Pack these folks off to a desert island

WHEN I'M King of the World . . . Special Edition.

 Annoying people I am exiling by Royal Decree to faraway places with strange-sounding names:

* Joe Paterno. Two weeks in American Samoa for OctoPa. But this isn't an exile. Nor is Joe annoying. It's the only way I could get the guy to take a vacation. Joe and Sue go to their place in Avalon, N.J., a couple of weeks each summer. I guarantee Joe sits on the deck diagramming plays. Why Samoa? Joe would freak after a half-day in Aruba, St. Martin, Barbados, Maui. But he could come back from Samoa with letters of intent from a couple of 340-pound linemen. Then, his Big Ten coaching rivals no longer could whisper, "Joe Paterno doesn't go on the road to recruit." Now, Joe will be able to retort with an American Samoan truism: "God consulted Vince Lombardi when he made Samoans."

* Two really annoying TV commercial chicks. They aren't athletes, but they get more face and whiny-voice time during sports events than Roger Clemens. So pick an island north of Antarctica to exile the annoyance who says - ad nauseam - "I might be in my pajamas, but I'm not going to bed . . . " No, she's going for her college degree at home. Yeah, uh-huh. At least you might hit on that home-schooling bimbette around last call, but all the Progressive Insurance lady has to do is shrill "Discount!" three times to that wimp-squared customer and she's won an extended stay on an island infested with flesh-eating hermit crabs.

* Andy Reid's speech writer. Imagine an American president beginning the State of the Union Address by intoning: "Injuries." And ending it with "Time is Yours." In between, you get 5 pounds of thinly sliced crapola. Andy can select the island of his choice, but I would recommend Bora Bora for a man whose public persona is Boring Boring.

* The Public Charlie Manuel. Most men whose lives are entwined with millionaire ballplayers, nagging media and demanding fans eventually make peace with the English language. Put the Phillies manager - one of the best guys I have ever known - in front of a camera, however, stick a tape recorder under his nose, and he's suddenly dealing with a 60-letter alphabet with more consonants, vowels and diphthongs than Mandarin Chinese. His speech comes out in fits and starts, and that's a damn shame, because the man you talk with over a glass of cabernet has a Will Rogers wit and an engaging personality that refuses to let you go. The public Charlie Manuel is sentenced to the Isle of Wight, close enough to Oxford and Cambridge so he can take courses in being the same man on a podium that he is over a glass of wine.

* Ruben Amaro Jr. If the Phillies GM tipped waiters with the same paucity he hands out story tips, the restaurant industry would starve. Maybe that is how RAJ managed to land Roy Halladay, shockingly deal Cliff Lee and, even more shockingly, bring back the fans' favorite lefthander without the shred of a rumor. Without a teeny trace. The absence of blog-worthy conjecture makes Rube a natural for a stretch on Niihau, Hawaii's Island of Mystery. By law, only Hawaiians of 100 percent Polynesian blood and Cliff Lee may live there.

* Ochocinco and TO. The co-stars of one of the worst TV shows in history and no-stars of a lousy Cincinnati Bengals team earned a 6-month stay on the Pitcairn Islands. They are the remote specks west of nowhere and east of New Zealand where the descendants of Fletcher Christian and the mutineers of the 18th-century HMS Bounty still live. A serial mutineer like Terrell Owens could be elected president there. Of course, Ochocinco is changing his name back to whatever the hell it was before he succumbed to the magnetism of his own ego.

* Jose Canseco. In 1991, media covering the Pan Am Games in Cuba converged on a Havana harbor enclave named Regla. We were informed Canseco had family there who refused to defect when Fidel Castro turned Cuba into a communist state. Their disdain for the future steroid freak turned whistle-blower-for-profit was palpable. They wanted their famous relative muerte . . . But, yes, you can go home again. Jose gets a stretch on a tiny, unnamed island just off a sprawling crocodile farm I once visited in Cienfuegos-Zapata, near Bahia de Cochinos, Bay of Pigs. Thousands of the snaggletoothed beasts are raised by the state to become either dinner or luggage. With all his baggage, Jose could qualify as either.

* Jerry Roberts. This Chicago auto dealership manager certified himself as one of the great creeps of all time by firing salesman John Stone, who refused to remove his Packers tie. The guy hit bottom for me when he looked into a camera and actually said, with an attempt at sincerity, that his dealership was committed to providing a customer environment sensitive to the trauma of a Bears loss. People who anoint themselves with this kind of authoritarian importance deserve exile where one of history's most notorious despots, Napoleon Bonaparte, ended his days. St. Helena for you, Jerry. And step carefully around the seagull guana.

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