The Beat

NBA bad boy Ron Artest hasn't changed his tune on his new rap album, My World, which hits stores on Oct. 31. On the first track, Haterz, the 2004 Defensive Player of the Year sends a message to David Stern, saying he wants to teach the commissioner "'bout the ghetto." In the song Artest also says Today host Matt Lauer, who grilled him after the 2004 melee at The Palace of Auburn Hills, looks "like a girl" and addresses the brawl: "Touched the wrong person, Steve Jack had my back/O'Neal and A.J. with the counterattack." Artest told SI he doesn't expect the league to react ("I didn't really say nothing bad about anybody"), but he did clarify the song's boast of smoking "right before games" and hitting "the liquor store for a half pint" at halftime: "That was when I was younger, in high school. Definitely not in the NBA."

?Much like Michael Jordan once did, Jay-Z has a loose definition of retirement. The rapper and part owner of the Nets "retired" from hip-hop in 2003, but he has an album scheduled for release on Nov. 21--and Nets ticket holders will get first dibs on the disc. Fans who purchase a three-game Nets Premiere Week package (starting at $85) will get a copy of the album, Kingdom Come. The first single, Show Me What You Got, debuted last week; its video features Jay-Z riding shotgun to Dale Earnhardt Jr., zipping through the streets of Monaco in a race against Indy car driver Danica Patrick (left).

?When might the skeletons in a candidate's closet boost a campaign? When the candidate is seeking office in Wisconsin, and the skeletons once played for the Packers. Two years ago Sandy Sullivan, 65, the owner of a Green Bay marketing firm who's running for secretary of state, self-published Green Bay Love Stories and Other Affairs, in which she claims romantic liaisons with several Lombardi-era Packers. Sullivan says she bedded Paul Hornung ("He was soooo CUTE!") and Dan Currie ("One would have to be in a coma not to want him") and passed on a relationship with Don Hutson. Sullivan, who touts the book on her campaign website--along with an endorsement from Hall of Fame QB Bart Starr--says she isn't worried the book might turn off voters. "If anybody has any problems with it," she says, "they ought to look in their own closet."

?Italian defender Marco Materazzi has heard enough joking about the World Cup head butt he received from France's Zinedine Zidane. Now it's his turn. Materazzi, who has already starred in an Italian Nike commercial poking fun at the incident, is publishing What I Really Said to Zidane, a book of 249 phrases that he might have uttered--but didn't--to provoke the Frenchman. Among Materazzi's hypothetical instigators are an observation that "French philosophy hasn't been the same since Foucault died" and a threat to tell Zidane how ABC's hit series Lost ends. "As you will see," Materazzi told the Italian daily Gazzetta dello Sport last week, "I found it funny to explore the absurdity of the whole affair."