“The Whistler track is super-fast due to its grade,” racer Noelle Pikus-Pace, one of two American women to compete in this year’s event, explained to CBS News. “From curve one down to curve three, we drop so quickly so suddenly … Any error can cause injury.” Melissa Hollingsworth, a Canadian skeleton athlete and a top competitor for the gold medal, has said in no uncertain terms that the course is “dangerous.”

So just how scary is skeleton? Not all racers agree that the sport, and the Whistler track in particular, is unsafe. Cassie Revelli, a U.S. Skeleton Team member who is taking some time off from competition to recover from an injury, acknowledges the technical challenge the course presents yet reports that she has “not heard concern about the safety of the skeleton community” in Vancouver.

John Daly, at 24 the youngest athlete on this year’s Olympic skeleton team, has only fallen off his sled once and says it wasn’t a big deal when it happened. “If you get away from the sled, it’s just like sliding down ice, only a little bit faster,” he tells me. “You’ll eventually stop with some burns on your butt.” Then he mentions that his roommate, Luke Schulz, “did crack his head open last year in Switzerland.” (Thankfully, Schulz is fine now, after “a couple of stitches and CAT scans.”)

As it turns out, skeleton is widely held to be the safest of the three sliding sports, partially because its sled’s steering mechanism is subtler and more precise than that of a luge sled, making turns less risky. Revelli attributes the sport’s relative safety to athletes’ low center of gravity. And, as Daly points out, “If the bobsled rolls over on you, that’s 500 pounds.” Skeleton sleds, by contrast, top out at under 95 pounds.

Martin Rettl, who took home a silver medal for Austria in 2002 and now serves as Team USA’s driving coach, goes so far as to say that skeleton is “a very safe sport.” He concedes that “if you make a mistake, there can be a broken arm or a broken leg,” estimating that “90 percent [of the time], if something happens, you can be sure that … something was in the track.” During his 17-year sliding career, Rettl says he didn’t experience a single injury.

The sport has changed a great deal since Rettl took his first plunge down a family friend’s track at the age of 15 and found himself hooked. Skeleton traces its roots back to 1882, when British soldiers built a track to sled between two Swiss cities. The sport that resulted was dubbed “cresta” and, unlike its later incarnation, skeleton, took place on a different kind of track than bobseld and luge. (As for skeleton’s intimidating name, some believe it was derived from the Norwegian word for “sled,” while others claim it refers to the sled’s shape.)

Revelli, who also works as a resident skeleton expert at Utah Olympic Parks, explains that the sport was much riskier in 1948, after which it was excluded from the games due to concerns for competitors’ safety. Beginning in 1970, several modifications, including a new kind of sled, made the event safer, and in 1992 a World Cup skeleton competition was established. Seven years later, skeleton racers learned that their event would finally be readmitted into the next Olympic Winter Games, in 2002.

When Rettl began racing in 1989, the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing had only been funding skeleton and lobbying for its inclusion in international events for three years. Since then, he says, the sport “is getting more and more professional. In the beginning … every country was working together. It was a big family. You could really feel the change in 1999.”

Despite sacrificing some camaraderie, Rettl sees the new developments as positive, noting that the Olympic event has increased exposure for the little-known sport. An enthusiastic evangelist for skeleton, Rettl encourages everyone to try it at least once. When he finds out that I grew up not far from Lake Placid, N.Y., which houses one of the country’s few training tracks, he spends a few minutes attempting to convince me to schedule a test run. “From the outside … it looks very scary because your head is just an inch away from the ice,” he says. He’s so persuasive that I begin to forget all about my clumsiness and cowardice and actually consider looking into it — but only for a moment.

In fact, if there’s one common factor that seems to motivate most skeleton athletes’ devotion to the their somewhat obscure obsession — a pursuit whose training includes endless running and lifting and eats up five hours of Daly’s day, year-round — it’s the utter exhilaration of sliding. It’s easy to assume that some kind of unconscious death wish inspires the racers’ head-first heroics, but just the opposite comes through in their breathless talk about the sport: What really seems to compel them is a desire to condense life’s greatest sensations into the intensity of a single, minute-long plunge.

“I love speed more than anything else in sports,” says Rettl, while Revelli praises the sense of decisiveness and power she gets from skeleton: “There are so many variables that go into sliding, and to just be able to control a few of them is an amazing feeling.” In describing his love for the sport, Daly’s voice gets dreamy and urgent at the same time, like he’s talking about a new romance.

“I get to go on a roller coaster every day of my life,” America’s youngest competitor tells me. “You’re going down that track, off the side of the wall, going 4 or 5 G’s… Sometimes you feel like that sled’s not even underneath you.”

Just about every publication that covers music is taking Wednesday’s announcement of the record’s label and release date as a chance to weigh in on the rock widow’s crazy antics. At Philadelphia Weekly, the news came coupled with the perpetual question of whether Courtney Love is an “inspirational, influential, odds-overcoming tough-chick rocker, or manipulative, soulless, fame-grubbing monster.” Dude site Heavy captions a photo of Love with the sarcastic quip, “How can you stand to miss this hotness?” and then (perhaps to meet some quota for the use of the word “hot”) refers to her as a “hot mess.” Meanwhile, the folks at New York magazine’s Vulture prefer to describe Love as a “famous crazy lady” and close their post with an extra dose of schadenfreude: “We wish Love a smooth, uneventful promotional run, and look forward to the exact opposite of that happening.”

Of course, Love has been an easy target throughout the nearly 20 years she’s been in the public eye. First she was guilty of being addicted while pregnant; then she “killed Kurt”; for a few years after that, she was a “sellout” for trying to get a movie career going. These days, gossip sites run an article just about every day on her plastic surgery, legal troubles, Twitter rants and, most recently — a detail that very few of the posts announcing “Nobody’s Daughter” managed to miss — the fact that she’s had her teenage daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, taken away from her. Hell, Love can’t even post an informal, unedited video of herself singing The Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” in a hotel room without the Village Voice jumping on what was obviously never meant to be a polished performance for a bizarrely overzealous takedown. “To say she does not pull it off is putting it politely,” crows Zach Baron. “To say ‘she sounds like a horse’ is putting it mildly. Rather, Ms. Love sounds, at various intervals, like a sucker-punch victim (2:17), a drunk in a bubble bath (2:47), a woman on the can yelling for more toilet paper (2:20-ish).”

Listen, Courtney Love courts the press, and she also may be unstable. She may have (or have gotten over, depending who you believe) a drug problem. But how many male musicians can you name that fit this description? And yet, how often do you see critics scoff that, amid all their personal problems, they couldn’t possibly put out a decent album? In a deeply insightful piece on the differences in how we see “crazy” men vs. “crazy” women in music, Ann Powers explains why this might be:

A male artist getting crazy can come off as threatening, but he’s also often greeted as a prophet or, conversely, an endearing holy fool. A woman artist getting crazy is a different kind of mess — one that raises the general discomfort level by raising the specter of uncontrolled sexuality, irresponsible motherhood, violence done to or by the sacred “gentler sex” — all elements of our common consciousness that have haunted us since Medea’s time and have never been resolved.

It’s not that we shouldn’t trash the new Hole record if it sucks. I just wish Love’s army of haters could wait to hear it all the way through at least once before writing off “Nobody’s Daughter” and the woman who made it.

Thankfully, at least some good has come out of this annoying trend. Allow me to present “Jeff & Erin’s EPIC Wedding Trailer,” for your Friday afternoon viewing pleasure. I won’t ruin the awesomeness by trying to describe it. But rest assured, the title doesn’t oversell the video at all. Just watch:

TMZ reports Palin filed court documents Thursday afternoon claiming that Tripp’s dad owes a whopping $1750 a month in child support. (If you have the patience and curiosity to wade through 9 pages of sloppily-scanned legalese, TMZ has kindly posted a PDF of the papers.) How did her lawyers arrive at that number? It seems that in Alaska, non-custodial parents are required to pay 20 percent of their yearly income, up to $105,000, for the care of their child. And Bristol’s people have reason to believe that Johnston did indeed earn in the six-figure range “through various interviews and modeling related activities.” Palin says she’s only received $4400 from Johnston since Tripp’s birth.

Of course, Team Levi has its own version of the story: Johnston’s delightfully named manager, Tank Jones, says his boss has paid over $10,000 in child support and protests that Levi, bless his charitable soul, “does not make money off of every interview he does.”

This latest battle can only complicate the Palin-Johnston custody war. And I don’t envy the judge who’s faced with the estimable task of deciding which of these two impeccably reliable narrators is telling the truth. Meanwhile, in the midst of Bristol and Levi’s tabloid-ready he-said-she-said, it’s easy to forget that the focus of this mess is a real, live one-year-old who has pretty much already lost, no matter the outcome.

That’s right. To review: This is a site where certified physicians give medical advice and compete for the business of patients they’ve never seen. Hippocratic Oath alert!

When I actually took a look at SurgeonHouseCalls, my disgust only grew. Among a sizable list of procedures categorized as “Asian Plastic Surgery,” I read the site’s sales pitch on skin whitening surgery:

In Japan, geisha were (and still are) known for their painted white skin, which represents beauty, grace, and high social status. However, the skin-whitening products are not used in such a wide scale in Japan today. Geisha paint their skin white in geisha-based ceremonies to celebrate their culture and background.

In ancient Persia, during the Achaemenid dynasty, farmers and civil workers used pure hydroquinone to keep their skin clear and soft.

See, Asian ladies? Your self-hating traditions go back to ancient times! Why stop now? Painting your skin white is a celebration of your culture! Quick, somebody tell Sammy Sosa.

Unsurprisingly, not all of these doctors’ colleagues are thrilled about the site. “Conservative plastic surgeons say it’s fine to send an e-mail message with general information about a range of procedures to a patient, but the practice of offering a diagnosis without ever having met a patient can be problematic,” writes the Times’ Catherine Saint Louis, in what may be the week’s most glaring statement of the obvious. Physicians quoted in the article worried about the poor quality of users’ photos and pointed out that it’s hard to estimate the price and extent of a procedure without seeing the patient in person. And as for the site’s legality, well, “offering a surgical recommendation to a distant patient may violate state laws, if the plastic surgeon isn’t licensed in the home state of the patient.”

Saint Louis goes on to discuss a larger trend of individual plastic surgeons doing online consultations. While some correspond with patients over email, Dr. Barry Eppley performs 20-minute exams via Skype. I shuddered a bit, reading Eppley’s spider-and-fly account of how he woos out-of-town patients. “They do move ahead,” he tells the Times. “Regardless of where they are geographically… people will come to you because they connected with you.”

So, what are the arguments for online plastic surgery consultations? “It changes the first in-person consultation, empowering the patient with knowledge of the procedure, decreased anxiety level and financial readiness,” SurgeonHouseCalls’ founder Jason L. Mussman tells the Times.

Now, at a time when Heidi Montag can’t stop bragging about her recent plastic surgery bonanza and a million other celebrities are coming forward to announce they’ve had work done, it can seem like everyone is getting these procedures, that they’re somehow necessary. We seem to have forgotten that cosmetic surgery is just that — cosmetic.  If you have the money and desire to go under the knife and are prepared to be responsible about it, good for you. But if you’re too nervous to meet a doctor in person or can’t afford to get  proper medical care? Please, do yourself a favor and just skip it.