- Maria Sharapova, say it ain’t so. The Russian beauty, with those amazing legs and perfect smile, had been doing so well in proving that she was a legitimate athlete and not the next Anna Kournikova, but more and more it seems that Ms. Sharapova is trending downward on the tennis court and is succumbing to the same trend of injuries and subpar play that drove Kournikova from the sport. With multiple endorsement deals and omnipresent commercials, Sharapova has established herself as a corporate presence, but she is also withdrawing from tournaments and losing matches at an alarming rate. The latest event she will miss due to a lingering shoulder injury is the Munich Open, which began today. She will also miss the Generali Ladies event in Linz, Austria, which begins on Oct. 22. For the sake of everyone out there, men especially, who appreciates all of the, um, talents that Sharapova brings to the court, I hope that she can beat the injury bug that she’s fighting and regain the form that allowed her to become a winner of multiple majors. She seems like a nice enough girl, not nearly as arrogant and self-important as Kournikova, and she has the added bonus, unlike Anna, of never having starred in a music video for that hack, vocally-bankrupt, mole-sporting loser Enrique Iglesias. Plus, if she still aspires to be a Bond girl, Maria is going to need to win tournaments because let’s face it, James Bond doesn’t date losers. No, he prefers stunningly beautiful nuclear physicists with perfect bodies who also just happen to have PhD’s from prestigious universities. Get well and come back strong, Maria, a lot is riding on it for you and for me as well…..
- Damn. My holiday shopping just got a whole lot harder, thanks to the police in Mexico City and their decision to crack down on vendors selling bootleg items in the city’s busy downtown historic center. More than 1,000 police in full riot gear blocked vendors from setting up their stands selling knockoff purses and bootleg movies Friday, meaning that I’m going to have to go elsewhere if I want to find that copy of The Heartbreak Kid before Christmas. It’s the first crackdown of this nature in a decade, but the removal of 87 vendors from the streets was mostly peaceful, although it certainly wouldn’t have been if I were there. Where else can you find a good bootleg DVD of Disturbia and a nice knockoff Gucci purse at two adjoining stands? And where is your anger and indignation, Mexican bootleg/knockoff vendors? Why was there no rioting, clashes with police or burning and overturning of cars? Knowing those people, though, they’ve already found a new place to set up shop and are back in business. In the meantime, until I find out where this new location is, does anyone have a bootleg copy of Superbad that I can borrow? Anyone?
- Rarely has there been such a perfect match for marriage. Drew Carey, the portly, crass comic now charged with hosting The Price is Right, has gotten engaged to Nicole Jaracz, a recent graduate of culinary school. Carey has clearly never met a meal he didn’t like, and while I don’t think Jaracz’s culinary degree will allow her to make Carey’s favorite thing to consume, beer, she should be able to assist him in keeping up his rotund appearance. He kicks off his stint as host of The Price is Right this week, meaning he’d better having been brushing up un his groping, fondling and sexual harassment techniques if he truly hopes to follow in the legendarily lecherous footsteps of Bob Barker. Best wishes to you on that, Drew, and best wishes for the future Mrs. Carey in keeping up with the 4,000-calorie per-day diet that the Drew-ster appears to be on.
- Not a good sign for you, Indiana University, when your men’s basketball coach, Kelvin Sampson, already in the NCAA’s crosshairs for recruiting violations while in the same capacity at the University of Oklahoma, spent his first year at IU violating the very restrictions the NCAA placed on him for those infractions while at OU. Not only that, but Sampson’s rules violations appear to be extremely intentional and an obvious attempt to circumvent the rules. Because Sampson was banned from off-campus recruiting for his first year at IU, his only direct method of recruiting was via the phone, although he was also limited in the number of calls he could make to recruits and their families. To try and get around that roadblock, on at least 10 occasions an IU assistant coach placed a call to a recruit or the family of a recruit and then once the call was started, added Sampson in on a three-way call. As much as you’d like to pretend that those calls didn’t count, Kelvin, the NCAA says they do. The university’s self-imposed penalties include taking one scholarship from the men’s basketball program for this next year and withholding a $500,000 that Sampson was supposed to receive, assuming he did what is clearly impossible for him and abided by the rules. The hope with these self-imposed sanctions is always that the NCAA will see them, believe that the university is serious about cleaning up its act and policing itself and will thus go easier on it. In this case, I hope the NCAA says a big “Screw you” to IU and hits the university and Sampson with some stiff punishment, because nothing else seems to get through to him. Up the penalties until he’s left with no scholarships and can’t so much as think about thinking about sending a postcard to a recruit. Clean it up, Kelvin, or someone else will clean it up for you and you won’t like the result.
- Memo to W.: when the civilian death total in Iraq drops to four on a given day, like Saturday, a total that is the lowest for a single day in recent memory, and that’s something you’re celebrating, that’s a bad sign. When four civilians are killed as a result of the national conflict you’ve created and that’s a positive, feel free to view that as a clear indication that you are failing and failing miserably in your attempt to instill democracy, law and order in a country. This isn't a country the size of the United States, it’s a relatively modest-sized nation with a whole lotta desert, i.e. uninhabitable land. When four people are killed due to the violence you’ve paved the way for and facilitated, there’s really no way you should feel good about it, regardless of whether or not it’s an improvement from the day before. It’s like saying you only got into one fender bender today, which is less than the two you got in the day before and the three you got into the day before that. Any number higher than zero isn't acceptable. What we can celebrate is the fact that none of those four civilian deaths were people killed by Blackwater personnel, which has proven to be a problem in the past. But let’s stop trying to score a day of four civilian deaths as some sort of victory, because that’s the most delusional, misguided and asinine thinking I’ve heard since….well, when was the last time W. opened his mouth? ‘Nuff said……
- Social dissidence takes a hit over the weekend, and of course I’m all over it. In Yemen, a country not exactly known for its freedom of expression and lasseiz-faire attitude toward governing, police fired into a group of protestors assembling to prepare for a Sunday rally to mark the 44th anniversary of Yemeni uprising against British occupation of their country. The police blasted away at a group of retired army officers, killing four people even though the gathering was neither violent nor dangerous to anyone. Props to the Yemeni police for their total overreaction and quick-trigger syndrome in a benign, harmless situation. You dare to assemble, we kill you, what a motto for a police force to abide by. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Myanmar’s military junta arrested four more prominent political activists, continuing his crazed crusade against anyone and everyone who might have the spine to stand up against him. Amnesty International reported the arrests, which included one individual who went into hiding a few weeks ago after the anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks began. The United Nations has sent an envoy to the area, but at this point Gen. Than Shwe and his army are so out of control, paranoid and hell-bent on reigning with an iron fist that no U.N. envoy is going to talk them down from their position. Now, having reported those two disturbing incidents, I have faith that social dissidence and resistance will survive and live to protest another day, because these repressive leaders and authority figures can arrest and kill people, but that can’t kill the anti-establishment spirit. The Man can’t keep you down unless you allow him to, and I don’t think that the people in either of these situations are going to allow it. Fight the good fight, people, refuse to give in.
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