King Kong Tennis

Bizarro is brought to you today by Larry King.

I like this Larry King Kong joke. The bottom title caption thingy is funny by itself and the humor is further advance by the reference to Skull Island, which is where Kong was captured. Not to be missed is the coffee cup which reads, "Marry Me," since Larry marries a lot of people. So there you have it – three jokes in one. Because I care about you.

Random thoughts of the week:
The USA won a World Cup game in the last minute of the match the other day and unlike my previous experiences with soccer, I found it exciting. In spite of my disparaging comments about soccer (football everywhere except the U.S.) a few days ago, I'm starting to get into the tournament. I still say the melodramatic diving is absurd (every time someone falls in apparent agony because he was tapped on the back I want to introduce him to the hockey player who, during the recent Stanley Cup Playoffs, had seven teeth knocked out by a puck, finished the game, had surgery the next day and played the next night), the officiating is laughable, and it's a bit slow for my taste, but I'm having fun with it. I like to listen to sports while I draw cartoons and look up when the commentator gets excited.

You may have heard that a truly historic tennis match happened at Wimbledon this week. Without going into how tennis is scored, the average match takes around 3 hours and around 50 games are played, often less. This one, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, lasted 11 hours and five minutes, took three days to complete because it was called for darkness twice, incorporated 183 games and 980 points. That's more games in a single match than some players have to play to get all the way through a tournament and several different opponents to win the trophy for the entire thing. To put it into perspective, it would be like a baseball game that lasted fifty or sixty innings, like a football game that lasted 12 hours, like a soccer match that lasted 9 hours, like an election that lasted 6 weeks (oh, we had one of those), like a dumped lover eating three gallons of Haagen Dazs at one sitting.

Here is what the average score of a tennis set looks like:
Player A: 6 4 4 6 6
Player B: 3 6 6 3 4
Each number represents the number of games it took to win each of five sets. Player A wins the best of five.

Here's what this match looked like:
Isner: 6 3 6 7 70
Mahut: 4 6 7 6 68

How these guys remained standing and playing well is beyond anyone's guess. After the match, Mahut went home and cried a lot, Isner went on to lose his next match (a day later) quickly and mercifully, going home and downing three gallons of Haagen dazs.

Last random thought: We had a dandy time watching our buddy, Rhett Miller, play at the Bowery Hotel bar last night. Here's a pic of me, Rhett, CHNW, and Rich, Rhett's dentist, whom we've become friends with because he shows up at all of Rhett's gigs in NYC. And no, it was not Loud Shirt Night at Bowery Hotel last night, it was just a coincidence.












P.S. Rhett isn't naturally shiny, he had just finished playing and was sweaty. (Mmmmm...rock star sweat...)