GLOBAL EYE

Bone Heads


Forget the campaign. Call off the elections. Get Al Gore a rocking chair and put him on the porch back in Tennessee. George W. Bush is going to win the U.S. presidency in November. It's a mathematical certainty now.


And how do we know? Because Jackie Stallone's dogs told us so.


Yes, the mystic mama of Rocky himself has descended from the celestial plain, bearing two tiny teacup Dobermans who can foretell the future, reports the Los Angeles Times. And they prophesy the election lights on Dubya.


The dogs f Rachel and Hannah by name and usually decked out in matching sequined jackets stretched over their 20-centimeter-high frames f make their predictions through a series of growls, grunts, snarls and yawps. (Just like regular political pundits, then.) Stallone, a "licensed astrologer," theninterprets these spiritual emissions into our more degraded earthly language.


"The dogs are getting more attention than Sylvester did in the first 'Rocky' movie," gushed Jackie, who has spent the last 24 years trying desperately to accomplish that feat herself. "They channel messages from the spirit world and telepathically send them to me. I ask a question, close my eyes, and the first thing that comes into my mind is the answer." (Just like regular political pundits, then.)


A couple of growls exchanged between the year-old pups produced this political prognostication: "Bush will win by 200 votes." He's obviously got the Canine-American vote locked up.


Rachel and Hannah also predict that Bill Clinton will soon be managing "a TV or movie production company," that Hillary will be elected to the Senate, but, unfortunately, "the marriage is over." Through much woofing, wagging and some unseemly licking, the dogs also foresee that Madonna will soon call it quits, "Ally McBeal" will be cancelled (O speak true, speak true, blithe spirits!), O.J. Simpson is innocent, and that within 10 years, "prisoners will be sent to Mars and guarded by robots."


Stallone is taking time off from her other area of occult expertise, "rumpology" (like reading palms, only instead you look at ? well, you get the idea), to concentrate on the dogs. "They're something spectacular," she says. "They're also healers. They're going to visit hospitals and heal people."


But animal-lovers needn't worry that Rachel and Hannah are being exploited by their owner f sorry, their channeler. No, Stallone holds to very high standards in this kind of thing. Some scurrilous hustler wanted to use the gals for a "psychic dog hotline," where callers would call to have their fortunes barked at them. But our Jackie was having none of it.


"I'm not going to use them for nonsense," she vowed.


Well, that's a relief.


Straight Talk


Listen, pal, the guys who play ball for the University of Hawaii are butch f you got that? Manly men of manly mien, with nary a limp wrist f or a limp anything for that matter f among them. You understand? They like girls f just girls, only girls, nothing but girls, they're girl crazy, for God's sake! Sure, they shower together; sure, they pat each other on their tight little behinds; sure, their coach is a guy named June f but that don't mean nothin', see? Nothin' at all!


Yes, the not-at-all-insecure-about-their-own-sexuality UH athletic officials changed the name of their football team this week to avoid any "stigma on our program" through association with "the gay community," reported The Associated Press.


For 77 years, the football team has been known as the Rainbows, ever since a rainbow f a symbol of power and hope in native Hawaiian culture f appeared over the field after a big win. But this week, the school's athletic director, Hugh Yoshida, said the team would drop the name, and the rainbow symbol, because of its association with the "gay community, their flags and so forth."


The move came after a big push from the team's head coach, June Jones, and sports agent Leigh Steinberg, who had been hired by the school to "market" the team. They felt that the slightest whiff of poofery would keep red-blooded lads f and their donating dads f away from the tropical gridiron. The school was also anxious to avoid any association with the Reverend Jesse Jackson's anti-discrimination group, National Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said the broad-minded Yoshida.


So what's the moniker for the team now? Why, Warriors, of course! Actually, this Spartan sobriquet had been added back in the 1960s, when a similar spasm of sexual anxiety crept over school officials like a damp, drooping fever, and the team became known as the "Rainbow Warriors." But the threat of a homosexual "stigma" has obviously grown so great in the intervening years that nothing less than the full removal of the offending part would suffice to purge the team f and their mincing littlegirly named coach f of the dreaded gay taint.


Critics said they were shocked and puzzled by the athletic department's move. "What could they have been thinking?" said one protester. "I just can't figure them out."


Rumpology, anyone?


Coup-Coup Birds


Breaking more than 200 years of fiercely enforced strictures prohibiting political activity by the military, the U.S. armed forces threw a big bash for the Republicans partying it up at their convention in Philadelphia this week.


The Pentagon wheeled out the latest in glitzy hardware and provided sumptuous feasts for their specially invited Republican guests, all to show their pleasure in the impending return of the Reagan-Bush-Quayle years, when by God, men were men, war was glorious, and toilet bowls for transport planes cost $6,000 each.


Pentagon officials said there was nothing at all political in their open involvement in a political convention. It was just a coincidence that the arms show took place next to the long-planned, long-announced Republican convention site, said Defense Secretary William Cohen, the only, er, Republican in the Clinton Cabinet.


Well, maybe he's right; maybe they just happened to be in town this week. Or maybe they just wanted to show those two notorious draft-dodgers, George Dubya and Dick Cheney, what all those guns and bombs and other neat stuff really look like.