W(hy) N(ot women's) B(asketball as long as it involves chicks shoving each other onto their) A(sses?)

Can it be a coincidence that less than a week after I mention the WNBA for the first time in my life, the biggest event in the history of the league takes place?

No, it cannot.

Or can it?

Yes, it can. And who should be in the middle of it all but my new favorite player, Cheryl Ford, whose police mug shot (below, again) I featured last Friday. Ford tore her ACL in the game, and is now out for the season. Unfortunately she got injured on an earlier play, not in the fracas itself, which would have made her "I'm afraid of contact" quip that much more ironic. Or less ironic. I'm not sure which.




"There's no doubt that there has been a tremendous amount of attention," WNBA president Donna Orender said, "but it's not the type of attention that we seek."

Perhaps another marketing axiom is now in play: There's no such thing as bad press. Don't get me wrong. Homunculus isn't about to hunker down with a Cosmo and his bitches and turn on a WNBA game. But if a brawl breaks out, he will watch the highlights. Online. The next day.

[Cue chauvinistic catfight meow sound & scratching-claw gesticulation.]

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Oh yeah? Well I'm descended from King David. Biatch.

Last week I saw Mongol, the 2007 biopic about Genghis Khan. It was the first movie from Kazakhstan ever to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, and has been a surprise crossover hit here (by foreign-film standards, anyway). However,

[WARNING: Spoiler Alert!!]

it sucked. Trust me. The biggest surprise for me came after the film was over, when I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and found out that 88% of critics liked it.

How can 9 out of 10 experts be wrong? Some, like me, would say that a) the experts are actually morons and b) Homunculus is never wrong. But I think this is also a case of a foreign-film bias at work. With Hollywood coming up empty so often, critics are desperate for films to praise; foreign films fit the bill. First, and most significantly, only the best movies from other countries make it over here in the first place, so foreign films are inevitably better, on average, than our own. Also, though, foreign films are foreign, and when we think of the words "foreign film," we think of smart guys with elbow patches writing peer-reviewed essays about decontextualized sapphic undertones. We think of Bergman and the French New Wave, Fellini and Kurosawa. Black-and-white. "Non-narrative" structure.

Yet most foreign films, even the ones that make it over here, are just slightly better versions of our own indie films. Mongol isn't even that; it is just a slightly better version of our own shitty big-budget epics. The director, for all his skill with action scenes, basically comes off as a film-geeked-out adolescent with a hard-on for blood and medieval weaponry. My suspicion is that he's seen Braveheart a few too many times.

Here is a plot synopsis:

1. Little Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
2. Teenage Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
3. Young-adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, loses war, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
4. Adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, wins war, becomes emperor of the Mongols.

And that's where things get interesting -- and where the film ends.

Rumor has it the film's producers intend to turn it into a trilogy. If they do, they might want to check out Wikipedia. I had remembered reading something once about how some ridiculous percentage of Asians are descended from Genghis Khan. So when I got home, I looked up ol' Temujin on the web to see if I could find anything about that. Sure enough, the Wiki came through, as always. According to Zerjal et al [2003] (my favorite Central-Asian microbiological genealogists, incidentally), "about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world)" carry a Y-chromosome link to "male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives." According to Homunculus, that's about 15 million mini-Khans running around the Steppe (plus about 15 million more Genghis-ettes). Not bad. The dude must have been like Warren Beatty, Wilt Chamberlain, and Warren Jeffs rolled into one. (Homunculus, for his part, would love nothing more than to have 8% of the Western world in 2853 A.D. composed of little Homunculi. Ladies?)

The film, needless to say, turns Genghis into an uxorious romantic. (In its defense, Mel Gibson's teeth in Braveheart were anachronistically well-polished, as was Russell Crowe's chest in Gladiator.)

Mongol also spurred a memory I had of a quote I read a long time ago from the Khan about what really turned him on. I googled "genghis khan quotes" and -- voila! -- found what I was looking for:

WOTE's (as-Fun-as-a-Quote-Can-Be) Quote du Jour

"The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters."

I think we can all agree on that.

Seriously, this dude was one of history's all-time badasses, right up there with Napoleon, Vlad the Impaler, and that guy who tackled a shark from behind and gutted it. For the filmmakers to characterize the Khan as a philosophizing family man, as opposed to the warmongering firestarter he actually was, is a bit of a stretch. It would be like casting, say, Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

Oh.

Next Up: The Dick B. Cheney Dildo Factory

Here is my favorite news story from the past week. God bless the Bay Area, my home sweet home.

WOTE: "I'm Single & Lonely, and Nobody Actually Reads this Blog." I WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?

I was checking baseball scores on ESPN.com today when an ad for the WBNA caught my eye in the upper-right-corner of the screen. In case you’ve missed it -- and, given that it’s the WNBA, you probably have -- the newest ad campaign features several of the league’s stars repeating common criticisms of the game from non-fans (a.k.a. men) -- "Women’s basketball is a joke," "You couldn’t pay me to watch women’s basketball," etc. -- and then countering the slights with some serious fire. "She wouldn’t say that," it says on the screen. "Would you?"

Um. Call me a chauvinist douchebag (you wouldn’t be the first) (in fact, you’d be the third this week), but do you really want us (i.e., men) to answer that?

My favorite ad stars Cheryl Ford of the Detroit Shock, looking like she just polished off the world's fattest blunt (below). "I'm afraid of contact," she says to the camera, "so you can post me up all day long." Then, in silence, the world's most non-rhetorical rhetorical question appears on the screen: "SHE WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?" And then the WNBA's new motto: "EXPECT GREAT."

With the campaign, the WNBA is breaking a cardinal rule of marketing: never highlight your weaknesses, even obliquely (and certainly not explicitly). It's like they teach you at the college career center: In your cover letters and interviews, never qualify yourself with a "but" -- "I know I’m not the most qualified for this job and I don’t have that much experience and I smoke a lot of opium, but I learn fast and work really hard..." Not smart.

Because if you’re like me (and let's be honest, we all have a little Homunculus within us), your first instinct is to accept the negative statement at face value and dwell on that.

Coke: "It rots your teeth and gives you diabetes."

WE WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?


Um. Yes. Yes I would.

Speaking of ad campaigns, Match.com says it's OK to look. So I did. And I have to say, I was impressed. There are a lot of quality women out there who love to laugh, love their jobs, love to travel, and are just as happy in jeans and a sweatshirt as they are in a cocktail dress.

Below is the profile of one woman I was not as impressed with. Unless it's actually a man pretending to be a recent immigrant, in which case it is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read. My favorite line -- and it was tough to choose just one -- is the part about how she likes being lowered down from mountains, because I'm pretty sure even a perfect Broken-English translator wouldn't be able to decode that one.

[By the way, I know I am a terrible, terrible person for posting this. But I already knew that when I woke up this morning, so -- no change there.]

I SEARCH A REAL TRUE LOVE!!

• 28-year-old woman
• Glen Cove, New York, United States
• seeking men 30-42
• within 50 miles of Glen Cove, New York, United States

About my life and what I'm looking for:

I the usual girl. To me of 28 years. I adhere basically to old principles. I very much want to find the love, the the man with which I can lead the rest of days of the life. I shall care of such person who will find and will appreciate in me understanding, trust, honesty, charm...

For fun:

I look films with participation, Yma Turman. Also I listen N'SINK,

Micle Jackson, etc. Like to experiment
hairdress and a fashion. I dream to visit in the Egyptian pyramids.

My job:

I work as nurse in hospital. I like the work because it is pleasant to me to
Bring in advantage of people

My ethnicity:

I white. I do not accept racial hatred, and I think that all people are equal the World

My religion:

I concern to Christian orthodox religion

My education:

I have finished the Yaransk State university on a speciality the bookkeeper and have received the red diploma

Favorite hot spots:

As I love skiing, I would like to visit where many mountains
And to be lowered from top of mountain. Also I have dream to jump off with a
Go down from a parachute together with my favourite person.

Favorite things:

When in the street the rain to me is pleasant to read books. My favourite (loved) author Mark Twain.
Love comic and interesting programs. To like me vegetables and fruit.
Bananas and peaches. I prefer a free fashion. From music I prefer classical

Last read:

Recently I started to read the novel, but also and to like to read secular magazines to
Keep abreast all have placed, occurbing in a society.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.


(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

"Penny Dreadful," from The New Yorker, 3/31/08


* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

Piggy-backing on My Pig-Bashing; Plus, Booty Sweat

Apparently the intelligentsia read my post on Tuesday. Here is more on Helms, this time from Salon:

"Let us now praise Jesse Helms"

"Jesse Helms is not dead"


And here is a new energy drink I will not be trying.

And May He Rest in Peace Amongst Many Gays, Blacks, & Foreigners

When I read on Saturday that Jesse Helms had died, my first reaction was, He was still alive? I must have gotten him mixed up with Strom Thurmond or some other long-irrelevant, recently-buried asshole.

After seeing the headline, my second reaction was this:

I knew Helms was notorious for his staunch conservatism, but I didn’t know a whole lot more than that. Most of us, including yours truly, have very little sense of how policy is actually made in Washington. We judge our legislators from the sidelines, and usually from the cheap seats. We go by what we see in the news: the small minority of bills that make headlines, the sound bites Jon Stewart pulls and then mocks. We hear that some Republican senator from Oklahoma has sponsored a bill approving more oil-drilling in Alaska and we think, Fuckin’ Republicans -- they’re all earth-wrecking pricks.

In reality, of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Having read "inside the Beltway" books like Washington, by Meg Greenfield, I've gradually taken on a more measured stance. A lot goes on behind the scenes, and most of it is not sophomoric bickering. When Politicians from opposing parties claim they are friends who just happen to "respectfully disagree" on many issues, my impression is that, more often than not, they are telling the truth, even in this era of bitter partisan politics.

Put aside the fact that they’re more ambitious -- and, eventually, more corrupt -- than the rest of us, and politicians are just like everyone else. That is to say, they are multidimensional, complex, flawed but generally well-meaning people. Check out former targets-of-Democratic-scorn in less malevolent settings -- Bob Dole on Letterman, Newt Gingrich with Ali G -- and you'll see on display the qualities that got them elected in the first place . Even Robert McNamara comes off reasonably well -- not as a hawkish ideologue, but as a reflective intellectual with his heart (yes, heart) in the right place -- in Errol Morris's phenomenal documentary Fog of War.

It follows, then, that maybe there was more to Jesse Helms after all. Maybe he was reflective. Maybe he had a heart.

Maybe not. I read his obituary in the Times, and here was my third reaction:

What a dickhead.

I could be compassionate and liberal-minded and say that nothing is ever so simple. Nothing is black and white. But "black-and-white" pretty much sums up Helms’s own limited thinking (in more ways than one), so why not apply those same standards to him now? Ultimately the guy was a backwards-thinking, intolerant bigot, and that is how he should be remembered. I read about his career and was reminded of everything Helms stood for and fought for, and I was able to put aside my humanism and drop the benefit of the doubt I had briefly given him.

America would be better off without people like him, and so will the afterlife -- wherever his happens to be.

And in other news, equally worthy of the Times:

"Pringles, Never a Chip, Found to Be No Potato Snack, Either."

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

The Finnish equivalent of "Freebird" is "Paranoid," by Black Sabbath. At concerts in Finland, the audience is often heard shouting "Soittakaa 'Paranoid'!" ("Play 'Paranoid!'").



(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact courtesy of:

Rock Band. Which rocks.


* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

By weight, the most abundant creatures on earth are krill. A single swarm can weigh up to 2 million tons. One species, the Antarctic Krill, makes up an estimated biomass of over 500 million tons, roughly twice that of humans. Crazy.


(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

The 2006 BBC series Planet Earth, which is required viewing for anyone who lives on earth.


* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.