Really? She is? I guess I'm going to have to upgrade to the Movie+Plus Package from the cable company!

Maybe Kournikova could go to a women's prison to find out what happened to her sister, cameo by Sharapova, and end up getting humiliated and tormented by the warden Navratilova.

That would all indicate an upgrade, methinks.

Anna K is actually a quite capable tennis player. Turns out that she's also a bit of a ditz, and can't stay focused on singles tennis long enough to actually win. When she's got a partner, as in doubles, she's among the best. A partner... Hey - that, too could come in handy in her new movie career. She reminds me of an old, old Thomas Dolby song, whose words include "Her friends say she's a dumb blonde, but they don't know she dyes her hair".

She's surely no Maria Sharapova, as we've all found out.

I'm considering joining the Linux community. Any advice?

I'm with Patton. People are too hard on Anna about her tennis skills. She was good enough to break into the top 20 rankings - which is pretty damn good in the grand scheme of things. Do you realize how good you have to be to compete on the tour?! There are a lot - thousands - of players each year who desperately try to break the top 200.

No, she never made it into the elite of the elite. The small clique of players who can win tournaments (in singles) or the even smaller cadre who can win a grand slam. But that's not the same as saying she's terrible. A lot of people were down on her because they thought she had the skills but lacked the dedication to realize her potential. But that's not the same as saying she's a bad tennis player.

I once saw her play a small indoor tournament in Tokyo called the Toray Pan Pacific about 2 years ago. (Man, I wish I had brought field glasses like the other men in the top rows.) She made it into the Semis before losing 6-4 6-4 to Lindsey Davenport. You could tell she was not in the same class as Davenport but wasn't like she didn't deserve to be out there at all. She had to beat at least 2 other mid-level pros to get to the semis. Davenport won both sets but it wasn't like a 6-0, 6-1 blowout. When you see the pros live, it's amazing to see how hard they hit and she was trading baseline shots with Davenport, a veteran top 5 player with a lot of power. I saw her win some rallies and hit some winners. She held her own serve a few times too but couldn't respond when Davenport finally broke her.

Saying she sucks at tennis requires a very relative definition of the word suck.

John: Howbout "She sucks relative to other tennis players as famous as she is". Is that a sufficiently relative definition of suck?