The .Plan

The movie Ping Pong, at the Seattle International Film Festival. The photograph says it all:

Click through for the link to the official movie Web site.

This guy must have grown up in Haiti, drinking haterade out of his momma’s baby bottle:

I detest Kobe with such bilious overpowering fervor that, when he’s playing well, I have trouble doing much else with my life: an incapacitating dark sludge floods my soul. Over the last few weeks—as Kobe threw dirty elbows, made smug post-game comments, and beat the lovable Suns on a couple of irritatingly great last-second shots—my Kobe-hatred swelled to alarmingly high levels. With the Suns’ victory, however, I felt the black tide begin to recede. Its absence still feels strange.

I don’t hate Kobe for petty reasons: for his talent, for instance, which is beyond dispute and often gorgeous to watch, or because he sold out Shaq, or because he’s an adulterer, or because his face looks like a weasel. I can forgive all of that. I don’t even hate him because the referees surround him with a sacred halo of gentle touching (he was once so coddled in a playoff game that Ralph Nader had to start agitpropping about it), or because he’s skewed the self-perceptions of pickup ball-hogs across the nation, or even because he makes close to my yearly salary every time he scores a basket. This is all irritating but peripheral. The true source of my rage is much, much deeper: I hate Kobe Bryant’s rotten and derivative soul.
–Sam Anderson, “The Kobe Haters’ Manifesto”, Slate, May 30, 2007