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Hmm, this guy’s always in front. Riccardo Bocchino, fly-half. Photo from New York Magazine.

Moschino has created the official uniform for the Aironi team, launching the first partnership between an international fashion brand and a rugby team. The Aironi are Italy’s top team: they play both in the Magners League as well as the Heineken Cup and in this season they’ll play against the strongest teams in the challenge to become European Champions.

Dalaga. 150 Franklin St., nr. Greenpoint Ave., Greenpoint; 718-389-4049

Dalaga NYC in New York Magazine’s Best of New York Shopping 2010 issue.

While you view this educational video that solves that niggling problem “What should we do with all our parents’ Reader’s Digest Condensed Books taking up so much shelf space in the house?” we shall announce the winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 4.4: Classes, Books, Teacher’s Dirty Looks.

The winner, as chosen by the readers (If you didn’t vote you can’t complain) iiiiissssss: Cacs.

Congratulations, Cacs! You may claim your prize—a copy of John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River signed by John Irving—at the usual place starting Monday, January 24. We would bar you from joining any more LitWit Challenges, but we hated the “Give others a chance” rule when we were in school and we’re not about to impose it. Everyone, you’ll just have to beat Cacs. Your motivation: Be the Cacs-sackers.

The next LitWit Challenge is coming up. We figured we’d let you have a weekend to work on your entries to see if the quality is improved or diminished by the time pressure. As newspaper folk know, desperation enhances invention.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

The reviews of The Tourist are so scornful, its nomination for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy, neither of which it is) so preposterous even by the aesthetic. . .standards of the Hollywood Foreign Press that Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais (Did you know he was in that New Wave outfit Seona Dancing whose single More To Lose was a hit in Manila and nowhere else?) would’ve lost all credibility if he didn’t use it as a running joke at the ceremonies, the plaudits for the big-budget Hollywood debut of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (whose previous film was the universally-admired The Lives Of Others; the sound of his name should cause everyone to snap to attention each time he enters a room, plus he is 6’8″) so nonexistent that I had to rouse myself from my pleasant cold medicine-induced stupor on my comfortable cat-festooned bed to watch it at the theatre.

I enjoyed writing that sentence more than I did the movie. The Tourist is no more preposterous than the typical Hollywood mediocrity, but one expects Depp, Jolie, and von Donnersmarck to have higher aspirations. This is the kind of movie Alfred Hitchcock could’ve directed in his sleep, and appeared in just long enough to sink a gondola. The more filmmakers attempt the kind of breezy, deceptively light thriller Hitch used to make, the more miserably they fail. And old Hitch didn’t blather on about Art, he made films the audience actually wanted to see. (Did you know that the directors of the French New Wave Truffaut, Godard et al thought of themselves as Hitchcocko-Hawkians?)

In the end these are the reasons to see The Tourist: Johnny is beautiful (though the Jesus look is not flattering), Angelina is beautiful (and the camera keeps zooming in on her derriere), and Venice is beautiful (though she has been photographed much, much better). Do not believe people who say that beauty does not matter. Over the years I’ve had to unlearn the clunky motto my second grade teacher had written on the blackboard: “Beauty is useless, Character is the best.” The second part is true, the first part surely perpetrated by the resentful.

Beauty is hard currency in this world: you have to recognize it, create it, or sell it. Or be it, but do it quickly because it does not last. People will turn themselves inside out for beauty; they will kill or die for beauty. Shallow maybe, but that’s our species.

A scrum in sevens. We can attest that forwards Justin and the Andrews still have teeth in their heads and that their ears are not calcified.

There’s a rugby-playing character in The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. He is Adriano, an aristocratic Italian midget.

“Adriano was the hooker, and did his work in the fulcrum of the pack. How he especially relished it, he said, at the commencement of a scrum, when the six heads came smashing together! It was normally the hooker’s job, Keith knew, to backheel the ball into the tread of the ten-legged melee that strained at his rear. But it was a different story, apparently, with I Furiosi: as the clash began, Adriano simply raised and crossed his little legs, so that the men behind him (the second row) could rake their studs down the knees and shins of the opposing front line. He said,

‘Most effective. Oh, I can promise you. Most effective.’

‘. . .But doesn’t anyone put a stop to it?’ said Scheherazade. ‘And don’t they take their revenge?’

‘Ah, but we are equally famed for our indifference to injury. I am the only Furiosi forward with an unbroken nose. The lock is blind in one eye. And neither prop has a tooth in his head. Also, both my ears still hold their shape. Not yet even calcified’. . .”

The BBC Sport guide to positions in rugby union: the hooker.

Why don’t you ask a hooker if he wears a miniskirt, stiletto heels and make-up to a match.