MOLI VIEW™

The freaky-looking guy who bags my groceries biked down Venice Boulevard while wearing a bright orange vest, the kind of thing you might wear if worried you might fall off of the vessel and into the drink. "Man, that dude looks way crazier than cat shit," I said to my hands on the steering wheel. "But there's no denying that's some mighty fine exercise." Minutes earlier I'd visited the liquor store. The guy behind the counter was, as usual, listening to Al-Jazeera Radio, where the hits never do start coming.

It was the weirdest context imaginable to birth the notion that my sports weekend had indeed begun.

A few hours earlier, just before falling into a brief spell of sleep, I did indeed see Kobe Bryant "strap it up" and play in the Lakers' game against the SuperSonics. The Kobester came through for 16 fourth-quarter points, yet primarily played the facilitator card and iced up his knees mad early. But Jordan Farmar and center Andrew Bynum, Kobe's ideal trade bait? They looked insanely good, as impressive as possible in an exhibition game. The youngsters appeared as though they want to steal some All-Star votes, come winter.

And I checked in on the least impressive "important" college game I'll probably ever see. Rutgers beat South Florida, and if I'm supposed to believe these are two of the top teams in America, well, we may have lost some of our civil liberties but we do have excess credulity. It's like, don't try to tell me the cleaning lady is a beauty contest queen. She's probably a perfectly fine human being, but there's a baseline criterion that has to be met in order for her to qualify. Like, she's gotta not have grime under her nails to compete. South Florida just lacks the bona fides, I don't care what the polls and computers say.

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