People

OCCUPATION: Confounding puny players and tailors

BEST PUNCH: Reigniting an old rivalry, O'Neal taunted his injured teammate, saying Bryant "should probably look to be more of a passer until he gets his legs strong."

Kobe (Say-It-Ain't-So-Chum) Bryant
AGE: 25

OCCUPATION: Taking explosive shots, fending off a rape charge

BEST PUNCH: Calling O'Neal "fat" on ESPN, Bryant said he may quit the team at season's end largely because of Shaq's "childlike selfishness and jealousy."

Winner: O'Neal. That's not fat; it's 340 lbs. of terror! O.K., it is fat. Shaq can still eat Kobe for lunch

Next Time: B.Y.O. Togas
A birthday cake with pyrotechnic bosoms; a troupe of shapely, toga-clad dancers; a Jimmy Buffett concert — who knew there was such a variety of ways to exhibit poor judgment? Jurors in the trial of former Tyco CEO DENNIS KOZLOWSKI, flanked here by a pair of hired Roman revelers, watched a 21-minute videotape last week of a $2 million birthday party Kozlowski threw for his wife on the Italian island of Sardinia in 2001. Kozlowski, who stuck his firm with half the tab for the blowout, is accused of bilking Tyco out of $600 million. He appears on the tape promising partygoers a week of "eating, drinking...all the things we're best known for." Many trial watchers shared an understandably scandalized reaction: $2 million and the best he could do was Jimmy Buffett?

Bod For A Burqa?
In a country where ankle baring is saucy, a spokeswoman in a red-hot bikini is a candidate for eternal damnation. VIDA SAMADZAI, 25, an Afghan-born college student whose family fled to the U.S. in 1996, is the first woman in 31 years to compete in a beauty contest as Miss Afghanistan. When Samadzai paraded in her native country's sash at the recent Miss Earth pageant in the Philippines, the Afghan supreme court condemned the leggy Pashtun beauty queen to hell, calling such pageants "totally un-Islamic" and against "tradition, human honor and dignity." Ah, if only all Afghan women enjoyed the dignity Western women are afforded: to be judged not by the hem of their burqas but by the size of their breasts.