Countdown's Countdowns

Countdown’s Top Five

1. The West Virginia T-shirt, courtesy Abercrombie & Fitch.

• What state has the

• A for popular antidepressants.

• Kids in trouble because, as usual, of negligent adults:

• A long-running feud between two teenage girls ended with the mother of one of them hiring a guy with a mullet nicknamed Bam-Bam allegedly to
• A child has brought
• In Miami, it was a 5-year-old
• A year ago in Crafton, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, mailman Clayton Smith was inexplicably shot and killed while on a break from his route.  There was no motive.  Now a neighborhood
• 35-year-old Lori Rock was driving her daughter`s friend Sydney Hughes home.  Ms. Rock, police say, was so drunk, she passed out behind a wheel on a highway.  Sydney managed to

• 35-year-old Robert Crider of Lubbock, Texas, knew he was too drunk to drive home.  He gave keys to his son.  The boy was pulled over for erratic driving about halfway through their trip, their 350-mile trip. 
• It is just coincidence that today in Washington, MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, called for

• The in Dallas. 

• Top four self-liberating primates:

• . 

• And then there is Dr. Rice, or more accurately, then there
• While Dr.  Rice is not testifying at the public hearings, she is talking to the media, including
• The commission today issued several preliminary reports, the most poignant of them reached one simple conclusion:  That the U.S. government finally settled on a strategy to undermine al-Qaeda by attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan on Monday,

Today’s Top Three Newsmakers

1. The RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, the folks who keep suing over illegal computer downloads of their music.  Their Web site has been .
2. who forced a JetBlue flight from New York to Florida to land in North Carolina after they got into a fistfight over the armrest between their seats. 
3. .  No only has he been sentenced to a year in jail for insurance fraud.  He has also now been banned for life from the auto body business in California.

Let's Play 'Oddball'!

1. Nearly three years ago, some loser of dishwasher liquid into the Fountain of Wind at Canal Park.  This set up amounted to white-out conditions in the middle of July.  Kathy J.  Kelly was walking along when the bubbles overtook her.  She could see nothing, she fell into the fountain, and sustained a shin injury so series it required skin grafts and she sued.  Today the city of Duluth was found 70 percent negligent by a jury, which awarded Miss Kelly $125,000. 
2. A Chinese Taoist Herbalist has sealed himself 49 feet off the ground in a mountain resort in the province of Sichaun a small glass house.   claims he once went 81 days without food. 
3. David Hempleman-Adams for greatest altitude achieved in an open basket. 

Keeping Tabs

1. A Denver furniture dealer has bought up everything from the Lodge and Spa at Cordillera, the infamous resort at which Kobe Bryant allegedly raped a 19-year-old hotel staffer.  The entrepreneur, a man named Steve Farland, says he is going to resell a wrought iron chair from room 35, the room in which Bryant stayed.  He may even auction it and other dark reminders of that room on eBay.
2. Bob Edwards, the first and only host of "Morning Edition," has been
3. And the queen of soul is in the hospital, Aretha Fanklin being treated in Detroit, has been since Saturday.  She is in .