If this is true, it's creepy. If it isn't, it's damn funny. The power of eBay at work, even though it's illegal on eBay to sell this item. (Update: The link's been taken down.)

Vincent Gallo is an actor of independent films, most notably Buffalo '66 and The Brown Bunny, the latter of which he made and features him enjoying fellatio from Chloe Sevigny. But I digress. It seems on eBay, through a third party, he is selling his sperm to the highest bidder, minimum bid $1 million. What amuses me are the extra conditions and possible discounts you can get for buying his sperm. To summarize:

1. The bidding price includes one attempt at in-vitro fertilization (additional attempts will cost the bidder but the sperm will keep coming at no extra charge), but if a woman wants to be naturally inseminated, it'll cost an extra $500,000. Of course, Gallo will waive the fee if he is presented with multiple photos of the lucky lady and he approves.

2. He has the right to refuse if the winner is a woman of "dark complexion".

3. If the woman has naturally blonde hair and blue eyes, you get a $50,000 discount.

4. If you're related to a "German soldier of the mid-century", you can also get the above $50,000 discount.

5. Gallo favors a Jewish mother since "this connection to the Jewish faith would guarantee his offspring a better chance at good reviews and maybe even a prize at the Sundance Film Festival or an Oscar."

6. The baby's surname can't be Gallo.

I just feel sorry for the winning bidder, if such a person exists.

Before I get to the article of the week, let me remind you to fall down on Sunday for daylight savings time. After that, change your clocks back one hour.

Now, in an article in the Los Angeles Times, did you know Mexicans' consumption of beans has dropped more than 50% in the last 10 years? In favor of what, you ask? Ramen, the dehydrated favorite of many.

Only 3 years old, Leon Gustavo Davila Hinojosa is still learning to speak Spanish. But the precocious youngster already knows a bit of Japanese: "Maruchan."

That's a brand of instant ramen noodles that to him means lunch. Leon's grandmother stocks them in her tiny grocery store in this hamlet 40 miles southwest of the capital. The preschooler prefers his shrimp-flavor ramen with a dollop of liquid heat.

"With salsa!" he said exuberantly at the mention of his favorite noodle soup.

Through the centuries, Moorish spices, French pastries and Spanish citrus have left lasting impressions on Mexico's cuisine. Now Japanese fast-food noodles, first imported here in the 1980s, are filling pantries across the country.

Time-pressed school kids, construction workers and office drones have helped turn Mexicans into Latin America's largest per-capita consumers of instant ramen. Diners here slurped down 1 billion servings last year, up threefold since 1999, according to a Japanese noodle association.

Urban convenience stores do a brisk trade selling ramen "preparada," providing customers with hot water, plastic forks and packets of salsa to prepare their lunches on the spot.

People in the countryside have developed a taste for it too. As part of a food assistance program, the Mexican government distributes ramen to commissaries in some of the most remote pockets of the country, where it is supplanting rice and beans on many tables.

The product is so pervasive that a national newspaper recently dubbed Mexico "Maruchan Nation."Purveyors say you don't have to strain your noodle to figure out why. Nearly 60% of Mexico's workforce earns less than $13 a day. Instant ramen is a hot meal that fills stomachs, typically for less than 40 cents a serving. The product doesn't need refrigeration and it's so easy to make that some here call it "sopa para flojos," or "lazy people's soup."

Sold here mainly in insulated, disposable containers that look like Styrofoam coffee cups, instant ramen starts as a clot of precooked dried noodles topped with seasoning and a few dehydrated vegetables. Boiling water turns the lump into tender strands of pasta in broth, ready to eat in three minutes.

That's a profane act for some Mexicans whose relationship with food is so sacred that their ancestors believed that humankind descended from corn.

Food here is history. It is religion. It is patrimony. Ask anyone who has savored such delights as chiles en nogada, poblano chilies stuffed with spiced pork and topped with creamy walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds to replicate the green, white and red colors of the Mexican flag.

It's also passion. In Laura Esquivel's popular novel "Like Water for Chocolate," the sensuous alchemy of Mexican cooking unleashes a family's ravenous desires.

Small wonder that defenders of the nation's cuisine, such as Gloria Lopez Morales, an official with Mexico's National Council for Culture and Arts, are appalled that Mexican palates have been seduced by this lissome ramen import.

Lopez is leading an effort to have UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognize Mexican food as a "patrimony of humanity" that should be nurtured and protected.

She worries that globalization is disconnecting Mexicans from their very life source, be it U.S. corn displacing ancient strains of maiz or fast food encroaching on the traditional comida, or leisurely afternoon meal."

For Mexicans, food is basically culture. The act of eating here in Mexico is an act of enormous significance," she said. "We have entered a period of threat, of crisis."Nutritionists likewise are alarmed that instant ramen, a dish loaded with fat, carbohydrates and sodium, has become a cornerstone of the food pyramid.

With the majority of the population now urbanized and on the go, Mexicans are embracing the convenience foods of their neighbors in the U.S. while abandoning some healthful traditions. The result is soaring levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, particularly among the poor."It's cheap energy," said Dr. Gustavo Acosta Altamirano, a nutrition expert at Juarez Hospital in Mexico City, of the nation's growing addiction to soft drinks, sugary snacks and starchy foods like ramen noodles. "But it's making us fat."

Instant ramen has its roots in aching hunger. It was invented by Momofuku Ando, a serial entrepreneur whose businesses crumbled with Japan's defeat in World War II.

Memories of shivering Japanese lined up for a bowl of noodles in bombed-out Osaka haunted Ando for years, he wrote in his autobiography, "My Resume: The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen."Ando, now 95, founded Nissin Food Products Co. in that city, guided by the mantra: "Peace follows from a full stomach." He figured out that frying fresh ramen was the key to preserving the noodle and making it porous, so that it could be reconstituted with boiling water into fast, cheap nourishment.

Instant ramen hit the Japanese market in 1958 and became an immediate sensation. The product is such an icon in Japan that thousands visit Nissin's ramen museum each year to see a replica of the tiny backyard workshop where Ando cooked up his invention.

The most economical version is sold in plastic-wrapped, dehydrated squares that consumers typically heat in saucepans on the stove. The average U.S. price is 14 cents per package, thanks to highly automated manufacturing in plants on American soil.

Most of Mexico's ramen is imported and served in insulated, disposable cups, which drives the price up to about 35 cents. Most of that product is manufactured in Southern California, where Japanese food giants Nissin and Tokyo-based Toyo Suisan Kaisha Ltd., maker of the Maruchan brand, have their U.S. headquarters.

Asian nations remain the world's top consumers. The Chinese alone ate nearly 30.5 billion servings last year. Outside that region, only the United States, Russia and Brazil gobbled more instant ramen than Mexico. But in Latin America, Mexico is the noodle champ. Its consumers ate an average of 9.4 servings in 2004 compared with slightly more than six bowls for those in runner-up Brazil, according to the Japan-based International Ramen Manufacturers Assn.

The most popular brand here is Maruchan, whose logo of a cheerful, round-faced boy peeps out from stores shelves nationwide.

Maruchan executives declined to be interviewed. "They like to keep a low profile," said Mark Horikawa, a spokesman for the company's U.S. headquarters in Irvine.

But with a Mexican market share estimated at about 85%, the brand is impossible to ignore. Like Band-Aid bandages and Kleenex tissues in the United States, Maruchan has become the generic term for ramen noodles in Mexico.

That's clearly an irritation to Nissin, which is running a distant second here. "We call them copycats," Takayuki Naruto, president of Nissin Foods (USA) Co., said in an interview at the company's U.S. headquarters in Gardena.

But the firm that invented instant ramen grudgingly acknowledges that it has learned from its imitator.

Naruto said that Maruchan won cost-conscious customers by "lowering the grade" of ramen, allowing it to undercut Nissin's price. He said Maruchan also handled Mexico's mid-1990s peso crisis more deftly than its competitors. While other brands pulled out or hiked their prices significantly to compensate for the devalued currency, Naruto said Maruchan hung tough, increasing its share of the market.

Nissin ultimately cut back on the vegetables and other ingredients in its soups and lowered its prices. "People still ask us where the egg went," said Masa Takada, Nissin's marketing manager.Naruto said he considered the Mexican market "critically important" and that the company had only begun to fight. The ramen maker has an extensive product research and development unit where food scientists experiment with new flavors catering to regional preferences.

For Latinos, Nissin has created goat-meat flavored ramen, a zesty chicken flavor derived from Mexican tlalpeno soup, and picante shrimp, beef and chicken varieties.

Takato "Tim" Shimizu, a serious man in light blue coveralls, is Nissin's top taster in Gardena. Shimizu said he tried to tune his Japanese palate to spicy cadences of Latin America. For confirmation, he routinely pulls Mexican-born workers off the packing line to try out his latest recipe.

But no matter how hard Shimizu works to fine-tune the seasoning, he said his tasters insisted on cranking it up a notch."I am surprised at the amount of lime and hot sauce they add," he said.

Tastes are changing in the Mexican countryside as well.

In a giant warehouse of Diconsa, a government agency that distributes food to the rural poor, cases of Maruchan are stacked on pallets, along with staples such as powdered milk, flour and cooking oil. The agency began stocking the noodles about five years ago after managers of government-subsidized country stores reported that their customers were clamoring for them. Diconsa purchased about 5.5 million pounds of Maruchan last year, nearly triple what it bought in 2000.

Miguel Angel Ansareo Mogollon, manager of the central warehouse located outside Mexico City, said rural women busy with children and chores were influenced by television advertising.

A cup of instant ramen costs 4 pesos, or about 37 cents in Diconsa-affiliated shops. A serving of beans costs pennies in comparison. Still, the average Mexican's consumption of frijoles has dropped by more than half since 1995, according to an agriculture trade group. Per capita consumption of tortillas has declined precipitously as well.

"Traditions are changing fast, even up in the mountains and in the countryside," Ansareo said. "You can spend days cooking beans. Maruchan is ready in three minutes. All the mother has to do is boil the water and throw in the chilies."

But back in Coamilpa, Leon's grandmother, shopkeeper Nohemi Moreno Vasquez, boasted that she has lived 70 years without tasting instant ramen and doesn't plan to start now.

Moreno is proud of Mexican cuisine and its traditions of fresh ingredients, slow-cooked sauces and hand-worked doughs.

She sees no benefit in feeding her grandson instant noodles, even if his parents are exhausted and have little time to cook after working at the local auto plant."

Our food is our heritage. There are riches on our tables," Moreno said."If we don't partake out of laziness, shame on us."

How's this for twisted...UNICEF in Belgium has produced a commercial featuring the Smurfs to teach children about the realities of war. How? Bomb the Smurf village of course.

The commercial starts out pure Smurfs: the birds are chirping and the Smurfs are singing...until the bombs start dropping, destroying their village and leaving a baby Smurf to cry in the middle of the chaos. "Don't let war affect the lives of children" it says in the end.

And it could have been much, much worse. A representative at the ad agency says "We wanted something that was real war - Smurfs losing arms, or a Smurf losing a head -but they said no."

While a lot of people are approving of the message (the family of the Smurfs creator, the official Smurf fan club), did it really have to be the Smurfs? Or any childhood institution for that matter? What if Mister Rogers Neighborhood or Sesame Street was bombed? It's a striking image of course but is it worth it to traumatize young children in the process? Not really.

When William Bennett said "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," he claims he meant for it as a far-fetched argument against a book that argued an increase in abortions could reduce the crime rate.

Well, maybe if you didn't start out by saying "I do know that it's true" you could have emphasized that this was a hypothetical argument instead of letting the media interpret your statement and making you look like a racist. Idiot.

Back when my academic career at Cal started, I shelled out $60 for a season ticket to the football games. Students did this for the experience I was told since it was a rare event to see the football team be successful. While the team lost 8 games that year, fans accepted it even if they couldn't stand it.

Flash forward to today where times have definitely changed. With Jeff Tedford at the helm, Cal has produced 3 straight winning seasons, going on 4. Heading into this season, all signs indicated a difficult year. Many defensive starters left as did Aaron Rodgers and the receiving corps. A weak special teams lacked a significant upgrade. On paper, it would have seemed .500 was a good year. But in the 5 years since my first season ticket, things have changed. Now it's a rare event to see the football team be unsuccessful. Last night's loss to UCLA hopefully provided a wake-up call to those who thought the Bears would win no matter what. They won't. It's a flawed team. It's a rebuilding team. Next year, I'm fully expecting an undefeated season as these young talents mature. But for now, I'm content on seeing them exceed expectations, which is what they're doing as I write this.

Along with my brother, we bought my sister an iPod nano for her birthday. Since none of the stores near my brother had it, I was tasked to go out and buy it at the nearby Best Buy. So hey, walk in, walk out...should take 5 minutes right?

12:00 I get there. It's a new store but it feels really small. Worse yet, the iPods are all the way in the back. Even worse, the lights are on but nobody's home. Since the iPods are under lock and key, I gotta wait for the guy to get back from his break. So my 5 minutes are up. But hey, it's out and I've got it in my hands, eager to race to the cashier. Well, the guy stops me and says, "I should let you know about the service plan we offer you." It's a 2-year plan for $40 that offers to replace the iPod if it breaks. Since the only problem I could possibly foresee is somebody stealing it, I declined.

As I made the walk back to the cashier, the salesman made a last chance plea for the service plan. Again, rejected. 5 minutes waiting at the cashier, I'm there, credit card in hand. "Okay...have you heard about our service plan?" The cashier brings out this brochure and covers every point imaginable in the wordy pamphlet. I'm trying to be nice, nodding at all her talking points and when she's finally finished, I refuse again. Once you start, you can't stop and back down.

I'm ready to swipe. I make the first movement, but then suddenly...12:20. A man approaches with the word supervisor on his nametag. "How was your shopping experience today?" I mutter a "fine" since I'm totally beat at this point. "I see you bought an iPod Nano today. You know, it would really be wise to get a 2-year service protection plan in case anything breaks down." A cashier who had just finished her duties for her shift, overhears our conversation and interrupts, saying "Yeah, the service plan is good...because Apple gives you an iPod that's been refurbished and you don't want somebody else's iPod." So this cashier and supervisor keep talking to me while I'm swiping my credit card. The original cashier understands and gets my transaction through. Once the supervisor finishes, I'm out the door.

12:25.

But you know with my luck, my sister will break the iPod and somewhere out there, someone will say I should've gotten the service plan.