Hi, folks--just finished reading the July/Aug. 2007 copy of The SatEvePost and enjoyed it as usual, but particularly "On Pins & Needles ..." by Michelle Slatalla. I personally have never liked to sew, and the only sewing I do now is when some article of clothing needs the legs hemmed up.

When I was going to what was at the time called junior high (a very public school in Pasadena, Texas), all the girls had to take sewing and cooking and the boys were shoved into shop and auto mechanics. I was a tomboy from the word go.

I absolutely refused to go to sewing/cooking, so was ordered to the principal's office, where I sat in a chair across from his desk for the duration of the class. I stared at the poor man, and occasionally he'd look up from his paperwork at me and shake his head.

This cat-and-mouse game went on for the better part of a week, at the end of which we struck a deal. I took six weeks of sewing/cooking (which was a total disaster) and got to take shop the second six weeks, during which I made a little hang-on-the wall image of Uncle Sam (I still have it).

I guess it does pay to compromise occasionally. Very judicially, of course.

OK, so the mature nature of the Grand Theft Auto franchise has ticked off plenty of parents, politicians, and one loony lawyer from Florida. But once you look past the controversy, you’ll see a series that helped raise our expectations for videogames today, in particular with its go-anywhere, do-anything environments.

Finally, this massive ingredient in GTA’s winning formula is finding its way into a sports title. NBA Ballers: Phenom, the follow-up to Midway’s arcade-rich hoopster, will make the entire city of Los Angeles—including downtown, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood—your playground. And surprisingly, you’ll be spending almost as much time off the court as you do on it.

Just like any GTA metropolis, Phenom’s version of Los Angeles is full of life. “The game is set during a fictional NBA Finals week, so everyone is there, including the ‘who’s who’ of NBA athletes, music celebrities, coaches, agents, and media,” says Executive Producer George Gomez. “You can walk around several L.A. neighborhoods and interact with people, stores, and vendors.” Aside from chitchatting with the city’s beautiful people or shopping for some new duds, you can cruise the streets looking for extracurricular activities, such as snapping pictures of pro players and working a charity car wash with those sexy Laker Girls. Photography? Charity work? Sounds kinda lame, you say? Gomez promises that won’t be the case. “Once you see these events, I think they’ll make you smile and I doubt that you’ll think of them as ‘cheesy,’” he says. “We are trying to create a rich environment that will allow you many choices. Some of the choices are more oriented toward performance in the game, and some are there simply for the exploration and entertainment value.”

Speaking of choices, each one you make along the way will greatly affect the game’s outcome. One possible scenario has you winding up the No. 1 pick in the next NBA draft, while another puts you at the helm of an entertainment empire, splitting time playing ball with movie shoots, record labels, and designing your own clothing line. “We have a Career Aptitude meter on your bio page that always tells you exactly what direction you’re headed,” says Designer Johnny Vignocchi. “The mechanic is similar to what you see in modern role-playing games like Fable and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.”

Getting noticed

Long before Ervin Johnson became “Magic,” Michael became “Air Jordan,” and LeBron became “King James,” these basketball superstars spent years proving themselves on the court. Luckily, things happen much faster on the videogame hardwood. In Phenom, you’ve got only one week to show the roundball community that you’re the real deal. “The player arrives [in Los Angeles] with nothing but his skills and his desire to make his mark,” says Gomez. “The week-long battle includes an old-time rivalry, a lost love, mentors, coaches, distractions, and maybe even a new love.”

From the outset, you’ll walk around town and choose which pro-am tourneys to enter (you can also head to LAX and fly to venues in other cities). Obviously, victories will improve your rep. In addition, you’ll earn clothing and equipment that can help—and hinder—your abilities. “As the player grows his collection of special gear, he’ll make his own choices about what gear to equip because not all of it is purely beneficial,” explains Gomez. “Shaq’s ‘Diesel’ sneakers increase the players shot blocking and low-post offense, but reduce his long-range shooting attribute. The player will have to judge what’s best for his own style.” You can also hone your skills via assorted minigames, including Shootout, which tests whether you can sink jumpers under the pressure of a time limit and a defender all up in your grill. And remember those questionable off-the-court side missions? They might factor into wins and losses, too; completing certain tasks will help you build friendships with certain NBA players and celebrities, who may eventually become your teammates in the new 2-on-2 matchups (the original Ballers only featured 1-on-1 play). See, car washes are about more than staring at soapy T and A.

For Ballers on the Go

On the same day Phenom hits your console, Midway will bring NBA Ballers: Rebound to the PlayStation Portable. It’s basically the same game as the original console installment (which earned a Silver Award in EGM), but it comes packed with a few new minigames (like DunkFest), fantasy courts, and NBA players, including the Heat’s high-flyer Dwyane Wade and the Bulls’ three-point artist Ben Gordon.

FALL is here at last and I've been looking forward to it for a number of rea- sons: crisp autumn air, orange leaves, pumpkin pie, and the probability that the sexier women on our city streets would begin to put their clothes back on again. By winter, they may be fully dressed.

Don't get me wrong. I like female bodies. But over the last decade, every heterosexual man with fully oxygenated blood must have noticed the gradual disrobing that has been going on among women in major metropolises. The recent dust-up about Calvin Klein's soft-core photo ads missed the point. Women well above age 17 are wearing less today than at any time since I entered puberty in 1976.

The male instinct tells us to celebrate this. Recently I conducted a survey of my male friends, in their twenties and thirties, and found they had all taken note of the evolution in fashion: shorter shorts, shorter skirts, chiffon-type skirts that are long but see-through, suggestively ripped Levis, very tight and small white T-shirts baring eight inches of tanned stomach, very thin loose T-shirts worn without a bra. No shape or location of anything, no ques- tion as to firmness or softness, is left ambiguous.

"Lately I can't keep my eyes in my head," Glenn, a 29-year-old graduate stu- dent, told me appreciatively. "I'm walking down the sidewalk just memorizing what these girls look like."

"You know the scene in Desperado?" asks Perry, a book agent. "This girl in a mini-skirt crosses the street. Two Mexican guys in cars are staring at her and they crash head-on, but she just turns around and smirks. It's like that for me all the time."

Surely there are fewer bras on big-city streets than at any point since the bra-burning Sixties. I mean, leave Calvin Klein out of it. His ads were tame enough to be reproduced in full in the print and broadcast media. Some of the outfits I've seen on a balmy Saturday night on Manhattan's Upper West Side could not be fully described -- in words, never mind pictures -- in the respectable press. Can it be more than a decade before women stroll topless in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles?

Yet when they are done rejoicing at the unfolding vistas, my buddies start to voice certain doubts. "I mean," Ira, a commodities trader, says uncertainly, "what the hell do they want, anyway?"

The problem is, after you've thanked Providence for all the previously hidden body parts, you realize that the parade of them has turned you into an oaf, a creature of incessant ogling. Danny, a lawyer, explains poignantly: "It's got- ten to the point that, when I see someone coming down the street and I think she's going to knock my socks off, I turn my head. Or cross the street."

I have also talked to women about the subject, and their annoyed response to men forever checking them out pretty much comes down to: Well, if you would all just look straight ahead like West Point cadets, you wouldn't have a prob- lem. Danny accepts this reasoning. Referring to the rules of modesty that used to govern dress among men and women, he asks, "Why should we penalize women because we're dysfunctional?" Being an oaf, in other words, is a matter of free choice.

Is it really? When you describe something as dysfunctional, you mean it doesn't work the way nature intended. A dysfunctional heart pumps too little blood. Dysfunctional lungs don't process enough oxygen. Yet for millennia, when any generally healthy heterosexual male has been confronted with a woman's almost-naked body, he has reacted the way a man hungry for food does when you wave a pizza under his nose. There is something essential in men that makes them want to look. And look and look. It's a desire that can be trained, not extinguished.

Which is to say, ladies, that you are pushing our buttons. "Sometimes I try not to look," explains Mike, an editor. "But it's like when I tried to quit therapy. The shrink knew every button to push. Guilt, anxiety. He almost talked me out of quitting, but then I got mad at being manipulated and quit anyway." Some buttons produce guilt or anxiety; others the thrill of titilla- tion. Probably resentment exists below the surface in more than a few men.

Nor does the sight of half-dressed women merely turn men into boors. Worse than that, frankly it's a bore. With all the interesting things to think about in the world, when the weather is fine and we walk outside we are stuck gazing at successive pairs of thinly draped bosoms. No doubt the United Nations took so long to arrive at a coherent Bosnia strategy partly owing to the proximity of the male delegates to the streets of New York.

If it is any comfort to us heterosexuals, a homosexual friend of mine says that he and his comrades have it just as bad. I don't buy it, though. At gay parties and rallies, he complains, guys are constantly taking their shirts off, and they'll take yours off too if you don't watch out. That must be annoying. On the other hand, I haven't encountered a gay man walking down Broadway with his fly open or a hole in the crotch of his jeans. Yet.

JAPANESE ARE OPTING IN to small-screen mobile "mail-mags" on their keitai, and Tokyo-based Xavel is scrolling up the profits. The company's Girls Walker mobile Web site (http://gw.st/pct currently lists around 75,000 titles and 9.4 million subscribers, which converts to around 2 million users. Each mini-magazine links back to the mobile homepage, and users are encouraged not only to subscribe but also to publish their own writing via a simple mobile format. Ads on every issue promote mobile shopping through Xavel's partners and the Girls Walker full-color shopping sites. Helped along by sharp, clear images from the current generation of mobile phones, the company moves around [yen] 100-150 million worth of high-quality, brand-name clothing, perfume and accessories every month exclusively through the small screen.

"Two years ago, everybody laughed at us when we went looking for partners for Girls Walker," says the company's '30-something CEO and presides Fumitaro Ohama. "They said there was no way consumer would buy goods over the keitai." Retailers aren't laughing now. Xavel's return shopping rate is an enviable 45 percent, and sales from the 2002 Christmas campaign were expected to net around [yen] 500 million this year--nearly a fourfold increase from 2001. Girls Walker is the No. 1 Japanese mobile portal site, and they've done it all by word of mouth.

Ohama, who attended USC and originally thought about a career in filmmaking, says his concept for the company was to combine the business models of Yahoo, Amazon and Japanese PC mail magazine distributor MagMag into one handy portable package. His target market: young women in their 20s. Despite the economy's lingering malaise, this is an exuberant group of brand-loving big spenders eager to share new finds with friends. "These women generally don't have PCs at home because they'd rather spend the money on a designer bag," says Tatsuya Kodera, Xavel's business manager. "Their social network and link to the Internet center on the keitai."

Fun and frivolous

Japanese mailmags--free opt-in newsletters--started out on the PC but transferred easily onto mobile's smaller screen. Xavel began with in-house mail magazines covering fun and frivolous topics like fortune telling and melody downloads. As they began to create a community of readers and writers, topics expanded to include personal diaries, news about TV and movie stars, commentary and everything in between. All have a casual, friendly tone.

Grassroots publishing

About as visually exciting as Soviet-era public housing, the "publications" are generally a black and white scroll of text several screens in length highlighted by ads set off in lines of asterisks or blocks. What matters to users is nut how they look but the opportunity for expression they represent. Neeraj Jhanji, founder and CEO of ImaHima (www.imahima.co.jp), a location-integrated mobile group messaging service in Japan and Europe, points out the positive benefit of this grassroots mobile publishing boom:

"Many of these mobile publishers are young people. At that stage in life they are looking for self-expression, to gain more confidence while trying to understand the world around them. For them, communication becomes central. Mobile mail magazines, becoming a writer yourself, establishing independence--'I am an individual and these are my thoughts'--it's a healthy outlet for their emotions and intellect."

Xavel succeeded in part because its mailmags opened a dialogue with readers, even if much of that dialogue centered on beauty, fashion and fun. M-commerce sites have been further divided into Perfume Walker, Fashion Walker and even Men's Walker. Demographics for both mail magazine writers and in-shoppers have expanded beyond women in their 20s to include men and women from their teens to their 40s.

Jeffery L. Funk, associate professor at Kobe University Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration, has done extensive research into the management of technology. Funk points to Girls Walker's adroit use of viral marketing techniques. "On each magazine sent out, they have a link back to the mobile site to become a magazine writer. It's 'viral' in terms of getting more writers and 'viral' in terms of being easy to forward your mail to a friend," Funk says, referring to a marketing technique where a message is passed from one user to another like a computer virus. "It not only increased the number of readers but of writers. The portal then has these unique Ills, which it can then mail advertisements to--all opt-in. (And) they don't call them 'ad'; they call it 'information.'"

Advertising from outside sources is kept to a minimum, and only respected brands pass the company's screening. Amateur publishers earn a fee for ads placed on their publication. Strict policing on every level has built up huge reserves of consumer goodwill. "The last thing we want is for our users to feel that we are sending them 'meiwaku mail' or spam," says Xavel's Ohama. "We could make five or six times the ad revenue we now generate, but in the long run we would lose customers. Word of mouth is a very powerful marketing tool in this country--it can make or break you."