40C-Love

At every tennis Major (save the still chaste Wimbledon), at some point some female player wears an outfit so skimpy it gets commentators asking: "Is this outfit too skimpy?"

But are today's skimpy outfits really any more revealing than the tighty-whitey short-shorts the men used to wear? If Connors's and McEnroe's shorts had been any more revealing they would have qualified as x-rays.

I'm sure those questioning today's outfits would argue that the revealing attire of the Williams sisters and Maria Sharapova are made to pique the "prurient interest," whereas Connors and McEnroe were just wearing utilitarian garb (as though men can't play up sex appeal). From there the complaints would fall along familiar battle lines; conservatives griping about the women no longer being ladies and progressives griping about the women being objectifed.

For the conversatives who say these outfits are a sign of modern decay, remember that in ancient Greece, the Olympians competed naked.

For the progressives; sex appeal is the only edge female athletes have on men. Sports are about competition, and sex is the only way women can compete with male athletes for attention. Forget about retiring jerseys. Start retiring sports bras.

What the controversy comes down to is that these scantilly clad players are women, and women showing skin always brings out the Keystone Skin Cops. The men could string their rackets with their small intestines and no one would blink.

At least the women wearing the least clothing are among the most dominant. If the critics had their way, these heroines would dress more demurely and risk being overshadowed by the Anna Kournikovas of the world. Progressives especially should champion the minimal clothing, because the outfits of the Williams and Sharapova increase their star power; meaning they will be seen by more little girls who will then be inspired to pick up tennis rackets themselves. You want fewer girls playing with Barbie? Let Serena, Venus, and Maria compete tennis-wise and looks-wise and living Barbies who can't hit with the big girls (Kournikova) won't steal the entire spotlight (when Kournikova played, they may as well have hung the net between two stripper poles).

Tattoo Who

I do not have tattoos. They're not a turn-on, and more importantly, I don't like the evidence they leave behind. Because when you get a tattoo, what you're doing is timestamping your body with a statement of who you were at a certain period in your life.

Craziness.

When I'm 40, I don't want people to know what I was like when I was 20, because then I won't be able to lie about how cool I was. I want to be able to tell whoppers like:

When I was 20, I was making money in stocks, I was making money in real estate...I was so loaded the government labeled me too big to fail.

Meanwhile my forearm will say "Food $tamps 4 Life!"

Cave Rain Man?

I just watched my first full length 3-D film: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about the Chauvet Cave, which is a cave in France containing the oldest cave paintings yet discovered. Far from sloppy blobs, the drawings offer quite detailed portraits of horses, birds, bears, etc.

Some of these drawings are estimated to be 32,000 years old, more than twice as old as any previously known drawings. Some are quite detailed. For instance, there is a striking portrait of a rhino that seems to be running, as evidenced by the flipbook-like style of the artwork.

When these drawings were produced (and they weren’t produced all at once; there is speculation that some were done 5,000 years apart), daily life was torturous enough to make waterboarding seem like an episode of Double Dare. Europe was covered in glaciers. Freezing to death was a constant threat. Bows and arrows weren’t around, so in order to eat, man had to grapple with formidable beasts at fairly close range. Yet despite these hardships, MAN still felt the need to express himself. Procuring meals that were only modestly rancid and minimizing his frostbite wasn’t enough. He had to contextualize his existence through art. He had to say something about being here.

Mostly, these expressions were just straightforward depictions of what he observed; realistic treatments of the animals he encountered. The artists apparently felt no need to identify themselves. We see no signatures on the artwork. We see no cigarette holders left behind by snooty cave art critics. It is kind of refreshing.

And we see no drawings of humans. Not exactly. There does appear to one humanoid-animal drawing with religious overtones, one that seems to chime with the ancient fertility cults. And most significant to me, there are lots of handprints, all evidently done by one guy. We know it was one guy, because this gentleman had a crooked little finger that seems to recur in all of the handprints. He of the Crooked Pinky made several impressions of his hand on different walls.

So at a time when simply remaining alive from dawn until dusk was a grand achievement, when obtaining even the most basic components of sustenance was a risky and complicated endeavor, The Crooked Pinkied Artiste still thought it was worth his time to record his handprint again and again and again. As Cave of Forgotten Dreams makes clear, the Chauvet Cave offers us MAN’S oldest known attempts to capture his surroundings, as well as some of his early gropes at religion. And in the handprints of this single crooked-fingered doodler, I see the world’s oldest recorded neurotic.



My handprints can be found all over Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/greatMikePayne

Um waiter, the fly in my soup isn't a tsetse!

I have decided that food snobs are the most obnoxious snobs of all. Food snobs—FOODIES—are fast becoming the new metrosexuals.

When did food snobbery become a national pastime? People used to bond over awful food experiences, like eating Ramen Noodles in college. Now they bond over their hatred of people who don’t “get” flatbread.

And foodies always become the giddiest over the silliest dishes, like toast. "Okay, my perfect recipe for toast? Here goes: pita bread, with pesto, butternut squash, vegan bacon, and horseradish made from Secretariat!"

Yeah, that's no longer toast...

Foodies also won't just accept that you don't like what they like. If you tell them you don't like falafel, get ready to hear: "You don't like falafel?! Oh, that's because you just don’t know how to fix it!" or "You're just not going to the right restaurants!"

What are you, the hummus whisperer?

The Savage Truth

Famed pro wrestler Randy "Macho Man" Savage just died. This week I watched comedian Mike Lawrence do a bit about how all of the Super Bowl QBs were still alive, while pro wrestlers die quite frequently. Given that both professions frequently result in serious injury and have massive drug/steroid cultures, it is interesting that pro football seems to prove far less fatal.

Could it be that football is much more of a meritocracy, whereas pro wrestling, like the rest of showbusiness, is random and maddening, and thus more likely to trigger self-destructive meltdowns? I would also guess that like every other sector of showbiz, pro wrestling attracts troubled misfits who need exaggerated praise to fill some void in their souls. Unfortunately, no set of tights will ever be tight enough to hold back the sadness.

The Emails of Ernest Hemingway

It is a longstanding tradition to publish the letters of famous authors. But now that no one writes letters, how will we overanalyze the correspondences of great writers to pad our dissertations? I know...we’ll publish the emails of famous authors.

I recently worked with a stable of Ernest Hemingway scholars to sort through the late novelist’s emails, and am currently shopping the collection to big name publishers. A small sampling:

To enabler123@___

Let's grab a drink after dinner. Doesn't matter where.

Sent from my iPhone

To enbabler123@___

Sorry about last night. That bartender was so ugly I had flashbacks to the Italian Front. Let's get a breakfast drink.

Sent from the bartender’s bathtub

To enabler123@____

Remind me never to drink waffle daiquiris again.

Sent from a medic’s iPhone

To otherlostexpat@___

I got so drunk last night I dreamt that Detective Comics was going to do a Nick Adams vs. Batman comic book series. Guess I should stop drinking wry. [LOL!]

Sent from Mall of Mojitos, South Havana location

To great.gatsbeer@___

I bet I could take Jack Dempsey.

Sent from a bipolar high

To great.gatsbeer@___

Dempsey’s punches hurt more than trying to write sober.

Sent from a bipolar low

To publishyourrubbish@___

I think Fitzgerald has a mancrush on me. Will anyone still be reading my books in a world where people say things like “mancrush?”

Sent from a safari undertaken in mounting desperation

To Mother_Earth@___

Please unsubscribe me from your planet.

Sent from Ketchum, Idaho

Hot Women who Never Hit the Wall

Beauty doesn’t last forever, and sometimes, it barely lasts at all. At some point, most women seem to undergo an abrupt change for the worse. Even beautiful women. One minute they’re hot enough to power Satan’s tanning bed and the next minute they’re just another face in the crowd. It isn’t easy to explain, and isn’t always a function of age. And once that special something vanishes, it never seems to reappear. My friends and I call it “hitting the wall.”

Occasionally there are stunners who dodge Father Time’s cruel machinations and retain the freshness that made them stand out from the other standouts. Some that come to mind:

Chris Evert: Tennis champ, girl next door, and the reason white skirts were invented. The fact that she has aged so well is even more remarkable when you consider how much time she spent in the sun. Ms. Evert played her best tennis at the French Open, where she even managed to appear ladylike while covered in red clay. There is a mud wrestling joke to be made here, but we’ll swerve around it out of respect for this classy specimen.

Alyssa Milano: Definite contender for most attractive Alyssa of all time. A woman whose looks remained top floor even as her career hid in the basement. Usually when the resume gets spotty, the face follows suit. Not in this case. A woman who looks dirty and sweet with her sex drive on repeat. And being a vegetarian, you know the wet spot wouldn’t smell like nitrates.

Marisa Tomei: This perennial knockout might even be getting better with age. And allegedly, she has a lust for uncool sitcom characters. Given my resemblance to Bud Bundy, it is virtually impossible for me not to be in there.

Salma Hayek: In the truly elite stratum of cartoonish sex appeal. Still going strong at 44, motherhood and all. So smokin’ that a source close to the U.N. tells me they are considering a bill that would change the expression to “Gentlemen prefer brunettes.”

Faye Dunaway: So hot in Bonnie and Clyde she should have been preserved in amber and used to create a Jurassic Park full of hot chicks. So hot in Chinatown she made an already tragic story more tragic. You have heard of cheekbones that could cut diamonds. Unlike diamonds, Ms. Dunaway’s cheekbones truly are priceless. It has been said that Helen of Troy had “a face that launched a thousand ships.” If Helen had gone clubbing with Dunaway, she would have spent the first half of the night buying her own drinks and the second half alone at home, wearing sweatpants and reading The Bell Jar for the 75th time.



My Twitter feed is as gorgeous as ever: http://twitter.com/#!/greatMikePayne