Next time you’re in a bookstore or the supermarket, take a look at the magazine rack. If you like football, you won’t be disappointed.

As the Washington Post pointed out in a piece last week, the market for annual football preview magazines seems to be defying the notion that print is dead. The Post story counted more than 20 different football magazines – everything from general preview mags to those that specialize in fantasy football information.

It’s the fantasy football titles that really keep this thing going. For whatever reason (and I’ve got a few ideas) those of us who play fantasy sports still want to have something in print when it comes time to sit down for hours on end and pick the players who we’ll spend the next few months obsessing over. It makes all the sense in the world, and it makes no sense all at the same time. To wit:

• You want more than just a list of rankings when you’re picking your team. You want some analysis, and the more the better. Even if you’re doing your draft online, where you can sit and scan whatever Web sites you want the whole time, you still want that printed form to refer to. There’s something about it that lends credence to what’s written there.
• The publisher makes a difference. I usually stick with somebody I know when it comes time to buy a fantasy preview mag: Sporting News is one I like. Nice layout, easy to use. There are other big-name publishers like ESPN and Yahoo and many others that play here too. You go with the one you know and like, and you feel good about it. It gives you peace of mind.
• It’s a lot easier to find what you’re looking for when you’ve got a magazine. If you’re on the clock and running out of time, what do you trust more, waiting for a Web page to load, or being able to grab a mag and flip right to the section you’re looking for? I’ve got Verizon Fios, which is lightning fast, but I still want that magazine by my side.

Of course, this whole preview magazine business is also total nonsense. In order to be on the newsstands in late June – which is when some of these things start hitting the street, believe it or not – these mags go to press in early June. I bought the Fantasy Football Index mag, which included a confusing set of instructions about how to get updated information from their Web site — something about a place on their Web site that tells you a word on a certain page to enter. I felt like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie Secret Society decoder pin in A Christmas Story. I took a cursory look at their site and didn’t see how I’m supposed to access this fresher info. At least they didn’t try to sell me Ovaltine.

So these mags can’t help you when it comes to knowing who is injured, or which free agents haven’t yet signed with anyone. And that always leads to some levity during the draft when some schmuck who isn’t paying attention picks a guy who’s hurt or out of the league.

Be that as it may, publishers are still falling all over themselves to put these things out. And it stands to reason. An estimated 27 million mostly affluent people are playing fantasy sports. Some of us are in multiple leagues.

It’s a wonder any work gets done at all.

I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but one of the concerns I voiced turned out to be well-founded.

Over the weekend, Major League Baseball ran a free preview of its MLB.tv package via the PlayStation 3. It was the first chance I’ve had to check out live streaming content over a gaming console, and while I still think this method of content delivery has some promise, there are definite drawbacks to it as well.

The MLB.tv package definitely delivers an HD picture, but something about the image quality wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but it just didn’t look as good as a true HD TV feed. Blum tells me that what I was noticing was the difference in the amount of signal compression between the feed delivered via the Web and the one delivered through my DirecTV dish. It was still a nice, bright image, and definitely watchable, but just not at the full clarity I’m used to.

On another note, I do think the package had better interactive features than Blum gave it credit for. You can rewind a game to any point, and as you’re rewinding, the line score pops up on the screen and it highlights what inning it is. So on Sunday, I missed the Pirates’ two-run rally in the eighth inning that led to their 5-3 win against Cleveland. I rewound the game until the bottom of the eighth was lit up in the line score and was able to stop it right there and watch what I wanted. There’s also an archive, so you can go back and watch games you missed, which is a nice perk. And that rewind function lets you sift through all those games and quickly find the action you’re looking for. One thing I didn’t see was a box score/stats display. That would be extremely useful.

Overall, I was fairly impressed, though I think the compression issue is something these packages will need to solve in order for them to really gain traction.

I sat down and watched a 3D TV demonstration — they had some soccer footage playing on a nice big flat panel set — and all I can tell you is I thought it sucked. For right now, 3D TV is a lot of hype over nothing.

First of all, you’re sitting there with those stupid-ass goggles on, and the fact is that while the effect is noticeable and is somewhat cool, you get over it in a hurry. What I saw didn’t look like an HD picture. It seemed like it was in significantly lower resolution than the typical HD picture I get on my TV at home. I’d much rather watch a pristine HD picture in 2D than the crapfest I watched in 3D in the demo.

It’s a cool idea. We all live for the day when everyone has a holodeck in their house and can interact with characters like they do on Star Trek. But from what I saw, this 3D TV thing adds no value. And the fact that the average consumer has no idea what it’s supposed to look like doesn’t help either.

For now, it just seems like a way for the TV makers to drive up prices on their sets by a few hundred dollars. I pass.

Late last week, word leaked out that last October, on the heels of a 99-loss season, the Pirates secretly gave one-year contract extensions to their manager and general manager. The manager and GM were instructed not disclose this news publicly, but this is the world. Nothing stays secret forever. FoxSports.com reported it, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the Pirates were in the midst of a 12-game losing streak, which they finally snapped over the weekend. The concealment of this info for so long created a firestorm in sports-crazy Pittsburgh.

Here’s the tech angle to this story: A 24-year old kid who dons a pierogi suit to run in the between-innings pierogi races at PNC Park in Pittsburgh posted a snide remark about this on his Facebook page. He dared question the practices of an organization that has become the laughingstock of pro sports. But his boss — the guy in charge of mascots and in-game entertainment for the Pirates — apparently didn’t see the humor in it. So the pierogi kid got canned — from a job that pays $25 a night.

We’ve seen athletes get in trouble for things posted on their Twitter or Facebook pages, but now it seems big brother is watching the mascots and perogi racing guys, too. And just like that, we now live in an America where a pierogi can’t speak his mind.

Contestants certainly won’t be facing any vuvuzelas in the audience. (For the uninitiated, those are those loud, annoying horns they sell at all the stadiums that make watching World Cup games sound like you’ve got a beehive in your living room).

Robot soccer is  played with 5-inch cylinders that are lucky to move at a walking pace. And the fan base is, how shall we say, limited. But still the CMDragons are adopting a “hate the game, not the playa’” vibe. Team management was quoted as saying there is no reason why CMDragons team should not flat out win. And the operation is relying on a secret algorithm that will give their bots the edge in scoring.  But all is not as it seems in the CMDragons camp: Last year, their bots went blind when a program pulled a Bill Buckner and crashed.

So plenty of work remains.

And after listening to Jonathan’s take on instant replay in baseball in this week’s The Sports Circuit podcast, I can stay silent no longer.

First of all, just to clear this up, every team has a regional sports network — even my beloved, woe-begotten Pirates. They don’t all have networks that are owned by the teams, like the Yankees with YES, but every game is televised. Jonathan is correct that from team to team — or from regional sports network to regional sports network — the assets may be different. Frankly, I don’t notice that much difference from broadcast to broadcast as I watch games from across the country on MLB Extra Innings. But not everyone has a slow-mo cam for each base, etc. So I agree that if baseball is to implement instant replay, there must be a standard system that is in use by every network that televises games.

However — and this diverges from the idea of solutions — I hate instant replay. I want to like it. I like it in theory: Get the calls right. Great idea. But the irony here is that advances in technology have made me hate it.

If you’ve been watching the NBA Finals (and if you’re not, you should be — it’s Celtics vs. Lakers) you know that in both Game 2 and Game 3 there were out-of-bounds calls that were reviewed to see who the ball last touched. Both times, in my opinion, the refs got it wrong after looking at these super slow-mo, high-definition, frame-by-frame replays. And do you know why? Because when you slow something down that much and look at it one frame at a time, you can see whatever you want to see.

Tuesday night Kevin Garnett clearly had the ball slapped out of his hands and out of bounds by Kobe Bryant. Should have been Boston ball. But then they went and looked at it one frame at a time and managed to find a frame that shows Garnett with the tips of his fingers still touching the ball as it left his grasp. You’re talking about a fraction of a second here. And that’s ridiculous. He lost the ball because Kobe knocked it out of bounds. Boston ball. End of story. But the ref gave it to the Lakers.

These high-tech replays are at odds with the way a play unfolded in real time.

This has become rampant in football on plays involving fumbles, where they slow it down frame by frame and look to see when a guy’s knee hit the ground and whether the ball was coming loose at that point or not. How can you tell if the ball is loose when you’re looking at one frame? You can interpret one frame any way you want to. These things have to be looked at within the context of a game that happens at high speed.

The only place where I think it works in football is determining whether a receiver had both feet in bounds, because that’s not a judgment call. He either did or didn’t, and the replay can show that. In basketball, replays that show whether a shot beat the buzzer are OK. The National Hockey League doesn’t get much credit for it — heck, the NHL doesn’t get much credit for anything — but they’ve done a good job with video replay to determine whether the puck crossed the goal line. We saw an excellent example of that Wednesday night, when the overhead camera clearly showed the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup-winning goal crossing the line, despite the fact that it happened so quickly that the on-ice officials never signaled that the puck had gone in.

But other than these specific uses, it’s tough to make a case that replay is a good thing. Ultimately, reviewing the play in the Armando Galarraga game comes down to a judgment call: When did he have the ball in his glove? That particular play was easy to see. But if you have to do frame-by-frame analysis, as if it were some terrorist video being broken down pixel by pixel in the bowels of the CIA headquarters, then the technology has overstepped its bounds.

Last week, Hef and company announced that the June ish of PBoy will feature a 3D centerfold. And though  anybody who explores new ideas in print should get a pat on the back in this nutty digital age, the fact is, the 3D gatefold of Hope Dworaczyk is at best a low-end so-called anaglyph system. That’s the crappy blue and read paper glasses thing. So Avatar this will not be.

But hey, it’s a start. And where Playboy goes, so goes Jerry Jones. We are picking some sort of Dallas Cheerleaders 3D test pretty darn quick.

OVER UNDER PICK: 3D Cowboy Cheerleaders In Print: 16 weeks.

Who knew, but the web is chock full of tiny little replica race cars that can help you communicate with a computer. Check out MotorMouse, an English firm that sells tiny little Porches, VWs and other production cars. You will have to ship overseas, order in British Pounds and be ready to pay. $60 is about the average for these sucker. But with these kinds of margins there is plenty of other “automice” out there looking for a bit of marketing love. Dale Earnheardt Jr. has a mouse for is 88 car. Ferrari has its FXX car also in mouse form.

Now sure, this might be a bit overboard for all but the serious car fan, but still. If there is a better way to get a Porche, Ferrari or NASCAR racer in your life, we would like to know about it.

But honestly, if there is a better way to get a Porsche in your life, we are not aware of it. So far the models are only limited to production cars. Hopefully we can see