Dancing With the Bulls

José Tomás shows in just 37 stunning seconds why he is the last best hope
for bullfighting ...

... and if that doesn't prove it, have a look at these two and a half minutes.
¡Olé!

Postscript: Oct. 7 -- Yesterday, during arguments in a a free-speech case involving a ban on animal-cruelty videos, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia asked, "What if I am an aficionado of bullfights, and I think, contrary to the animal cruelty people, they ennoble both beast and man? I would not be able to market videos showing people how exciting a bullfight is."

Well, if Scalia is for it, I'm against it. Almost makes me cringe in shame for posting this video. Besides, I never thought the bull was ennobled. My staff of thousands also wonders why I posted it.

"Hmmm," the staff wrote, "very interesting. Made us think of that football player Michael Vick who got sent to prison for dog fighting. Too bad. He should have dressed up in some tight, Liberace-style pants and made a homoerotic ritual out of it in the name of ancient Moorish-Hispano Kulchur and Hemingway manliness. Gladiators, ha! But better a bull than a Christian or Jew."

I protested that the analogy was unfair, that Vick and his dogfighting ring risked nothing -- he simply had underperforming dogs "killed by electrocution, hanging, drowning and other violent means."

"I don't think bullfighters are risking all that much," came the reply. "I wonder what the kill ratio is between matadors and bulls over the last 50 years -- maybe a 1,000 to 1? Or 10,000 to 5? The bulls don't have a chance. Of course, it's not one of those things worth much worry. There are thousands of other far worse things that reinforce human brutality. I would imagine that the murder rate in NYC in the early 1990s was higher than the death rate for matadors."

Not content to guess, the staff found an article, "Death and Flamenco in the Afternoon," that gives actual bullfighting stats: Five matadors killed since the mid-1990s and 10 in the last 50 years vs. 40,000 bulls killed annually in Spain's 600 or so bullrings. "It's not a fair fight," the article concludes. "The death rate stands at one matador to several hundred thousand bulls."

And how about the latest twist, a matador's deal to advertise a drink for gays on his cape? "Wait till Saturday Night Live gets hold of that," says the staff.