ode to heavyweight boxing

What happened to my favorite sport of all time, heavyweight boxing?

I remember being a teenager and watching Mike Tyson clobber Trevor Berbick. It was 1986 and Tyson's precision, ferocity and lightning-fast jabs left anyone who watched him in complete awe. He was only 20 but he was already an icon, so much so that if you got wind of a Tyson match, you cancelled all social engagements, gathered around the sofa and didn't pick up the phone until the fight ended. It felt like a gift to see Tyson in action. I remember watching fighter after fighter get ravaged and hoping Tyson's career would never end.

But utlimately it did. Tyson made bad choices, lost his edge and seemed to lose his soul along the way. His fall from grace was hard but it wasn't solitary. An entire industry fell with him. Twenty plus years after the Berbick fight, nobody really cares about heavyweight boxing. The great American heavyweights are gone and no one has a clue if they will be replaced. Boxing has been eclipsed by ultimate fighting and been undone by aging champions who are just trying to inch one step closer to a title. If you truly loved heavyweight boxing, you truly detest it now.

I console myself by thinking that perhaps there is a contender out there who will help bring the sport back to its glory days, someone who will remind us of Tyson, of Ali, of George Foreman. I'm excited at the prospect of sitting around the sofa with my kids to watch the next great fighter enthrall us and rise to the ranks of legend, once again.

Please hurry!!

sometimes it sucks to be persian

I'm half Iranian and there are days when it's simply embarrasing to be a member of this ethnic group.

Take yesterday, for example. I was on an elevator in Century City and had to stand elbow to elbow with a Persian business executive in a shiny suit. He was on his cell phone screaming at Ahmad in both English and Farsi. "Dees vat I am telling you, ACH-MAAAD!" he barked. "Al booh afta HA EH AAAACCCH!" Poor freaking Ahmad.

Then today, headlines all over the place about the comments during the UN meeting by Iran's idiotic president, whose name I can't spell. Thank you for making all Iranians look like raving anti-Semites and pushing diplomatic relations back to 21 B.C. Really. Mamnoon.

Last weekend, J and I took a drive through the Westside and happened upon block after block of Persian Palaces. If you don't know LA, the Persian Palace is an unfortunate blight on the city's architectural asethetic. These homes are generally boxy and feature cornices and bronze Middle Eastern statues, typically of lions. They also completely dominate the land they are built on, with virtually no back or front yard. It's all stucco, marble and gold. An architecture critic once wrote in the LA Times that the Persian Palace has all the grace of a "Humvee in a wedding dress."

Don't get me started on Persian drivers. Please.

Tonight we will go to my parents' house for Persian food. Then something transformational happens. When you ingest Persian cuisine, be it a beautifully formed kabob, a perfectly broiled tomato or yogurt with cucumbers and dill, the embarrasment of your fellow Iranians just melts away. You gain the strength to handle them and their obnoxious conversations, comments and homes. You are proud of your culture and happy to be counted among them.

Until your next encounter, of course.

I'm no conservative

But I hope Christine O'Donnell wins in Delaware. This aspiring Senator, in less than two weeks, has been quoted on every salacious topic, from condoms to masturbation to homosexuality, and back to masturbation. I thought Sarah Palin was entertaining, but screw that. She can't deliver outrageous quotes like O'Donnell, whose latest statement showed us she understands all sides, like, you know, witchcraft: "I had a midnight picnic on a satanic alter ...complete with a little blood there and stuff." Of course all of this is regurgitated from old news clips and interviews, but let's be real. Based on her political platform and her logic-defying campaign statements, she hasn't radically departed from her high school belief system.

I have zero confidence in O'Donnell becoming an effective Senator, and she's already lost three Senate races, but what a tragedy if she loses this campaign, goes back to her marketing career, and the rest of us have to listen to Palin again.

i love the homos...

...but there are just too many of these biatches on TV right now.

Despite my protests about watching a competition about baking, J convinced me to tune in to "Top Chef Just Desserts." The show features a plethora of cupcakes, many of them prepared by actual cucpakes.

One super-homo, who was on the bottom during the quickfire challenge, was brought to tears when told that his chocolate creation was favored by the judges. "It's just so, you know, emotional," he sobbed. "Making a pastry is like giving birth. You don't know how it's going to turn out. You don't know how people are going to react to your pastry."

Oh, cry me a Fire Island river. However, I have to say the other biatches are just as annoying. There is the pouty, prima donna Seth, with his muscles always on display; Tim, who resembles David Turtera, likes to make frozen desserts and calls himself the ice queen; and Yigit, from Turkey, who looks he came straight out of a bath house ad. What I would give for a Danielle Staub or a Teresa Guiduice-like baker, someone who could turn out a kick-ass brownie and go toe-to-toe, prostitution-whore-style, with these homos.

That would be true just desserts!

how about this:

Let's not build the mosque and community center near Ground Zero. Let's also not build a church, synagogue, a temple or any other house of worship in that general area. That way no one is offended, no one feels slighted and we can try to repair the rift that's dividing us.

I've done a bit of an about-face in the last week. A month ago, I was open to the idea of the mosque being built. I wouldn't say I was pro-mosque but I felt that perhaps it could open up dialogue between people and be a force for good.

Over the weekend I watched some You Tube footage of the planes hitting the towers. I'd seen it all before, but this time I couldn't get past the footage of people jumping out of windows to their death. One clip showed a man scaling down the side of the second tower with some rope. How he got his hands on it we will never know. The clip is about a minute long. He climbs valiantly for a few feet before the rope starts shaking. He loses his grip and falls to the ground.

Maybe its because I have a child now and I couldn't bear the idea of dying and leaving him, or of him perishing in some unthinkable way, but I couldn't get past the footage, nine years after the planes struck.

It all became clear to me in a New York minute. If my loved one had been killed in the World Trade Center, there is no way I could accept a mosque being built in the vicinity. It would just be an unfortunate reminder that a murderous faction of Islam exists. However, I also would not want any other religious group to move in on that turf. Their mere presence, however unintended, could suggest they are superior to Islam, or that they represent the majority of people who perished on September 11. There is nothing healing about that.

So let's put an end to all of it and have the community center relocate its proposed location. It's the sensible thing to do, in the wake of an event that makes no sense at all.