Ozzie Guillen Speaks; Apology to Follow - Leading Off

Today should be, to say the least, an interesting day in Miami.

In some ways, it is the official kickoff of the Miami Marlins’ Ozzie Guillen era because Guillen really hasn’t arrived somewhere until he irks large amounts of people. Everyone knew this would happen. Even the Marlins’ owners knew this would happen as they were handing him a four-year, $10 million contract in the off-season. But they will tell you today they never expected this to happen. Pledging allegiance to Fidel Castro? In Miami? Guillen might as well have taken the Marlins’ marketing plan and set it on fire. Or stood at the door to the new stadium before the home opener spitting at the fans as they entered.

So, yes, the Marlins dragged Guillen back to Miami while his team is in Philadelphia to try to fix this with a news conference, and good luck with that. Sure, there are people who are willing to give Guillen a pass because baseball managers are not generally prized for their gifts at international relations and Guillen has shown that his level of cultural sensitivity comes from somewhere in the Neanderthal era. Tim Brown of Yahoo.com believes the “Ozzie being Ozzie” category covers this too, and even the Cuban-American Juan C. Rodriguez of The Sun-Sentinel believes it’s forgivable, even as he sees the pain Guillen’s words cause.

But even if the Marlins succeed in staving off boycotts (not likely) and getting back to the business of reviving the actual baseball team (more likely), the reality has to set in that the Marlins have signed themselves up for unending headaches, as Jayson Stark writes on ESPN.com. There are too many microphones available at too many hours of the day for this to go well, and as Armando Salguero writes in The Miami Herald, this went bad faster than even the most pessimistic would have imagined. The Marlins, after all, have to look forward to the day when relations with Cuba are normalized, writes Eric Adelson on Yahoo.com. This would be a bright future, without Guillen throwing any more grenades into the mix.

Who would have thought a week into the season that anyone would want to trade places with the Mets? They are still inexplicably undefeated after four games.

There were other noteworthy happenings in the early season, with Yu Darvish wobbling through his debut with the Rangers and Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun starting his new life as a doping suspension escapee with a preview of his life on the road, writes Greg Couch on Foxsports.com.

The Saints did not get any friendlier a reception in the N.F.L. commissioner’s office with their appeals of their bounty punishments, which to no one’s surprise were rejected. Now, as Clark Judge writes on CBSSports.com, the question is how they respond and tackle an actual football season without Sean Payton.

The issues are not much less thorny at Arkansas these days, as the football coach Bobby Petrino’s fate is still being mulled after he crashed his reputation along with his motorcycle. The officer who handled the case has been cleared of wrongdoing, but Petrino hardly has. Things are similarly grim at Baylor, which is reportedly facing N.C.A.A. sanctions for a “win now, answer investigators’ questions about all those phone calls later” philosophy popularized by the basketball coaches Kim Mulkey and Scott Drew. As Thayer Evans writes on Foxsports.com, Drew can stop taking such a sanctimonious tone about such things.

In nearby Dallas, the mess du jour revolves around the Mavericks with the news that Lamar Odom has been officially declared a bust and will be deactivated. Ken Berger argues on CBSSports.com that the Mavericks can survive the upheaval, but Jen Floyd Engel writes on Foxsports.com that Odom joins a uniquely vilified category of villains, ones who didn’t try.

The N.H.L. will now try to steer your attention its way as the playoffs kick off. Nicholas Cotsonika of Yahoo.com takes a look at who should be winning the season awards, starring Evgeni Malkin of the Penguins, and Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo.com tackles the flip side and investigates the season worsts.

Baseball might have a season worst, barely a week into the season. That is the genius of Ozzie Guillen. It’s all uphill from here.

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Ashley Judd Speaks For Herself About Faces, Bodies And Fame

 Enlarge Dario Cantatore/Getty Images

Ashley Judd attends Ashley Judd in Conversation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at the United Nations last month in New York City.

Dario Cantatore/Getty Images Ashley Judd attends Ashley Judd in Conversation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at the United Nations last month in New York City.

I hadn't even heard the ruckus about how Ashley Judd looks that's apparently kicked up since the debut of her ABC series, Missing. But she did.

And she's written a piece for the Daily Beast about it.

It's worth reading solely for the opening paragraph, in which she explains how she went from reading everything about herself to reading only positive things to realizing that "good and bad are equally fanciful interpretations," when it comes to being discussed in public. So now, she says she doesn't read much of what's said. But recent discussions about her weight, her face, and whether she's had plastic surgery motivated a change in approach:

I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

She goes on to explain exactly what was said about her following a recent television appearance during which people became fixated on her "puffy" face — the result, she says, of a month of medication — "multiple rounds of steroids," which her representatives have previously said were for a sinus infection and flu.

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Actress Ashley Judd cheers on her alma mater, the Kentucky Wildcats, before the Wildcats take on the Louisville Cardinals during the National Semifinal game of the 2012 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship on March 31, in New Orleans. Added because pictures of Ashley Judd cheering at basketball games are the best Ashley Judd pictures.

What follows is a stinging, pointed, highly intellectual and very thorough examination of exactly what is most commonly said about actresses over 40 and why it drives people nuts. Weight gain, normal signs of aging, and most of all, why any of this is discussed in the first place.

It's very rare in my experience to see an actress speak quite this bluntly about the phenomenon sometimes known as "bodysnarking," which can be about weighing too much, weighing too little, looking "puffy," or basically anything else people choose to seize upon. But it's even more remarkable to see one explicitly link it so forcefully to broader questions of sexuality and feminism. She makes clear that in her experience — mine too — much of this stuff comes from women, so much of it is ultimately about conversations women will either choose to have or choose not to have. She says she's sometimes guilty of it herself — me too, absolutely. In my experience, even women who would probably never go on about how actresses are too fat think far less of saying they're too thin, and there are certainly times when what seems to be terrible plastic surgery feels a bit tragic and is awfully hard not to mention. And it's an interesting dilemma, because if you can't mention terrible plastic surgery, how do you talk about how much you wish people would just age naturally?

The kind of environment Judd is talking about is very difficult to stamp out entirely, and it pops up constantly where you don't expect it. (Why, I might ask, does the headline begin "Ashley Judd Slaps Media In The Face"? Would it say "George Clooney Slaps Media In The Face"? Have we inserted a goofball piece of catfight imagery into a piece specifically about the dignified treatment of women?) But it makes for an interesting read.

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