Curse of the Day:
• May you eat so many fatty foods that you drop dead at 33.

• Funny article from UK yahoo here. It's about William Topaz McGonagall, a famously-awful poet, so bad he's remembered now, despite dying in 1902.  Some of his famous verses are being etched in stone in Dundee, in Scotland, for the 100th anniversary of his death. During his life he was a laughing stock, and constantly pranked.

A useful site about the man can be seen here, and it's got numerous of his poems linked to, if you want to see just how bad they really are.  They really are bad, I can say after reading a couple.  Loch Leven is a foine example.  Here are the last two of the five verses.

What makes them so bad, in my estimation, is their prosaic, boring nature.  Poetry is meant to be uplifting or evocative, conveying concepts and ideals beyond the mere words.  He does nothing of the sort; instead just describing things in rhyme, with atrocious meter and rhythm to boot.

• A sperm bank for lesbians is opening in the UK, and even with the great name, mannotincluded.com, it's somewhat controversial.  I wouldn't have thought a lesbian sperm bank was even necessary; don't they just sell out sperm at normal sperm banks to hetero or homosexual women on demand?  I guess not. In the US we'd probably get typical fire and brimstone and eternal damnation type condemnations from some Christian types, but as it's in the UK, they have to settle for this tepid criticism:

• Interesting article on Slate about commercials, mostly since it has a link to this commercial, which I found amazingly cool.  It's for the Xbox, and is an ad that was banned from UK TV after being aired a few times, due to numerous viewer complaints.

• VillianSupply.com is the funniest website I've seen in a while.  It's set up like a real site, offering various SuperVillian toys, tools, bases, etc, and is well done, and very funny.  Their payment methods page is great, and the super weapons one is just killing me.  Among the choices:

• Now that is a big fire.  Another shot of it.  Officials have ordered the evacuation of a town of 8000 people, which is pretty damn bad.  Must be thousands of houses and buildings, and you're leaving all you own, your job, etc, just hoping the fire can be stopped before it destroys your possessions.  Fun summer vacation.

• Plans are underway for a new hotel in Vegas.  Not exactly news there, they open one about every 2 weeks.  This one will be the most expensive hotel in human history though.  Really.  It's scheduled to cost over $2.5 billion, and here's the partial list of features from the article:

It's not scheduled to open until March of 2005, so don't start making your travel plans just yet.  Vegas is sort of amazing, since there's just nothing to do there, and the weather is horrendously hot; you can't even walk down the street at midnight in the summer without sweating.  So basically you go there to stay indoors and piss money away gambling.  Why does it matter if your room is 400 sq. feet or 5000 sq. feet when you spend every waking minute elsewhere in the hotel?  And yet it (Vegas) is a tremendous success; the population growing very quickly, new hotels going up constantly, companies basing their operations there, tourism booming.  Somewhat of an, "only in America" type city.

en love lesbians.  Well, men say they love lesbians, but what men really love are hot chicks looking sexy together, and maybe even having sex with each other, but only if they are still heterosexual women, who would of course need a real man (I.E. me) to "truly satisfy" them.

This is of course not news to anyone, so what brings forth this shocking revelation on my part? This.

As the shot caption relates, Kournikova has bombed out of yet another Grand Slam event in the first round.

On the Kournikova subject, there's also this shot, with five pretty blondes who are said to be Kournikova look alikes.  I find it interesting since clearly none of them look anything like each other, or especially like Kournikova.  It occurs to me that blonde women with long hair are thought to be much more similar in appearance than women with red hair, or brown hair, or black hair.  It's like the blonde hair trumps all other physical features, so you end up with 5 blondes in a photo, and they can say they are Kournikova look alikes, when they are nothing of the kind.

Though I bet any one of them topless would fool Penthouse.

Elsewhere on the Kournikova subject, as I saw in various captions of photos of her on the Yahoo slideshow, she has been dethroned!

According to readers of British tennis magazine Ace, Kournikova has been outvoted as the sexiest woman in tennis by Slovakia's Daniela Hantuchova.

You may wish to join me in asking, "Daniela who?"

Daniela Hantuchova.  So if she's that hot, she must be in a lot of photos, right?  Guess again.  Here's the news photo search for her name on Yahoo now.  She comes up in 12 captions, but she's only shown in one shot, and it's not a real good one.  In the other 11 she's named as the other woman on the court, and not pictured.  Now wouldn't you think the hottest woman in tennis would be in the pictures?  She's mentioned in the captions, but only as playing Kournikova, playing Hingis, playing Navratilova, etc.  You do see her in this one with Navratilova, but only from behind/the side.

I had to do a web search for her, curious to see what she looks like, and this site had a good selection of images when I checked yesterday.  However as I try it now, it's giving me all sorts of weird pop up warnings about bad encryption certificates, and won't load in MIE.  So just for a quick look at the woman, this fan site has a few images, and this one has a page of them, but it's loading at glacial speed.  I think that after people like myself saw her named as the sexy new thing, they all sought out the sites she was pictured on and overloaded their servers.  One Geocities site for her is giving the "bandwidth allocation exceeded" message now.

Anyway, the photos I did see have confused me. As the captions on Yahoo say, the readers of Ace Magazine, a British tennis mag, voted Hantuchova the sexiest woman in tennis.  I have no idea how many votes there were, or if they had one really good picture of her in the mag with the vote, but speaking as a formerly active heterosexual male, I can assure you they are smoking crack.

Hantuchova is pretty, but she's like the pretty friend of your 15 y/o niece.  She in no way approaches the near-supermodel looks of Kournikova, and if Hantuchova wants to be on magazine covers, she'd better pose nude, or start winning tournaments.

I don't mean it as a criticism of her, she's pretty and probably will be a much better player than Kournikova, and she didn't ask for the attention of being named the sexiest tennis player.  She's just far from hot enough to deserve the title. Not that I'd kick her out of the jacuzzi or anything, mind you...

Another article on Kournikova, that I just now read.  She was asked some slightly non-softball questions in a post-defeat interview on the BBC, and got snippy and stomped out.

After failing to get past the first round for the fourth tournament in a row, Kournikova was irritated when interviewer Garry Richardson suggested she should consider playing some lower-tier tournaments.

"I just don't think you should phrase the question that way,'' she snapped. She stood up, and asked that the taped segment start over. The BBC later aired the entire session.

The WTA tour complained about the cruel questioning, other players are defending her, but the BBC and other media are standing by their analysis.

"Her nerves are shot, she has no confidence, and she is not in very good shape, and if she is telling you otherwise then she's kidding herself,'' McEnroe said. "You can see that by watching her.

"At the same time let's not forget she got to the semis here and did break into the top 10. She's heading in the wrong direction very quickly and she's tried a number of different people.

"Wimbledon was her best chance. It's time for some serious reassessment and some serious practice.''

Anything involving Kournikova is huge news though, especially in the T&A and scandal-obsessed British tabloids.

Kournikova's defeat and interview spat made front, middle and backpage headlines in Britain's newspapers Tuesday.

"Is it game over for Anna?'' asked the Daily Mail in a two-page spread that said "TV tantrum tarnishes gold girl image.''

The Daily Telegraph, under the headline "Kournikova starting to look like last year's model,'' said her Wimbledon "is all over in an afternoon of posing and pouting, with a few tennis shots thrown in.''