Updated

It's now official: The holiday vacation season has come to a close and I for one am glad we can now kick it up a notch at full strength for the full year.

After coming back to work Thursday, two surprising and impactful stories have taken over the three-hour show: Ariel Sharon's health and the West Virginia mine tragedy.

What I will remember most about the mine story for years to come are the notes left behind by those miners who lost their lives. As Dr. Laura told us on-air today, they were thinking of others in their final moments. Lets just hope the sole survivor can make a full recovery and relay more of their final moments to help the families piece it all together.

As for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, well he seems to be the one indispensable player in the peace process. Now we'll find out how strong Israel's political bench is and if anyone actually knew what Sharon was going to do with the roadmap and the West Bank settlement.

On the lighter side, on Friday we learned that a new study concluded that all women are predisposed to cheating — especially at certain times of the month. We also learned that cell phones, pagers and BlackBerries are taking over home life in America and it's a bad thing. I think it can be bad to be on the phone talking work stuff on family time, but I also think our economy is humming because we are so very productive and communication plays a big role.

This week also saw two women take over all sports talk. E.D.'s Longhorns took the Rose Bowl and Molly Henneberg's red-hot Redskins take their act down to Tampa and Molly will be in the stands.

Have a great weekend, enjoy the NFL's wild card action and get ready for the first full work week of 2006. While we're talking sports and life, check out my book, "The Games Do Count" by going to www.BrianKilmeade.com and E.D. Hill's "Going Places" at www.hillfriends.com.

Thanks for keeping us No. 1!

Brian

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