Okay, so with the Golden Globes having come and gone, I'm developing a serious crush on Sophia Coppola—you know, Francis Ford Coppola's daughter, who just snagged the "best screenplay" award for Lost in Translation. Francis himself, of course, directed The Godfather series, not to mention Apocalypse Now. Also produced American Graffiti.

"Godfather" is so formal, though—mind if I call you "God-dad"?

"I assure you, Sir, my intentions with your daughter are totally honorable."

Ah well, you gotta have dreams ... or, at least, fantasies.

From Carolyn Myss' Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (p. 32):

In his book Tenderness is Strength, Harold C. Lyon, Jr., related an incident that involved a parapsychological phenomenon of mutual visualization during a moment of self-surrendered sex. Early one morning, he went fishing. For three hours he trolled for lake trout, using all his skills to perfection, and was about to head back home when he had a strike. He had caught a twenty-six-inch trout. Excitedly he shared his adventure and joy with his wife, who was still in bed. He recollects:

We had not been comfortable in our relationship for the past few months, struggling to resolve our differences and blaming each other for them. How silly. How useless. Our lovemaking had become mechanical, lacking the flow and fulfillment we both sought. An hour after I had climbed back into bed, we found ourselves making love with incredible passion, spontaneity, and tender joy, flowing from orgasm to orgasm. There was a letting go, a total surrendering to our own inner rhythms, which had eluded us for months. In the midst of my orgasm I had a vision of the big lake trout, organic and beautiful in the depths of the lake, and I realized that I could not make her take my lure even when it was presented with perfect technique. She had to be ready to strike the lure, with no holding back. This was a natural flowing instinct, not something I could force or manipulate.

Incredibly, in the afterglow of our loving, Eta [his wife, not the fish] shared with me that she too had seen a vision of the organic lake trout in the throes of her orgasms! We both realized in a flash that with all the technique in the world, we couldn't make our love flow until it was ready to flow, any more than I could make the lake trout take the lure.

Next week on Sex and the Outdoors: Bird-watching and bee-keeping.

Gone fishin'
By a shady, wadey pool
Shangri-La....

LONDON (AP) — The president of world soccer suggested that female players wear more revealing uniforms to bring more attention to their sport.

One English player called the suggestion by FIFA president Sepp Blatter "ridiculous" and "irresponsible."

I beg to differ: What's "ridiculous" is a guy walking around with the name "Sepp Blatter"—not to mention a sports organization called "FIFA." It sounds like the name of a poodle.

Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy—not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters.

The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

—The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

England goalkeeper Pauline Cope called Blatter's suggestion "typical of a bloke."

"To say we should play football in hot pants is plain ridiculous," she said. "It's completely irresponsible for a man in a powerful position to make comments like this."

FIFA spokesman [spokespoodle] Andreas Herren said Friday that Blatter never mentioned the word "hot pants."

An oversight on his part, no doubt. What they could do, just as a "pilot" project, is to field a team composed solely of Hooters waitresses, since they're apparently already halfway to the new uniform.

"The remarks were by no means meant to be offensive—not at all," Herren said. "Whatever he said, it was more a general remark, 'Let's take a look at that.'"

A look, a glance, a leer—yes, by all means, let's take one or two of those. Cor!

Swiss captain Evelyn Zimmermann and Norwegian players Lise Klaveness and Solveig Gulbrandsen also rejected Blatter's fashion advice.

Klaveness said soccer is about sport, not sex.

But would Mia "Wham, Bam, Thank You" Hamm (Nomar Garciaparra's wife, now) agree?

"If the crowd only wants to come and watch models then they should go and buy a copy of Playboy," she said.

Ooh, Miss Manchester United '04. Cor!

Added Gulbrandsen: "If I wanted to wear a bikini, I would have chosen to play beach volleyball."

Me too, but that's not the point. Wait—what was the point? I lost track, thinking of all those bikinis and hot pants.

Cor!!

The [NHL's] collective bargaining agreement with its players expires before next season, and the NHL wants a new system that guarantees "cost certainty." That could be achieved with a hard salary cap, which the players' union is opposed to.

"We can't ignore the issue. The labor issue is like a 500-pound elephant in the corner," [Dallas Stars president Jim] Lites said.

Well, no way did that sound believable: even a car weighs around one ton (2000 pounds), and an elephant's gotta weigh more than a car, don't you figure?

A little research discloses that adult elephants can weigh over 15,000 pounds!

That's a whole lotta pachyderm.

Of course, if the elephant was only around two and a half months old, it would indeed weigh in the neighborhood of 500 pounds.

You can't help but feeling, though, that if the league were to spend less time speculating about zoological stuff, and more time hammering out a new agreement with their players' association, we might actually have a hockey season to look forward to in 2004-5. Where's Alan Eagleson when you need him? He must be out of jail by now!

So how many elephants can you fit into a Volkswagen?

Four: Two in the front, and two in the back.

How do you know there are elephants in your house?

There's a VW parked in the driveway.

And how do you know Alan Eagleson's been in your living room?

Bobby Orr's on the couch, and the house insurance has been cancelled.

I'll give you five Maple Leafs for one Bobby Orr.

—Katherine Wheatley, "Main Street"

If Joe Montana knew how to win football games, Fritz [Perls] knew how to push [emotional] buttons."

—Michael Murphy (co-founder of Esalen, where
Perls lived and taught for six years)

I'm just coming across this in a book I'm reading (Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters), a section of which covers the humanistic potential movement. Apparently "Gestalt therapy won its first broad public recognition when Perls collaborated on a book by the same name ... it was Perls's clinical work that brought Gestalt therapy to life and eventually won him a wide following."

Perhaps nowhere was Perls's emphasis on independence and honesty at the expense of intimacy and compassion more plain than in something he called the Gestalt Prayer. "I do my thing and you do your thing," he wrote. "I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you're not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I. And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped."

Perls and Abraham Maslow once had the following "exchange" at Esalen:

No sooner did Perls arrive at the meeting [in 1966] than he assumed the role of provocateur. He had little tolerance for the sort of high-minded theoretical discussions that he termed elephant shit, and even less patience for a gathering that he perceived as pretentious and pointless. At least equally important, he couldn't bear ceding center stage to Maslow, who was himself accustomed to the deference typically accorded a college professor. When Maslow complimented a suggestion that one participant made, for example, Perls immediately jumped in. "This is just like school," he said derisively. "Here is the teacher, and there is the pupil, giving the right answers." Nonconfrontational by nature, Maslow simply ignored the jab and several that followed.

Eventually, Perls decided to step up his challenge. Sliding off his chair onto the floor, he literally crawled over to Maslow, looked up and invited him to come down to his level. Maslow was appalled. When he accused Perls of being childish, Perls only became more so, hugging Maslow's knees. Finally, Maslow turned in disgust to [Michael] Murphy [co-founder of Esalen], who was both amused and mortified by the performance. "This begins to look like sickness," Maslow told Murphy, at which point Maslow ended the session and went off to regather his thoughts—and his equanamity. When he returned to the group the next day, it was with a stern lecture about the perils of rejecting the intellect and of rebellion without a cause.

Now now, boys—if you can't get along with each other, you'll have to stay inside for recess.

From Orville Schell's Virtual Tibet:

In 1994 the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci released Little Buddha, a film about a middle-class American couple in Seattle, played by rock idol Chris Isaak and actress Bridget Fonda, whose son turns out to be the reincarnation of a high Tibetan lama. At the kitsch heart of this film was Keanu Reeves playing the Lord Buddha.

As interest in Tibet seemed to gain a certain critical mass, Madison Avenue, too, began to take notice.... Slick catalogs now addressed the "needs" of a growing number of Buddhist faithful. The J. Peterman catalog offered that hard-to-find Tibetan shaman's jacket.

"Jerry!!!"

Pete Rose is not unlike Einstein, who flunked English but excelled in math.

—Dr. David E. Comings of the City of Hope National Medical Center, on ADHD and how it applies to former baseball great Pete "The Gambler" Rose

Huh?

Einstein did poorly in Greek—his teacher told him he'd "never amount to anything"—but didn't actually need to learn to speak English at all fluently until he moved from Germany to Princeton, NJ, in his 50s.

Other than that, of course, he and Pete Rose are virtually indistinguishable.

Sheesh!

Another annoying telemarketer cluttering up my Call Answer. No actual message, but "pressing 5" reveals that it was left by someone at (905) 366-1011.

"1011"?

How geeks hook up: "Hey, can I get your phone number ... in binary?"

"Nice stack, by the way."

"Is that a stack pointer, or are you just happy to see me?"

LAS VEGAS - Pop star Britney Spears marched down the aisle in Las Vegas on Saturday, marrying a childhood friend from Louisiana, according to news reports. "Cheery Brit-pop marches down charts!" crow damp rock stars from merry England. "I'll be damned," says "Leaving Las Vegas" siren (and former high school cheerleader) Sheryl Crow. "Why'd we ever leave?" chime in Louise and new friend Anna. The 22-year-old diva married Jason Allen Alexander early Saturday at the Little White Wedding Chapel on the Strip, according to People.com.

"Nice day for a White Wedding" ... Chapel, that is. Where's Billy Idol when you need him? And didn't Jason Alexander play George on Seinfeld? Brits, you can do better! Of course, she had already lost her celebrated virginity to Justin Timberlake, back when she (ah, to be that young again) thought he was going to marry her. No sense wearing white, then, eh? The bride wore jeans and a baseball cap, according to People.com, and had a hotel bellman walk her down the aisle. Clouseau: How long have you been a bellboy? Bellboy: Oh, too long, Monsieur. Clouseau: Well, keep up this good work and I will see to it that very soon you become a bell-MAN.

UPDATE (1/04/2004): Never mind, it's been annulled.

Alexander was back in his hometown Sunday, according to his grandfather, Robert Alexander.

"He'd been through a lot. We picked him up in New Orleans coming back and he didn't have much to say," the elder Alexander told Entertainment Tonight.

This, of course, leaves Brits free to pursue the real love of her life—Madonna.

Turns out that the "... for Dummies" series covers religion too: Catholicism, Judaism, Islam-ism ... all of the great "-isms."

(Also came across a Cliff's Notes version of the Bible.)

Personally, I've always disliked the "... for Dummies" series, and had never looked into any of them before—my reasoning being that, since I'm not a dummy, they wouldn't apply to me. I had, however, recently ordered a copy of Yoga for Dummies, simply because I thought it might function as a short history of yoga and gurus. (Its author, Georg Feuerstein, does a lot of relatively scholarly writing on yoga.)

Two things: First, there's a miniature version of that book which, if you're not very careful, you might end up mistakenly ordering (and having absolutely no use for) instead of the "grown up" printing:

Kind of like a "Mini-Me" for yogis.

Secondly, turns out that it's a hatha yoga "beginner's" manual anyway, not a concise history of the various movements/sects or an exposition of the metaphysical meaning of the shapes incorporated in Buddhist stupas, etc.

Well, if the "... for Dummies" series is meant to make you feel stupid, it's certainly succeeding so far with me.