International Border Volleyball

Foley's Follies and the creeping putsch of the Military Commissions Bill are making the poor, neglected Border Bill fell left out. It passed the Senate on Friday, just before break, so that all the wobbly GOP incumbents could go home for a month to put on their Minutemen costumes for Halloween -- I mean, get tough on immigration for the campaign. Among its provisions: more money, more penalties, and -- yes! -- more fencing!

To celebrate that achievement, take a look at this. (Click on Walleyball.) This was a game of international over-the-fence border volleyball organized a few months ago by Brent Hoff, editor of Wholphin, a quarterly DVD magazine. Below is a still:

Me and Brent know how to knock the rock, if you catch my meaning, so he invited me out to the radioactive sands of the tijuana river delta to play number two on Team USA. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Want to find out who wins? Watch the whole video. It's short. And has some awesome freaking saves. And here's an excerpt of what I wrote about it for the LA Weekly:

Beach volleyball is a much different game when played over two-story metal pylons. Strategy and nuance go out the window. There are few sets and certainly no spikes. Mostly, it's tit-for-tat power bumps that send the ball in 30- and 40- and even 50-foot arcs. The ball hangs in the air so long that a lot of time is spent looking skyward, bracing for another bump that hopefully goes in the right direction. Waiting for one good knock to fall from the blue, it occurs to me that our entirely new sport makes for some extreme, if inadvertent, political theater. Despite the difficulty, the game is fun -- and surprisingly uninteresting to the border patrol, who zipped down at the drop of a hat several times earlier but now seem content to observe us with binoculars.

For the full story click here.