THE CURIOUS INDEX CANNOT STAY FOCUSED

OK SO COLLEGE FOOTBALL STUFF. There's plenty of recent college football news, from Robert Nkemdiche's Ole Miss career coming to a very abrupt end to Will Grier deciding to leave Gainesville, perhaps inspired by the success Jeff Driskel's had at Louisiana Tech. (Jeff Driskel: He's Technically Still Not Doing Anything To Help The Gators.) BYU hired a coach and Michigan hired a defensive coordinator.

Oh, and a ref in the New Orleans Bowl bled profusely.

BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT WE'RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT TODAY. We're going to talk about Steve Harvey and the Miss Universe pageant, which has nothing to do with college football whatsoever.

It is one of the most hilariously awkward and painful things I have ever seen, and it has inspired me to bring you the following one-man show.

STEVE HARVEY, M.D.

Laboratory science is not as precise as most people would like to believe. Even the most talented and well-funded practitioners have an error rate above zero point zero. There's simply no way to account for every variable, to eliminate any potential contaminant or inconsistency.

That inherent imperfection is no excuse for failure, of course. But it should inform any responsible scientist in his or her endeavors. Error is not a pestilence which we seek to eradicate; such would be pointless folly. Instead, I think of it as a shadowy assistant, working with me as I test and retest a hypothesis.

Sometimes this assistant is of great help. Consider the discovery of penicillin, a medical development born not of man's genius but of happy accident. A properly controlled laboratory would not have yielded this bounty - but, just as importantly, Alexander Fleming recognized that the credit properly belonged to circumstance, not his own genius.

Alas, I come to you today, Derek, not as a modern Fleming bearing the promise of new leaps forward in my field but as a failure. In my duties as chief medical officer for one Mr. Maury Povich, I have been derelict. Derek, sit down.