I love the U.S. Women’s Open golf championship, even more than I love the Kraft Nabisco Championship (the golf tournament part of the Dinah Shore weekend). I can actually focus on the golf, and not be so distracted by the parties.

Annika Sorenstam, who currently has 69 tournament wins, is the defending champion.

For years, I joked that I wanted to become an LPGA housewife. It seemed exciting. Your girlfriend marches around the golf course, kicking butt, and you get to be by her side. But, as Rosie Jones’ girlfriend reveals, it’s not all fun and games.

Plus, the women that I know who have LPGA player girlfriends are usually at home bored while their girlfriends are gone for months at a time, out on tour. Or they're stuck out on the course, carrying a 45-plus-pound golf bag, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between breaks.

Since International Surfing Day was yesterday (duh), and the next episode of Curl Girls comes out on Monday, I thought now would be a good time to give you a mini-tutorial about the world of women’s surfing.

Think of me as your own personal Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) from Weird Science. I have much to teach you. So put your bras on your heads, and let’s get started. By the way, this information will be useful whether you want to be a surfer girl or just want sit on the beach and hold a surfer girl's towel. It’s up to you.

First, let’s review some of the top women surfers in the world, starting with top-ranked Australian Stephanie Gilmore:

The WNBA All-Star game is July 15, less than a month away. Online balloting is now open. But how will you vote? Will you support your home team if you live in a WNBA city, or will you stick with your favorite college players, no matter where they ended up?

I live in L.A., so I love the Sparks, even with a retired Chamique Holdsclaw (bummer) and a pregnant Lisa Leslie on the sidelines.

It’s the first time I’ve been in a city with a WNBA team — it's a lot more fun to be able to go to the games. It's a little harder to be loyal to a team when you can only watch the games on TV or online.

My advice: Base your choices on stats, or pick them like I always sometimes do: Which player is cute? Do I hold it against her that she sort of looks like that woman who rejected me at that bar? What do her biceps look like? Can I pick her even though I hate that team’s uniforms? What if I don’t like the food in that state? How do I weigh that against her percentages? Being a sports reporter is harder than people think.

Here are my picks — although sometimes I think I curse things by picking them, almost like the curse of the Sports Illustrated cover.

My brain is filled with images of ponytails and visors after watching hours of the Women's College World Series for softball all weekend on ESPN and ESPN2. Did you catch all of the coverage? I never get tired of watching Olympic gold medalist Michele Smith, who was one of the commentators.

This weekend, Arizona State, Texas A&M, DePaul, Baylor, Northwestern and Washington all got knocked out of the series, leaving the Arizona Wildcats and Tennessee Lady Vols to play for the title starting today.

Did you watch the Indianapolis 500 this weekend? Three women competed in the Indianapolis 500 for the first time in the 91-year history of the event. Danica Patrick finished eigth, Sarah Fisher finished eighteenth, and Milka Duno had a minor crash that took her out of the race.

To catch you up on the significance of the women's competition, check out the Sports Illustrated photo gallery of the women and the history of the event.

I can't say I'm a NASCAR fan. I grew up in the South, and never understood it. Boiled peanuts and sweet tea, I understand. Racing around in circles in a track, I don't.

I do admit the women dressed in firesuits give me pause for reflection.

Milka Duno:

Makes me want to dig up my "Beers. Chicks. Trucks" t-shirt. Is it okay to want to come back in another life as a steering wheel?

AfterElton.com recently did a story on "gay newsmen." Gay female correspondents do exist too, but they are more likely to do "one shots," covering an event or a few events in a series.

Diana Nyad, the celebrated long-distance swimmer, has done a lot of high-profile broadcasting. I see her these days at awards shows — she hosted both the Billies and the Women's Sports Foundation dinner. Both times I have seen her talk, her focus was on her 102.5-mile swim from the Bahamas to Florida. She is pretty damn funny, reenacting parts of her swim on stage.

For an interesting take on sports news that's totally different from your average newscast, check out Nyad's weekly show on KCRW, The Score, on which she has covered everything from the recent doping scandal in cycling to boxing, dog sledding, tennis and climbing. She is also the sports correspondent for NPR's Marketplace and a host for Savvy Traveler. Before that, Nyad was the Senior Correspondent for Fox Sports News from 1996–2001, and was the anchor for ABC’s Wide World of Sports from 1980–1988.

She's come a long way since 1974, when, at age 24, she became the first person to cross Lake Ontario from north to south in 18 hours and 20 minutes. And that was merely one of her many amazing feats.

While you're all busy compiling the AfterEllen.com list of hotties, I'm going to talk about Martina Navratilova's biceps.

Since my Dinah Shore workout consisted of doing push-ups before the White Party, I realized I probably needed to reassess my workout program heading into the swimsuit season. The hell if I'm getting in shape to go lie on some beach somewhere, but it does help, especially if you live near West Hollywood and have to compete with Alexandria Hedison and Jackie Warner for dates, to work out every now and then.

I know Martina has dated at least two hot supermodels, including Hunter Reno, so I thought I should pay attention when Martina wrote a book called Shape Your Self.

A Japanese professional surfer. Olympic Romanian gymnasts. Brazilian ultimate fighters. Olympic Australian soccer players. Professional dancers. A 13-year-old local track and field star.

This is Women of Ninja Warrior, the Japanese reality game show for female athletes. The show is called Kunoichi in Japan — the word for a female ninja. In the U.S., you can catch it on the G4 cable channel. Kyla Gracie, the Brazilian ultimate fighter, is just one example of what you'll see.

The show is a spin-off of the men's version, called just plain Ninja Warrior, now in its 10th season. The men's version draws some pretty big athletes to Japan, like the gold-medal-winning gymnasts the Hamm brothers.

This year is a World Cup year in women’s soccer. You know what that means: We get to see Brandi Chastain take her shirt off. I'm sure you remember those photos of her with her ripped abs and her Nike sports bra.

I really would like to go off on a tangent about how freaking stupid all the media coverage was, but I won’t. Let’s talk soccer instead.

The World Cup itself happens in September, but starting in June, the U.S. women play a six-game series leading up to the World Cup. A new video on the U.S. Soccer website offers an introduction to the current women’s team. The video opens with Abby Wambach, wearing a tight hooded sweatshirt and a pair of dog tags. Later we see Briana Scurry talking about her major talent: She's "good with her hands."

Unfortunately, the video doesn't really include any substantial information about the women, either as soccer players or as people.

In the past few years, some top women's rugby teams have posed for nude or close-to-nude calendars as part of their fundraising efforts. A few of the national teams have calendars, including the Canadian team, as do a handful of club teams.

The team at Oberlin College in Ohio has a nude calendar, and has taken a lot of heat for it.

One of the members of the team told the student newspaper The Oberlin Review,

“In a society that brands female competitive sports athletes as masculine, this calendar parodies the standard beauty myth, by juxtaposing the concept of the seductive and submissive pinup with images of women who assert themselves not only as strong athletes, but also as empowered women.”

The Dinah Shore weekend is billed as the largest lesbian party on the planet, and centers on the weekend of the LPGA’s Kraft Nabisco Championship. This year, the Dinah overlapped with the women’s basketball Final Four. The Dinah Shore parties ended on April 1, and the women’s final basketball games were held April 1 and 3. Our recruiting numbers were spread thin across multiple states as hard-working lesbians were forced to choose.

(I'm kidding about the "recruiting." Or am I? Check out the tag line for the Final Four this year: “Women Rock. Join the Team!”)

The NCAA recently announced that the women’s Final Four dates may be later next year. Right now, the 2008 championships are slated for April 6 and 8 in Tampa, Florida. While the Nabisco dates won’t be announced until later in the year, the event (and thus the Dinah) usually falls in the last couple weeks of March.

This year, comedienne Suzanne Westenhoefer performed in Palm Springs with out LPGA player Rosie Jones in the audience, and then hopped on a plane to perform at an event before the basketball games in Cleveland, Ohio. I talked to Suzanne after both events, and she said that when she performed in front of a room of 500 people in Cleveland and asked who was in town for the basketball, all 500 cheered.

Spider-Man 3 opens tonight, and Spidey has a new suit. As Spider-Man knows, messing around with your uniform is serious business.

The WNBA also has new uniforms. The league announced this week that it collaborated with adidas to come up with new looks for all the teams. This is the first season adidas has been a league sponsor.

A uniform can make or break a team. It can make you feel like a superhero, if done right. Did you ever play on a team stuck with a fuchsia-and-yellow-striped uniform and a name like “the Sand Gnats”? Yeah, well, it sucks. You do not feel intimidating, no matter how hard you try.

I haven't been this excited since I got my Mork and Mindy rainbow suspenders.The Huck Doll line of action figures represents professional extreme athletes, including female athletes. I came across these in a snowboard shop while I was working ski patrol this winter. Here's a sampling of the available Huck Dolls and the athletes they represent.

1. Tara Dakides is known as a snowboarder from her five X Games wins and three World Snowboarding Championship wins, but she also competes in surfing, motocross and other sports. Dakides, also known as the Tarorizor, was voted as the coolest girl in sports in 2001 by the now-defunct Sports Illustrated for Women.

Tara’s action figure comes with a miniature of the snowboard she designed for Jeenyus snowboards. Sweet. (She also has her own line of clothing with Billabong, but the action figure isn't wearing those threads.)

Several years ago, Billie Jean King figured out that sometimes, if you want something to happen, you have to do it yourself. She wanted equality in tennis, so she started a tennis tour: the WTA. She wanted equality in women's sports, so she built her own sports organization for women: the Women's Sports Foundation. And when she wanted to honor women in sports, she created two separate events.

The Annual Salute to Women in Sports is held in October, and specifically honors the achievements of female athletes and those who have contributed to the landscape of women's sports. In April, Billie hosts the Billie Awards, which "recognize media excellence in women's sports and physical activity." The Annual Salute has been around for 27 years, while the Billies event is only in its second year.

I chatted with Billie Jean King at the 2007 Billies a few weeks ago. "It's not just about famous athletes," said King. "Tonight is about the celebration of women's sports coverage in the media. Women only get about eight percent of the sports coverage in the news from the major sports outlets."

The WUSA (Women's United Soccer Association) is coming back in April of 2008. The famous trio that stole the spotlight during the 1999 World Cup — Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain — have all retired, so it will be interesting to see who will emerge to carrry the teams and draw the crowds.

There will be teams in Boston, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Dallas, Chicago, the New York/New Jersey area and one yet-to-be-named city. The big question is this: Where will Abby Wambach end up?