The study also showed that Violet Palmer makes a disproportionately large share of calls against male players.

I agree with what Gene said, but I'd take it a step further. The NBA is a major league - perhaps the only major league - in which its players are constantly derided for their thuggish, new-school ways. Baseball's taken about a million lumps for steroids, but you won't find a huge contingent of fans/sportswriters complaining about the style of play or the attitudes of the ballplayers. Much ink has already been spilled on the topic of NFL players' licenses to get frigging crazy.

On that note, I'd want to see data comparing, for instance, tattooed vs. lightly- or non-tatted black NBAers (Allen Iverson and Stephen Jackson vs. Tim Duncan and Andrew Bynum). Or maybe guys who wear their hair in cornrows vs. fades. Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe you've got a contingent of refs longing for the days of Kareem and Walton, and so any brash young black man (see: Wallace, Rasheed) is going to face the wrath (in a small but statistically significant way, that is). I wouldn't be surprised in the least that some refs maybe see "blackness" as a gradient, with Dennis Rodman at one end and Joe Dumars at the other.

But I'm inclined to give more weight to the anecdotal interviews with African-American NBA vets. You'd think the subject of racist refs, however unconscious, would've been broached way before now. If it exists, it apparently took the Times to get even the players to notice... unless the thought of Stern justice has somehow cowed everyone into ignoring it.

What's up with the "is the Warriors-Mavericks series the best ever" talk I'm hearing from non-King sports outlets? I know the first round is usually devoid of drama, but wouldn't it be a better series if, y'know, the Mavericks weren't lying down the first four games? If Dirk and Baron were each dropping 35 a night, maybe we'd have something. But the possibility of an 8-seed dropping a 67-win 1-seed (with its absent fadeaway-shooting superstar & weak regular-season competition) doesn't equal greatness. Especially if the Warriors get tore up by Houston next round. No way a classic series starts in the last three minutes of Game Five.

The next classic playoff series I can see will feature LeBron and a healthy Gilbert Arenas.

Aren't we past the "oh, I don't own a TV" trope? Once you dropped that piece of science, I assumed you were going to be linking to a commercial, not a glorified banner ad.

Regardless... it's the same industry trick as showing smokers romping in the woods; if an advertiser can put up an alluring enough mirror, the customer will dress to match. Twenty coffin nails a day makes me a craggy, self-assured cowboy? Sign me the fuck up, please.

I see the Allergan ad as tapping into the mild American delusion that it's how you feel inside that determines who you are. You like your new C-cup? Then you must feel more attractive as a woman, as a person, and if you're that high on yourself, you must also be interesting, hard-working, successful, and intelligent too. It's basically a Mentos ad, only the Mentos are filled with a viscous gel and could induce capsular contracture. Pandagon has it right: with as much bad medical press as silicone implants have gotten in recent years, even if your bigger breasts somehow say "smarter," your purchase says "idiot".

Or should I say "Heather"? It's Freaky Thursday!

Oh, and I dunno about the lot of you, but Mr. Gibb's been treating me right for years. When the books close on the Bee Gees, "To Love Somebody" ought to stand as a far greater tune than "Stayin' Alive".

Fuck me, I'm still cracking up 12 hours later. I don't know which is funnier, the tweaking of corporate-endorsed stereotypes or the dig at Pan's Labyrinth.

Then if it's racism, it's finely tuned. Or it's biased towards dudes who can actually write credible tunes about the ass and the freaking thereof.

I haven't seen the video clip, but I'll assume for the sake of argument that it's egregious. If Verizon "fired Akon for doing the kind of thing it hired him for," then I want to see that contract, if only because I never knew "grinding on high school freshmen" was a corporately-prized skill set. R Kelly's consequences include indictments. Urban's and Wentz's were relatively victimless crimes (unless we insist on being heartbroken for, respectively, Nicole Kidman and legions of underage female mallpunks). Akon humped an young girl in public. He loses a couple sponsors. Two more hooks on Jeezy tracks and he'll be back in black. He and R can hook up for "The Sort of Best of the Same World" tour in 2011.

Aand does Michelle Malkin really have that much clout? I mean, O'Reilly and Luda, fine. But Malkin? I didn't think she could influence a TRL lineup. I hope she's good at reedy, faux-soulful choruses. America's got needs, Shelly.

And Akon's a singer, not a rapper. He's got cadences 'n' stuff, sure, but his calling card is that diluted jar of molasses he calls pipes. In the vast spectrum of hip-hop, he is nowhere near "hardcore".

It sure made my day, that's for sure.

And Liz T... why assume Gwen's a liberated female? It's like being an evangelical Christian president... maybe you have some trappings of that identity, but the nature of the system is such that you have to compromise at every turn to scale the heights. Maybe Stefani is the Liberated Female (TM) brand of pop singer, but she's nowhere near the real deal.

Jon Cogburn, you are sadder than "Is This What You Wanted". Unless you were going for a poorly calculated pose of arch dudgeon, your post made my day. 'Twas as seven quickly jotted blue-book entries.

love, luck, and lollipops!

I didn't enter the contest because I'm, like, way cooler than all recorded sound.