from the watching-grass-grow…-faster dept.

ZDNet has a story on Condensed Baseball, a pay-per-view net service that lets you watch selected major league baseball games on your computer, but with a difference: every pitch that doesn’t result in a play has been edited out. Which sounds weird to me. Is that really watching baseball? Anyway, good buddy Bundar says there isn’t enough sports on lies.com, so here you go.

from the motorboat,-motorboat,-go-so-fast dept.

From Reuters comes the story of 39-year-old Hiromasa Ando, who began his professional powerboat racing career as a woman, but who was diagnosed with a gender identity disorder and underwent surgery to make him a man last December. Ando, who was competing for the first time as a man, came in fifth out of six.

from the anyone-else-want-in-on-this? dept.

Apparently deciding that all this free publicity was too good to pass up, tennis player and famed email-virus bait Anna Kournikova has now filed her own lawsuit against Penthouse magazine, a few hours after the magazine publicly apologized for running topless photos of Judith Soltesz-Benetton and mistakenly identifying them as being of Kournikova. As reported here yesterday, Soltesz-Benetton had previously sued, and obtained an injunction blocking further distribution of the photos. Tune in tomorrow for the class action suit on behalf of the magazine’s readers.

from the see-if-you-can-follow-this dept.

A U.S. District Judge in New York has issued an injunction requiring Penthouse magazine to stop distributing its June issue, and to refrain from posting on its web site a series of images allegedly showing tennis player Anna Kournikova topless. The injunction comes in the wake of a suit filed Monday not by Kournikova (who denies the pictures are of her), but by 28-year-old Judith Soltesz-Benetton, daughter-in-law of fashion designer Luciano Benetton, who says the pictures are of her. The part that has me wondering is Soltesz-Benetton’s motivation: I can see her being upset that photos snapped of her flashing her rack on Spring break in Florida (or something; I’m not clear on the circumstances) had found their way into the magazine, but wouldn’t it maybe have been better, at least from the icky-publicity standpoint, just to keep quiet about the whole thing?

from the victimless-crimes dept.

After violating his probation for the sixth time, former baseball star Darryl Strawberry has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. His crime in this case was that he broke the rules of the residential treatment center he was staying at by 1) smoking, 2) having sex with a resident, and 3) trading baseballs for cigarettes. Whew; good thing we’ve got him back behind bars.

from the no-comment dept.

From Yahoo News comes this interesting photograph of golfer Christie Kerr celebrating her first-ever win on the LPGA tour at the Longs Drug Challenge in Lincoln, CA, yesterday. I’m not saying anything. Update: Damn that Yahoo News. Don’t they know that URLs are sacrosanct? Anyway, here’s another (smaller) version of the same photo.

from the if-it-ain’t-one-thing-it’s-another dept.

Fresh from the ass-whupping she gave Paula Jones as part of Fox’s Celebrity Boxing event, Tonya Harding is back in the news today for having lost control of her pickup, crashed into a ditch, and failed the subsequent breathalyzer test. Some people have the worst luck.

from the oops,-sorry dept.

Highlighting the unique nature of a sport where octogenerians participate in headline events, 89-year-old golfing legend Sam Snead teed off the opening ceremonial shot at the U.S. Masters golf tournament yesterday, sending a 100-yard slice into the gallery. Spectator Phil Harrison was knocked down and had his glasses broken by the errant shot, but apparently was otherwise unhurt.