It's a pretty amazing testament to how lame Maria Sharapova really is that, even after winning the Australian Open, she's still only ranked #5 in the world, and #6 Venus Williams is twice as close to catching Shamapova as Shamapova is to catching #4 Jelena Jankovic. Had Sharapova not been freakishly lucky enough to receive such a cakewalk at the Aussie, she might well now be tumbling close to exclusion from the top ten altogether.

Meanwhile, after her disastrous and humiliating performance at the Australian, Russia's number one player Svetlana Kuznetsova has lost her #2 ranking to Aussie finalist Ana Ivanovic, and Jankovic is within a whisper of bumping her down to #4. Kuznetsova is the only "real" Russian left in the world's top 10 players (Sharapova lives in the United States and the third "Russian" in the top 10, #7 Anna Chakvetadze, would hardly be recognized by Russians as being "Russian" based on her last name; she'd be more likely to face a pogrom).

The other real Russians like Petrova (booted out of the Open Gaz de France tournament this week, where she held the #5 seed, in the first round, losing to an unseeded Ukrainian -- ouch!) , Safina and Dementieva have disappeared from the radar screen, and despite their hostility to Sharapova she has finally been allowed to play for the Russian national team in the Fed Cup. So then, Maria: If you love Russia so much, isn't it just about time for you to go back to your "home" and live there? We'd be more than willing to spring for the plane ticket. It's interesting how stupid Russians can be, even if they spend long periods abroad. Now that Maria is playing for a foreign country, everyone in America is free to hate her (or hate her even more). Meanwhile, she doesn't live in Russia, so even though she plays for them, Russians (with any sense) will also hate her. And she's wonderful at generating hate (remember how she icily ignored the suffering of a fellow Russian player during a tournament a while back?), and any shortcomings are more than filled by her crazed father, the most venal psychopath the sport has encountered to date.

As an aside, one might wonder what happened to all that vaunted Russian female beauty where tennis is concerned. The real Russians (Kuznetsova, Petrova, Safina, Dementieva) could easily be mistaken for men on their bad days, and certainly don't offer proof of Russian dominance in the looks category.