WWE comes to basketball, China in a rare show of mercy and Venice Beach welcomes a new breed of freaks

- Have you, like me, been saying that what basketball needs to truly become the world’s sport is to be more like hockey and mixed-martial arts? For that small-but-growing minority among sports fans, there is now a central figure to rally around in the quest to bring violence to the basketball court: Oklahoma City Thunder center Nenad Krstic. Krstic, who had seemed to be a mild-mannered big man in the NBA during his short career, suddenly morphed into a raging WWE wrassler in a bench-clearing brawl during Serbia's game against Greece during the Acropolis tournament last Thursday in Athens. The fight broke out between the two teams but soon sprawled out of control as fans rushed the court and charged the Serbian team. At that point, Krstic picked up a chair and smashed Greek player Yannis Bouroussis in the head. It was a move that would have made the Ultimate Warriror proud, but Krstic now fears he'll be suspended for the FIBA World Championship because of his amazing chair shot. He claimed that he picked up the chair in self-defense after Greek fans and players rushed toward him. "It's not killing me, but I can't say I'm not a bit nervous," Krstic said of a possible suspension. "What keeps me calm is that I no longer can do anything about it.” FIBA, the international basketball federation, said it will review the incident and announce any sanctions by Wednesday. The Serbian team desperately needs both Krstic and teammate Milos Teodosic, who was also involved in the brawl, if it hopes to have a successful run in the upcoming world championship tournament. "We won't be able to make it through the group stage," lamented Serbian coach Dusan Ivkovic. Those are weighty words for a team that was the runner-up at the European championship last year. The Serbs find themselves in a fairly easy group - Group A - at the world championships, as Angola, Argentina (sans Manu Ginobli), Australia, Germany and Jordan fill out the rest of the group. Ivkovic’s prognosis seems unnecessarily bleak, but if I were him, I’d be working on finding a way for Krstic to be part of the next WWE pay-per-view rather than fretting about a possible suspension……….

- If you’ve ever sent an email you instantly wanted back, the Google’s Gmail service has your back. After the invention of “beer goggles” for email in which users had to answer basic math questions before being allowed to send an email late at night in order to prevent drunken emails that a person would soon regret, it seemed the ceiling couldn’t be raised any higher. Google has broken right through that ceiling by giving users the ability to "undo" an e-mail - within 30 seconds of sending it, that is. The feature has been available with Google's e-mail service since last year, but only in the past few days has it been upgraded and made more known. We now know that a user now has up to 30 seconds to take back an unfortunate message. The feature works by simply holding your message for 30 seconds before sending it out in case you change your mind. That fact was confirmed by a Google spokesman, who stated that the 30-second option was added early this month. That’s a vast improvement over the feature when it was first unveiled in March 2009, when you had to be super-quick to use it. Unless you acted within five seconds, you still couldn’t stop your message from going out, no matter how embarrassing or damaging it may be. Of course, implementing the feature is complicated, involving an eight-step process in which a user must follow multiple links to the Google Labs portion of the site, track down the "Undo Send" option and enable it. Once you do, a small green beaker representing the Google Labs feature appears in your browser window at the top of the Gmail page. The default time to retract an email is 10 seconds, but it can be adjusted as high as 30 seconds. To undo any email, simply locate the box at the top of the screen that will have the words "Your message has been sent." After that, you should see the "Undo" option and by clicking on it, you'll be sent back to the e-mail's draft form, where you'll have 30 seconds to edit or delete it before it goes out. It sounds complicated, but I’m guessing that one more than one occasion in the past, the effort would have been worth it for you………

- My, how standards for getting a sequel to your movie made have fallen. Used to be that you had to actually meet expectations, rank among at least the top few films in your debut weekend and, well, not suck in order to have a sequel made. That standard has gradually eroded over the years and now we have fourth, fifth and sixth installments of unimaginative, clichéd horror movies being made even though everyone in the world sees them as the blatant cash grabs they truly are. Count Piranha 3-D in that category because the dust had barely settled on the film’s mediocre opening weekend, when it finished sixth at the box office, when Dimension Films took a look at its $10 million opening and gave a green light to the movie’s sequel. This isn’t a rumor, either; the studio confirmed today that plans for another cookie-cutter, lame-tastic horror movie complete with buckets of blood and gore with director Alexandre Aja and producer Mark Canton re-teaming with Dimension. “We are thrilled that audiences are not just loving Piranha 3-D, but cheering for it,” says Canton. “And it’s fantastic that so many critics are really getting the movie and recommending it. We can’t wait to get to work on the sequel.” You mean it’s fantastic that critics who owe you a favor, are related to you or paid someone else to go watch your movie so they didn’t have to see it themselves are saying nice things about it? Well, I’m pretty sure even the makers of Gigli were able to find a few positive blurbs about their film to use in advertising, but that didn’t inspire them to make a sequel. So rushed was the decision for a sequel that no one has any idea what the plotline will be, which is awesome. How do you know that there is enough material and good ideas for a sequel if no one has thrown out any tangible plots? Listen to Aja talk and tell me that he isn’t basically ripping off the exact same storyline from the first movie, dropping it into a different setting and calling it a sequel. “We had many ideas, like the full moon party in Thailand — a huge event with like 200,00 young people from all around the world taking mushrooms and partying on the beach.” Someone please put a rusty ice pick through either one of my temples if I ever show even the slightest inclination to go see this sequel or watch it on DVD or Blu-Ray………

- This is one fight that hasn’t received enough attention and I think it’s about time someone stood up for the right of ladies out there to wander around in this world topless. Okay, so Joe Francis and Hugh Hefner are pretty much the only two people who would put that much effort into this particular battle, but they have some support in the form of gotopless.org, which sponsored demonstrations in Venice Beach, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami Beach and Seattle on Sunday to protest the fact that men are able to go out in public with no shirt on but women are arrested and charged with public indecency if they do the same. In Venice Beach - home of freaks year-round - more than 200 people gathered to speak out for topless women's rights. The protest was relatively peaceful, as the protesters got a permit in advance and worked around the local indecency laws against topless women by covering nipples with red tape, Band-Aids and other makeshift pasties. Once assembled, the group marched about a mile from Navy Court to Windward Avenue under the watchful eye of police. In the end, no one was arrested for indecent exposure and in fact, some bystanders flashed their own breasts in solidarity. "It's not just about taking pictures -- you got to back the cause and wear a bikini top, men," topless protester Kat Kaplan, a dancer and rapper, shouted to the crowd through a megaphone. The ladies were joined by about 50 pervs, er, men who wanted to support the cause and donned red bikini tops supplied by organizers. Gee, wonder why these guys feel so strongly about the cause of women being able to take their tops off in public? As they marched, protesters also held signs that said, "Free your breasts! Free your mind!" and "Demand topless equality." Their biggest opposition came from two counter-protesters who came from the Bible Believers church in Los Angeles and arrived on the scene just as the march was about to start at 2 p.m. "Women and men are completely different. Just because men do things doesn't mean women need to do them," yelled anti-topless protestor Mark Steven. "You ought to be offended -- there's kids here!" Mark, this fight is bigger than you or those 200 people marching on Venice Beach, so just let it go. Besides, I have a sneaking suspicion that our leaders have bigger issues to cope with than topless rights and wouldn’t expect the laws to change any time soon………

- Color me stunned, but did China just do something mildly kind and magnanimous? I’m sure there is some evil caveat to this, but as of right now, all we know is that China said today it may eliminate more than a dozen crimes that currently carry the death penalty. "China currently stipulates that 68 crimes are punishable by the death penalty," the official state-run Xinhua news agency reported. "The draft amendment eliminates capital punishment for 13 economy-related non-violent offenses, a drop of 19.1 percent." What that means. of course is that there are still freaking 55 crimes that can earn you the death penalty, woo hoo! The possible reduction of death penalty crimes is its early stages, with a draft amendment just submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, for a first reading. From there, it will likely be read two or three times and then voted on, at which point it could become the eighth amendment to the country's Criminal Law, which was implemented in 1997. Now, the cynic among us might argue that the move is merely a cosmetic movie designed to placate human rights groups criticizing China for the number of executions it carries out each year. Amnesty International has been particularly hard on China, claiming the Commies have refused to provide figures on their use of the death penalty. "Although media coverage is permitted in selected cases, information on the number of executions is classified as a state secret and individuals disclosing state secrets can be held criminally responsible," the group's website said. "Amnesty International therefore does not know the exact number of executions carried out in 2009. However, evidence from previous years and current sources indicates that the figure is in the thousands." So depending on what perspective you view this from, we could be witnessing a rare instance of Chinese governmental mercy or just another meaningless gesture from a totalitarian regime hell-bent on world domination, but probably one or the other………