as a sweeping, generalizing noun that covers everything that could remotely be considered put-in-mouthable (sorry, Arby’s) and, thus, most of the globular sugar-clump-balls that have been the primary source of theater-based nourishment ever since movies were invented in 1967.

I also know that making big-food jokes is sort of like riffing on Sam’s Club these days, or flight attendants, or the C&C Music Factory. But I have recently returned from a screening of the film “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” with the family, and my body is currently attempting to form structurally sound sentences while working through enough popcorn to fuel the Large Hadron Collider, the state of New Jersey or up to three Ford Expeditions for a week.

Like all children’s movies released in the past eight years, “Madagacar 2″ is entirely populated by overexpressive CGI animals who make butt jokes to each other. The difference is in “Madagascar” this is done while the “I like to move it move it” song is either playing, has just played or is backstage having a nice cold lemonade preparing to play again.

I hadn’t seen the original “Madagascar,” which made the richly developed characterizations and subtle plot nuance of this sequel a little hard to grasp, but within the first few minutes here’s what I figured out: There is a sad-looking giraffe who is desperately in love with a hippopotamus, which doesn’t seem to trouble anyone (even the hippopotamus); and even when he is a lion, Ben Stiller can only play one character. Also, though the movie “Once” gets an “R” rating for two bad words, a children’s film in which an anthropomorphic lion spends about 45 minutes repeatedly punching an elderly woman in the mouth gets more TV advertising than Cialis during halftime on Sundays.

Anyway, as I say, I had never seen the original “Madagascar,” but Jake has apparently seen it at school once or twice. This necessitated this trip out to see the sequel, as well as made me wonder exactly what kind of school we are evidently sending him to.

So we get to the theater for family movie afternoon, where my wife visits the nice folks at the concession stand, all of whom appear to be violating many of the country’s child labor laws. She ends up ordering The Large, a defensive-sounding Value Meal that comprises, in theory anyway, a tub of popcorn, two drinks and a box of candy - which, it is decreed by Jake, will be a bag filled with many hundreds of Sour Patch Kids - for the reasonable price of $85.99.

Sour Patch Kids, incidentally, are 20 pounds of terrible in a 10-pound box. (After the movie, Jake proposed topping off his feast with a post-meal aperitif of Juicy Fruit gum. Jake’s food pyramid on Sunday was more like a rhombus, or an extremely gooey dodecahedron. Jake’s nutrition, if you haven’t already surmised, is among our most pivotal concerns.)

After asking a few of his friends to help lift the Sour Patch Kids, the endearing teen behind the counter then turns his attention to the drinks ordered by my wife and I — massive, huge beverages that I am pretty sure respond to the tides.

The vessel of popcorn they have presented us with is hardly any less terrifying. It is large enough to submerge a newborn baby in it, which I do not recommend doing regularly, unless you need to butter up your baby for some reason, which isn’t something you’ll probably ever have to do unless you’re Anne Geddes.

But here’s the kicker: Having decided that we could uniformly, absolutely not even remotely begin to CONSIDER eating 29 pounds of popcorn without additional toppings, my wife asked the nice 9-year-old behind the counter where one might be able to locate white cheddar topping. She was told that the topping, which is identified proudly as a “certified nacho cheese product,” would run her an additional $1.50. Yes, citizens of Earth, it has come to this: a 19-cent sack of popcorn is $10; for just a few more bones you can even make that popcorn have a flavor.

There’s no real point to this other than shining a light on the aggressively, gloriously American experience of going to watch a giraffe with the voice of David Schwimmer hit on a hippo by calling her fat while eating enough popcorn that when the movie is over and the house lights go up, you look at your half-consumed tub of aggressively buttered snackables and think, my God, please, tell me that other children have been sneaking over and helping themselves to this abomination. On the other hand, if they have, the cheese product they’ve been enjoying has been certified.

And here’s the official word on the new record today, from Billboard.

• Bruce Springsteen - Workin’ on a Dream (acoustic version from Obama rally).mp3

The new track list:

• “Outlaw Pete”
  
• “My Lucky Day”
• “Working on a Dream”
• “Queen of the Supermarket”
• “What Love Can Do”
• “This Life”
• “Good Eye”
• “Tomorrow Never Knows”
• “Life Itself”
• “Kingdom of Days”
• “Surprise, Surprise”
• “The Last Carnival”

Bonus Tracks

• “The Wrestler”
• “A Night With the Jersey Devil”

From Island Packet staff reports, starring Tim, Other Tim and Jim

We at the Guide have come up with these Suggested Names for the Obamas’ New Puppy. (Yeah, that’s a lame lead-in, but frankly, this is like the only funny Obama-related thing we could come up with. If the nation’s self-appointed comics are to survive, this guy need to get lamer, fast.)

Please make your own suggestions in the comments (though the following are outlawed: -Blank- The Plumber, You Betcha, Wealth Redistributor and Phyllis).

• Checkers
• Karl Rover
• Rin Tin Hussein Tin
• Freddie Mac
• Gimmick
• Hopey McPuddles
• Maverick
• Yes We Canine

And here’s the proof.

What was I gonna do, let him not vote? He held a lightsaber to my throat, for Pete’s sake. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure he wrote in the Curious George/Sir Topham Hatt ticket, which is not a bad idea. Hatt gets some things DONE on the island of Sodor.

(Besides, Jake is registered to vote through ACORN. Nine times.)

GateHouse — I have written about daylight saving time before — so frequently, in fact, that I have written the sentence “I have written about daylight saving time before” before. I am thinking about writing it again, right now, because I am making a galvanizingly important point here, and also because if I keep writing it over and over I can get this column done quicker and return immediately to the couch, where I can continue immersing myself in the rich and rewarding world of the Ice Road Truckers.

But I am going to write about daylight saving time again, partly because I have sworn to do so until someone in the government pays attention to me — and it doesn’t have to be anyone important, it can be Sarah Palin, it’s cool — and partly because I have recently discovered that daylight saving time can kill you. And I don’t mean “it can kill you” in that nebulous, cable-news, plastic-water-bottles sort of way, I mean it can actually give you heart attacks. Yeah. Bet you’ll think twice before turning the page to “Cathy” now, huh.

I refer to a study done by Swedish researchers, who are all blonde and wicked attractive, over the past 20 years, which reported that the number of heart attacks over that time actually dipped the Monday after clocks were set back an hour, possibly, the scientists surmised shortly before heading out to do attractive-Swedish-people things, because people got an extra hour of sleep that night.

“But wait, Jeff,” you’re saying to yourself right now, specifically if you talk to mug shots in your newspaper. “You said that daylight saving time will kill you, yet these gorgeous Swedes seem to have discovered just the opposite, in their time off  from brewing fantastic beer and going gerfluergeling along the fjords?”

True. Guess what happens when you set clocks forward in the spring. Yeah. Clang. More heart attacks happened during the first week after the start of daylight saving time in the spring, especially in the first three days.

“Sleep — through a variety of mechanisms — affects our cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Lori Mosca to the AP. Mosca is the director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and wasn’t involved in the research, but says that “sleep not only impacts how we feel, but it may also affect whether we develop heart disease or not,” or, in non-crazy-scientific terms, daylight saving time is stupid and we should end it now, like that wordy guy in the newspaper says.

Listen, I’m not out to cause a ruckus here. I grew up in Indiana, where every citizen is actually given the choice, at the age of 8, to exist in any time zone of their choosing, meaning that finding an open bank is nearly impossible and attempting to hold a conference call is entirely out of the question. Indiana is made of a patchwork quilt of time zones, a few on Eastern, a few on Central, a few on Bangladesh for some reason, and no one in the state believes they need to straighten this issue out, resulting in my inability, at the age of 33, to figure out what time it is at my Mom’s house ever, for any reason. Yes, this is the worst problem anyone has ever had in their lives and no, I can’t just learn how to figure out time zones for myself, and frankly I resent the inference.

The facts are simple: We are a sleep-deprived society, daylight saving time causes an increase in heart attacks and early-morning archery accidents (well, it does, and no I don’t have the numbers, but, just, it does), and more importantly, it is difficult for me personally to figure out, so it must be abandoned forthwith. Also, the Swedes said so.

Billboard — “Just when I discover the meaning of life they change it,” Mike Skinner raps with typically uneasy, endearing coordination on his fourth album’s opening title track, but those aren’t the gutter scribblings of the desperately hungover—they’re a swelling carpe diem with a soaring hook (as soaring as you can get via Skinner’s keyboard-in-the-bedroom-closet vibe, anyway). Skinner has spent the few albums since his grand debut “Original Pirate Material” getting progressively more thoughtful, melodic and predictable, and where “Everything Is Borrowed” might lack the hair-singeing novelty of his debut (or its story-time follow-up “A Grand Don’t Come for Free”), there’s still plenty to keep things interesting: “Heaven for the Weather” is positively jaunty, “I Love You More (Than You Like Me)” is rather sweet, and Skinner’s dancing wordplay hits the beats on the gently meandering “On the Flip of a Coin” just right.

• The Streets - Everything Is Borrowed.mp3