WNBA benches Elmo for a night

Sesame Street Live had to revamp its dates at Philips Arena in Atlanta to make room for Games 3 and 4 of the WNBA Finals.

Among the possible marketing slogans:

• Sue Bird 2, Big Bird 0.

• Come see Oscar the Grouch get hit with a technical.

• Sesame Street is not brought to you by the letters D, U, N and K.

Some slapshot

Penguins star Sidney Crosby took batting practice at the Pirates' PNC Park on Wednesday and hit a ball into the right-field seats.

Or to put it in hockey terms, he one-timed that one through the nine-hole.

Fancy new digs

Giants Stadium is gone — demolished and turned into a parking lot for New Meadowlands Stadium — but it still carries about $110 million in debt, or roughly $13 for every New Jersey resident.

In other words, it's even deeper in the hole than Jimmy Hoffa.

Welcome back, Gridder

"It was a hard seven months," wrote Elliott Smith of OutsideThePressBox.com, "but football season is back, and for that we can say thank (insert deity of your choice here) it's NFL season.

"For those of us who are so inclined, we can now stop pretending to care about mosques, Lady Gaga, international basketball, Glenn Beck, Justin Bieber, taxes, the Texas Rangers, Facebook privacy, the World Cup, and whatever other distractions arose during the yawning NFL-free breach, and can turn our fanaticism onto 22 men and their quest to move a stitched leather spheroid."

Just wondering

Shouldn't Jerry Kill, the football coach at Northern Illinois, be coaching the volleyball team?

Talking the talk

• Times reader Jen Pungercar, on the Seahawks releasing T.J. Houshmandzadeh despite his guaranteed contract: "Giving a guy $7 million not to play is like paying a stripper to put her clothes back on."

• Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley, to USA Today, on his Vols' hygiene: "We had, I told them, the worst shower discipline of any team I've ever been around."

• Headline at Fark.com: "Tom Brady crashes his car while staring into the vanity mirror."

• Corpulent ex-first baseman Kent Hrbek, struggling with his pants before playing in the Twins Legends game last Sunday: "Can anybody get me a can of Crisco so I can get into this uniform?"

Russian to judgment

Former Princeton player David Blatt, now coaching the Russian national basketball team, raised a few eyebrows this week when he said the U.S. Olympic team didn't get cheated out of the 1972 gold medal.

In keeping with the theme, it only took him three takes to film the interview.

Dwight Perry: 206-464-8250 or dperry@seattletimes.com