THE TIES THAT BIND

I was cleaning out some old files and ran across this item that I had sent to Playboy a year ago, even as I knew full well that it would cause them to reach for the wolfbane and garlic. All I can say, fellow males, is: Be very very afraid. This is what I think they utimately mean by getting in touch with your feelings.


"I’m currently reading about the Huichol tribe of Mexico. They seem to have an excellent understanding and empathy between the sexes. In their culture, when a woman goes into labour, they tie a string around her husband’s testicles. As the pain of her contractions begins to increase in intensity, she regularly tugs on the string, so her beloved can share some of the agony with her. Sounds fair enough to me." -- Fiona McCade, News.Scotsman.com, 4/27/05.

CLASH OF THE TETONS

Today's article of interest is brought to you by the Associated Press, which reports that in Wyoming, local law enforcement and other authorities have had it up to here with naked people running around after they get done smashing cars. No, wait, the naked people don't smash the cars. Decent, wholesome family types do that.

Here's the deal: Wyoming police have announced that they are going to seriously arrest and charge people who insist on carrying out the recent tradition of streaking the Teton County Fair at the very end, after the last event. I don't know how much more serious they can get than last year, when they tasered a guy who was streaking with a fire extinguisher. Wait, no, they didn't taser him with a fire extinguisher, he was carrying the...never mind.

All kinds of things come to mind reading this article. First, the phrase it uses in every instance to describe this get-tough attitude is "crackdown." Whenever naked people are involved, you want to work the word "crack" into the piece, even if merely as a syllable.

Second, the authorities emphasize that decency is the key consideration, there are families here, and therefore family values, and good taste must prevail, and oh yeah, we're going to conveniently overlook the fact that this wholesome event is called the Teton County Fair, given that it's in Teton County, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, and that the word teton is French for TIT. Which is a play on what the mountains resembled to early European explorers, who were invariably male and lonely.

Third, the final event that precedes the streaking? A Demolition Derby. Getting into a car and driving it into as many other cars as violently and destructively as possible? Good clean fun. Brief animated nudity? Crank up the taser.

The showdown this year will occur on July 30, and I believe the Best Western still has accommodations available.

BALL GAME

Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and the Georgia Family Council are all just gnawing on their Bibles with outrage as they endeavor to stop the financial bid by medioctopus Liberty Media to buy the Atlanta Braves. They oppose the deal because Liberty owns On Command, a company that provides in-room hotel/motel porn movies to lonely male or female lodgers or anyone else with time on their hands and a credit card.

Oddly, this Coalition of the Deeply and Variously Offended who are protesting the deal seem oblivious, or at least indifferent, to the fact that the Braves are currently owned by Time Warner, an outfit that also offers adult fare (i.e. fuckflix) over its cable TV service.

Nor, now that we think on it, are they troubled that pro ballplayers are, demographically, one of the major revenue sources for the hotel porn business.

(As for George Steinbrenner being a convicted felon? Not even on the moral radar.)

God help the national pastime when the obvious graphic sexual symbolism of the hotdog dawns on these defenders of purity. "Honey, there's a bit of mustard right there in the corner of your mouth. Yeahhh. I love the way...Oh dear Jesus, this is Satan's game!!!" (Note religious repture embodied by three exclams.)

The story, should it interest any of you sick bastards, is by AP's Charles Odum at http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/feeds/ap/2006/07/14/ap2880353.html

BETTER TO BE HEADBUTTED THAN BUTTHEADED, I SAY

I am rolling my eyes like cheap dice right now, because I am still thinking about the Great Uproar that has ensued over the head-butting of Italian player Marco Materazzi by French player Zinedine Zidane during the final match of the World Cup. The radio sports guys are all aghast. USA Today fretted and clucked. Given the heated reportage, you could easily get the impression that Zidane had not just butted Materzzai in the chest with his head, but had then backed his Citroen over Materazzi's baby. It was an horrendous act which stained the entire soccer world, was the general attitude.

Oh please. As they say in Germany, "Geben sie mir ein break!"

Allow me to quote from the finger-wagging article by the Chronicle's Bruce Jenkins, only because that is the local paper I read, not because Bruce is particularly over the wall on this; I worked with him some years ago and he is eminently professional and thoroughly likeable. But consider...

"One struggles to find anything comparable in the history of American sport." One evidently regards hockey as a Canadian sport. Otherwise one might note that slicing other players with sharpened skate blades and giving them concussions and lacerations with large L-shaped sticks goes well beyond comparable to a head butt. Still, a more valid comparison might be with American football, where head-butting is, coincidentally, an essential part of the game. That's why all the helmets. Compared to what goes on in any typical post-tackle pileup on an NFL field, a head-butt is a warm hello. That photo of Zidane's head meeting Materazzi's chest? It made Bill Romanowski laugh like a loon. That's how he greets his mother. And just so that basketball won't feel left out, there is the occasional clotheslined player flung onto his back on a hardwood floor and left skullcracked and senseless.

"Zidane brought shame on himself, his country, and, remarkably, the worlds' most popular sporting event." Yeah, right. And in New Zealand, their opinion of America still hasn't recovered from the Tyson-Holyfield ear-biting incident. Zidane so shamed the sport that they gave him the Most Valuable Player award afterward. You want something that shames soccer, try the newsreel footage of drunken Brit soccer fans running riot, beating bystanders, charging the field, and burning the nearest village when their team fails, a news item as inevitable each year as the running of the bulls, and not all that dissimilar.

Actually, this isn't that important a matter to me. Bruce Jenkins loves sports far more than I do, so his reaction may reasonably be far more impassioned. It's just that my wife and I disagree about this--she's with Bruce--and this is, for me, a long and windy version of "So there."