Offies 2005: Presenting the annual Off-Guard Awards for the absolute worst of the year past.

By Tim Redmond

'CHECK IT OUT , Brownie – it's wet down there."

We picture George W. Bush sitting back in the soft seats in Air Force One, gazing idly out the window and musing about the floodwaters below. There are people dying in flooded nursing homes, people carrying their kids over their heads to escape the putrid deluge, people looting stores and waving around guns, mayhem of an almost apocalyptic degree – and the president is watching it all from a window at 20,000 feet. It's a scene that, in all its unreality, pretty much captures 2005.

And so, in keeping with our long tradition of recognizing the worst, the silliest, the lamest, and the most pointless events of the year, we present the 2005 Off-Guard Awards.

Okay, so Tiger doesn't have to shit in the woods. But the rest of us still do.

San Francisco, which can't keep the bathrooms open in many public parks, spent $500,000 to clean up the areas around Harding Park in preparation for the American Express Championship golf tournament.

Of course, if the guy in charge of running honest elections was a little less mystified about his job, he might still have it.

Several weeks before he was forced to resign, California secretary of state Kevin Shelley told the San Francisco Chronicle he was "shocked and mystified" by news that $205,000 in campaign contributions might have been laundered state money.

Now that they've banned drinking in the fire stations, the poor chief has no choice but to engage in this sort of recreation at home.

The husband of San Francisco fire chief Joanne Hayes-White called police to report that his wife had hit him with a pint glass, but he later recanted. The chief later told investigators that her husband had hit himself over the head before calling 911.

Funny – they left out the shots of men in tight pants patting each other on the ass.

49ers team-training videos designed to help players handle the news media and public relations featured racist and sexist jokes, lesbian soft-core porn, and the team's PR boss, Kirk Reynolds, receiving a lap dance.

If it's sensitivity training they need, we've heard Kirk Reynolds is looking for work.

Some 20 San Francisco cops were suspended over a video that featured uniformed officers ogling a woman at a traffic stop, a transgendered person, and a black officer in a dog collar.

Actually, he's pretty boring and way too serious, but at least he does the job he gets paid for.

Gary Delagnes, the head of the San Francisco police union, who earned $100,000 a year in city money while working full-time for the union, called Police Commissioner Joe Veronese a "joke."

Sacred, man: His hairy, fat, naked ass actually sat here and defecated. He probably puked in it a few times too.

The Sophia Foundation, a nonprofit that helps abused children, announced it would raise money by auctioning off Jerry Garcia's toilet.

Another great client for Kirk Reynolds

Members of the Residential Builders Association of San Francisco mounted a campaign to oppose the nomination of Amy Lee to head the Department of Building Inspection, in part because she was pregnant. One person testified at a hearing that Lee was a person "who couldn't even go up a ladder with her dress down." Another argued that she would be debilitated by "pregnancy brain."

Out in federal prison, where she was sitting because of jerks like himself, this sort of meaningful, poetic deep-thinking must have been of great solace.

Scooter Libby wrote to Judith Miller in jail, telling her, "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

You'd think a guy like that would have better gaydar. Kerry? The hair, James, the hair.

A reporter for an obscure Republican Web site who used the name Jeff Gannon and was given coveted White House press credentials (and who once wrote a story allegedly detailing John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" headlined "Kerry could become first gay president") resigned after bloggers discovered his real name was James D. Guckert and he owned gay escort-service Web sites like HotMilitaryStud.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com.

So he lied. That happens around here every day.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said he had no idea Jeff Gannon was using an alias, and he didn't care. "People use aliases all the time in life," he said.

Now he's not just a jerk, he's a rich jerk.

Village Voice Media CEO David Schneiderman got a $500,000 bonus for selling his papers to New Times, which will systematically tear them apart and turn them into clones.

Cool. Now if they could just blow it up with a live hand grenade.

Bevis Lake, a small body of water near Seattle, was quietly renamed Butthead Lake in official Census Bureau records.

Ooh, Senator, the way you say "impactful" ...

Kansas senator Sam Brownback, in hearings on the confirmation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, made a point of giving the incoming law-enforcement chief some advice: "I held a hearing last session of Congress on the issues of these – not obscenity laws, but on addictions to pornography. And there was an amazing set of experts that came forward, talking about the addictiveness of pornography. It's grown much more potent, much more pervasive, much more impactful.... I would hope that this would be something that you would take a look at."

Rich people and big corporations pay rich people and bit media outlets to broadcast lies and propaganda. Sounds like economic development to us.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger argued that calling a special election (at the cost of more than $50 million) would be good for the economy because "hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on television. It stimulates our economy."

White socks with sandals? Eew, there's something wrong with that guy.

Michael Jackson showed up for his child molestation trial one day wearing pajama bottoms, sandals, white socks, a T-shirt, and a dark suit jacket.

Whoops, that means he still might be able to reproduce, which is not exactly a boon to the gene pool.

A woman angry with her boyfriend, who was trying to leave her, convinced him to let her tie his arms to the bed during sex; she then cut of his penis and flushed it down the toilet. Utility workers recovered it, and doctors reattached it.

Let's see. More than 1,000 dead, most of them victims of slow relief efforts. An entire city destroyed. That sure sounds like heck to us.

In the middle of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Bush told the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, that Brown was "doing a heck of a job."

With all those bullets flying, it's no wonder he stayed back at the ranch.

Q.: Did they misinform you when you said no one anticipated the breach of the levies?

Bush: No. What I was referring to is this: When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said phew. There was a sense of relaxation. And I myself thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people probably over the airwaves say the bullet has been dodged. And that's what I was referring to. But as the man's question basically said, implied, wasn't there a moment where everybody said, well, gosh, we dodged a bullet, when the bullet hadn't been dodged?

Too bad they didn't have Jerry Garcia's body – they could have sold the goo for big money.

An exhibit of real human corpses with their body fluids replaced with liquid plastic created controversy in San Francisco when several of the corpses started leaking.

They learn fast in China – if the real guy had used one, the Democrats would still control the White House.

A Chinese company has begun manufacturing condoms with the brand names Clinton and Lewinsky.

Funny – Osama bin Laden thinks he gets the Word from the same place.

White House sources told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that Bush believed God had put him in the Oval Office to deal with terrorist attacks.

Relax, Paul – the aliens don't want Canada. They've seen it on TV.

Canada's former defense minister Paul Hellyer asked Parliament to hold hearings on preparing for encounters with space aliens, saying, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning."

Yeah. Let's lock them in chains and put them in knee-deep water on a freeway overpass. That'll teach the lawless little shits.

Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum said the poor, disabled, and elderly people who were unable to leave before the hurricane should have been penalized: "There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decided to ride it out."

All things considered, we're voting for nefarious bastard.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff when Colin Powell was secretary of state, told the Associated Press he believed Dick Cheney must have sincerely believed Iraq was fomenting terrorists, because "otherwise I would have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

Great moments in legal history

Anna Ayala pleaded guilty to fraudulently claiming she'd bitten into a human finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili in an effort to extort money by suing the fast-food chain. It turned out the finger belonged to a man who had lost it in an industrial accident and had given it to Ayala's husband.

Of course, everyone knows the real scientists believe L. Ron Hubbard will be back from the dead any day now.

Tom Cruise denounced Brooke Shields for taking antidepressant drugs to combat postpartum depression, saying that psychiatry is "pseudo-science" and that "there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance."

Whereas if he'd been taking his meds, he might have been able to avoid channeling Howard Dean

Cruise jumped up and down on Oprah's couch and put his fists in the air while raving about his love for Katie Holmes.

That's some high-priced blow, babe.

Kate Moss lost most of her lucrative endorsement and spokesmodel gigs after the London Daily Mirror caught her on tape snorting cocaine in a recording studio.