Jockstrip: The World As We Know It

OSCAR GAMES

Las Vegas has its Oscars odds makers, but for those who want to play games picking Oscar winners without risking the rent money, Yahoo! has set up an online feature where visitors can make their own predictions on most of the categories in the 74th Academy Awards.

The Yahoo! Movies Oscar Pool (moviegames.yahoo.com/oscars) lets people register their picks for best picture, actor and actress, as well as the new category for best animated feature. Visitors can also check out movie reviews, other awards and nominations and movie trailers -- and even find show times and buy tickets to see the pictures that made the final Oscars cut when the nominations were announced on Tuesday.

The game allows players to make their picks up until 8 p.m. EST on March 24 -- when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents the Oscars.

The game was developed by Yahoo! Inc., which is careful to point out that the game is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with the academy.

(Thanks to UPI Hollywood Reporter Pat Nason)

THINGS WE DON'T UNDERSTAND

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is the latest group to be taken in by a hoax spreading across the Internet involving the latest in what the well-dressed deer is wearing this year.

In the latest issue of its CEIUpdate newsletter, the libertarian-leaning group features a short item on the back page about a pro-animal rights effort that supposedly went horribly, horribly wrong. According to the item, an animal rights group placed vests of "bright, blaze orange colors ... onto 405 captured deer that were then released back into the wild. The object, evidently, was to disguise deer as hunters" and keep them from being shot. According to the story, the effort went awry when the owner of a sporting goods store offered a $5 bounty for each vest, resulting in 308 of the deer being killed and leaving the animal rights group with egg on its face.

As we said, the story is a hoax, but CEI apparently was not the first to be taken in by it. File this one away with the phony 602P Internet tax alert.

(From UPI's Capital Comment)

NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

Former Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah will be returning to his native country next month after nearly 29 years in exile, aides from his inner circle told UPI.

But the ex-monarch's advisers say the permanent move is not an attempt to return to the throne he lost after a 1973 coup. Rather, he hopes to throw support behind the interim Afghan government and the government that follows.

The 87-year-old Zahir Shah has been visiting doctors in Italy -- where he has lived since his government was overthrown while he was in the country on holiday -- in order to gauge his physical strength before making the move. Physicians have declared the former king's health strong despite his advanced age, aides said.

The exact date of the return trip has not yet been set, but the adviser said it would likely be around March 15 or 16. He said it would certainly be before the March 21 start of the Afghan holy year, which is called Nowrus -- a tradition outlawed under the country's former hard-line Taliban rulers.

TODAY'S SIGN THE WORLD IS ENDING

The scandal surrounding the pairs figure-skating competition at the Winter Olympics has grown so ugly that the International Olympic Committee president has decided to step in and demand action.

Throughout the day Wednesday, new details emerged in the controversy that began Monday night when Russians Enela Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharuildze won the gold medal over Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier -- despite the fact that most skating experts felt the Canadian team was clearly the best.

The referee for that competition, American Ronald Phenning, sent a letter to International Skating Union President Ottavio Cinquantana of Italy saying he believed there were judging irregularities in the pairs event. NBC-TV reported Phenning wrote that letter because he heard French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne say during the regular post-competition judges' meeting Tuesday that she voted for the Russians because she had been pressured to do so by her national figure skating association.

A news conference by Cinquantana Wednesday turned into a 75-minute session in which the head of the world skating governing body was barraged with often hostile questions.

Finally, IOC President Jacques Rogge made the rare move of summoning Cinquantana for an early-evening talk. And instead of keeping the visit secret, the IOC let it be known that the meeting had taken place -- a move seen as putting pressure on the skating union.

"I asked President Cinquanta to take adequate action as quickly as possible because of the high urgency of the matter," Rogge said in a statement.

Canadian officials have officially protested the pairs judging, asking that Sale and Pelletier also receive gold medals. Cinquantana said the entire matter would discussed at a previously called ISU meeting next Monday and that whatever is decided there would be final.

"I would be a liar if I said it (changing the results} was impossible and I am not a liar," he said. "But there is no precedent."

The Toronto Globe and Mail reported that sources had told the newspaper the pairs competition was fixed as part of a deal involving the ice dancing event, which begins next Friday. The newspaper quoted sources as saying the ice dancing results have already been determined and that the Canadian pair of Victor Kraatz and Shae-Lynn Bourne were slotted to finish fifth. It also said deals were made for Italians Barbara Fusar-Poli and Maurizio Margaglio to win the gold in ice dancing ahead of Russians Irina Lobacheva and Ilia Averbukh, and that French skaters Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat were set to win a bronze medal as part of the deal.

Figure skating has long lived with allegations that judges trade their votes, but such a scandal in the midst of its most high-profile event could have long-term implications. There are those within the Olympic movement, former IOC vice-president Richard Pound among them, who have called for ice dancing to be banned from the Games because of past scandals.

AND FINALLY, TODAY'S UPLIFTING STORY

There will be flowers for Valentine's Day. In fact, there will be more flowers than ever.

A flower crisis feared by importers in Miami was averted when shippers decided to provide more airplanes and trucks to get South American flowers from Miami to the rest of the nation.

Problems surfaced Monday when importers discovered they had more flowers than they could ship. The problem persisted Tuesday when Wilma Diaz, marketing director of Miami Flower Traders warned: "We've got trailers full of flowers that will die. Valentine's Day is the largest flower-consuming holiday in the year. Customers will be lost. Thousands upon thousands of dollars will be lost."

Federal Express -- which ships almost all of the flowers out of Miami year-round, including Valentine's Day -- managed to come up with three extra DC-10 cargo planes and 15 trucks capable of carrying 800,000 pounds of additional flowers. Federal Express normally ships about 3 million pounds of flowers during the Valentine's Day period, but this year that wasn't enough, said spokesman Ed Coleman. He said Federal Express works closely with shippers on projected needs.

"It was just that the volume this year exceeded expectations," Coleman said Wednesday. "There may have been additional customers." He didn't have an explanation for the increased demand, and neither did Diaz.

But Diaz said she was satisfied with the outcome. "Everything's fixed. FedEx did what it had to do," she said.