'Lex,

OK, so what do we make of this Kobe Bryant food-poisoning story? An accident, like the one I had with an unfortunate breakfast buffet during the 1985 finals? (The temperature inside Boston Garden: 102. My temperature: 104.) Or something more, well, sinister. Remember how the hotel fire alarms would ring mysteriously in the middle of the night whenever the Lakers came to Boston? A coincidence? If this were another time and another context, Dan Burton would be shooting cantaloupes in his backyard by now.

(Oh, yes. A note from Punditland. I was doing a thing for ESPN News yesterday afternoon at VideoLink, the studio from which a great deal of Boston-based bloviating originates for all the nighttime shows. Right when I got there, the police in D.C. found Chandra Levy's body in the park. You should've seen the place. Instant Pundit Defcon 2! "Sweetheart, get me a former prosecutor, and make her a blonde!")

You can't expect basketball not to mutate. After all, the process began when Dr. Naismith of sainted memory determined that the goals would be placed above the floor, thereby guaranteeing that a substantial portion of the game would take place in the air, which, in turn, created space in which basketball could breathe and grow. So, there are great eddies and swirls in it now. The ladies play it on the ground and the men rise, but it's still all about making your own space. My daughter already has abandoned soccer for basketball because, she says, she likes throwing something into something else. As for the Down Low—can't they get Otis Rush or someone to do the album?—I have to admit I watched it and, considering how little time the league has been out there, it's actually starting to turn out some players. If the TV networks weren't so godawfully insistent on propping up the colleges, the NBDL might have a chance to become a real minor league, which might force real jobs upon people like that thooleramawn Bob Huggins at Cincinnati, who thinks Phil Jackson doesn't work hard enough. Of course, he doesn't. He doesn't have to spend as much time as Huggins does bailing out his players.

The whole Piazza thing shakes my faith in American tabloids, which is, as you know, unbounded. I mean, the New York Post sacrifices Wally Matthews, the best columnist in New York, in order to placate the feelings of some bottom-feeder on Page 6? A tabloid where columnists can't snipe at each other? I tremble for my country.

I'm out like ... well, like nobody, I guess.

Pierce