I love it when people brag about doing crosswords when they're probably doing the one in Reader's Digest, or the vacuous one they print in the airline magazine. If you're not doing AT LEAST the NYT Sunday (or Saturday, which is actually much harder though smaller), and doing it in PEN, with minimal crossouts, you've got nothing to be boastful about, genius.

And if "capital of Canada" is on there, your puzzle is considerably below par.

Sudoku is a logic puzzle, that's all. It's NOT about numbers; it could just as easily be (and sometimes is) made with letters instead. There are easy ones and hard ones, and the hard ones are a lot harder than the crossword in the Alaska mag. I wouldn't be interested in plowing through a hundred of them in a row, but they're kind of fun.

Wait a second -- "math" is better than logic? What kind of math? You're talking about arithmetic? Whooptie Whoo.

And really, what business is it of yours what people are doing with their time? The number one puzzle books before Sudoku were word-search puzzles. Word search puzzles are dumb, period. So what? Why do you care so much about your seatmate's pastime? Unless YOUR favorite pastime is snooping on your neighbors, who cares?

Seatac airport near Seattle also requires international passengers arriving at one of the satellite terminals to claim their bags, take them through customs, and then recheck them through to the main terminal in order to exit. It is asinine. The terrorists are too busy laughing at our incompetence and stupidity to carry out their bombing (which will probably take place next in a terminal, by the massive security crush).

How is Beckham not going to just ba50-nkrupt the league? He's not very good anymore; not good enough to play for any top European team. Of course, he'll make a splash in the grossly inferior MLS, which might fool a few people into thinking they're seeing a great player.

But any MLS team can respond by hiring some REAL foreign players. How much is Thierry Henry or Stevie Gerrard or Fabio Cannavaro worth if Beckham's on a million bucks a week?

But no MLS team can afford these numbers. The audience isn't there, and will never be there. The Galaxy play in front of 20,000 people, and their stadium won't even HOLD enough people to pay for Beckham's salary.

Soccer is the greatest game in the world, but Americans will never really get it. Their own games will always take precedence. They will always, always prefer watching 350-pound behemoths destroy each other's knee cartilage for what, twenty? thirty? plays per four-hour football game. This is a fact. MLS will never, can never be more than a feeder league for real football, which will always be played elsewhere.

Any calculation of how much players receive in terms of scholarship has to take into account the fact that most football and basketball players are not really students at all and thus aren't receiving any of the benefits a normal student receives for his 47 grand.

They attend brief meetings with their private one-on-one tutor, which takes care of their academic obligations, and then go out and get their knee cartilage destroyed on the field. They probably get to bang a succession of cheerleaders, and the food and accomodation are excellent -- just like in the elite slave quarters.

When their four-year term is up, they still can't frigging READ, let alone perform duties that a university education theoretically prepares you for. If you hit the lottery and make it in the NFL, you'll earn a great salary -- for two years if you're lucky. Then you're unemployed, illiterate, and unable to climb stairs. Yes, you've got your Humungous State diploma, but when you can't even read what it says, it's not going to get you much in the way of jobs or life satisfaction.

Shut down bigtime college sports.

College football is a cancer on the body of the university system. It contributes NOTHING positive. The "students" who play are essentially slaves, well-fed, well-kept, and well-fucked, but still slaves, breaking their bodies for the entertainment of others with no compensation -- only a tiny fraction earn even a pittance in the pros. They're not really students, and they devalue the real students, who know intimately just how little anybody cares about them.

I propose a new structure: no coach salaries at all. A purely volunteer system. No sports scholarships; you earn your scholarship with, ahem, SCHOLARSHIP, not your body. Tickets to games are free, but only current students are allowed to attend. Travel to away games, if any, is by bus.

If this leads to the death of college football, that's fantastic. If it leads the NFL to build their own minor-league system, that THEY pay for, that's great. If it annoys a bunch of meatheads and yahoos who have no business being near a university in the first place, awesome.

This guy is a serious Maya scholar, and you think you can tear him up? Don't be ridiculous. The ancient Maya didn't live in "Mexico" or "North America"; they lived in a wide area, some of which became Mexico much later, but much or most of which became other countries, which are solidly Central American: Guatemala, Belize. Central American is a much more geographically accurate term for their extent.

I'm glad a real scholar has stepped into the debate. Most of the commentary on the movie hasn't been any more aware than Mr. Gibson was. The real Mayan story is much more interesting than another of Mel's interminable blood orgies. I'd like to see a movie about Diego de Landa, the Spanish priest who burned all of their books (only three codices survive), but ironically is also our only contemporary Western source for information about these amazing people. It's a shame that Mel's only got a hard-on for macho torture scenes.