Opening statements for the Barry Bonds perjury trial in U.S. District Court are scheduled to be heard today, and I’ll speak for the majority of America when I make an underhanded fist about navel-high and shake it dismissively. The lynchpin in the case for the feds is the testimony of Greg Anderson, who served as Bonds’s personal trainer while he was cracking home runs into McCovey Cove.

Along with the swearing in of the jury and opening statements, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston is expected to send the jurors out of the courtroom Tuesday so she can send Bonds’ former personal trainer Greg Anderson to jail.

Illston told Anderson on March 1 that she plans to have him kept in custody for the length of the trial if he follows through as expected on his vow of silence. Anderson’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said he will argue that Anderson can’t be jailed on contempt charges because he already served a little more than a year on similar charges after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds.

–The AP.

The trial is expected to last two to four weeks, and jurors have been ordered explicitly to not discuss the trial on the internet. Hi, jurors! But now I feel like I know how some people felt during the OJ trial, because this seems like a big waste of time, especially since Bonds’s alleged perjury occurred in sealed testimony that never should have been leaked to the public. Hey, the guy hit 73 home runs in a season! I don’t care how shriveled up his balls might be.

So the federal prosecution in this Barry Bonds case wants to show his presumably-shrunken testicles as evidence that he took performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career. Hey, I’ve got premature baldness and tiny junk and no one ever accused me of being on steroids.

The defense derided the science and studies that Bowers and the government cited that allege steroid and human growth hormone use by Bonds would have been witnessed by a former girlfriend, teammates and others in the form of physical symptoms: shrunken testicles, male pattern baldness, and a giant skull and fingers.[...]

Visual inspection apparently won’t do. Ruby noted that a “layperson” would have difficulty detecting diminished testicles “even by touch.”

The only reliable means of measurement, Ruby wrote, is by a “trained examiner” using a special device called an orchidometer.

What good would this do? Do we have any idea of what Bonds’ testicles looked like before he started juicing? I don’t understand why anyone could think this is a good idea. Hopefully Bonds’ balls will just plead the fifth. That’s why they put that in the Constitution, you know. No man should be incriminated by his own scrotum.

[Y! News, who provides testicle updates every hour, on the hour]

went to court today to plead not guilty to stuff he's very obviously guilty of, which comes as no surprise seeing as how he's lied about not doing steroids he very obviously did.  Wait, I wrote that sentence wrong.  I meant to put "allegedly" somewhere in there.  Fucking lawyers. 

The home run king's arraignment in U.S. District Court marked his first public appearance since a Nov. 15 indictment charging him with four counts of perjury and one of obstruction of justice. If he's convicted of all five charges Bonds could spend more than two years in prison.

Translation: he won't be convicted of all five charges, and he'll never see the inside of a prison.  Ooh, unless he's been to Alcatraz!  If he spent all those years in San Francisco and never went, it's his loss.  What an educational tour.  It's so crazy to look at the old cells and think, "Wow, just imagine all the ass rape that happened here."

Barry Bonds, baseball's all-time home run king*, yesterday was indicted by a federal grand jury on four counts of being a lying sack of shit and one count of obstruction of justice.  And yeah, I know the courts have to do the whole "due process" thingy, but I'm just going to go ahead and save myself some "allegedlys" and call the asshole guilty.  Mmm, that feels good.  GUILTY!  Try it out yourself.

So when the most cherished career mark in baseball belongs to a guy who's going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, that's bad for the game, right?  No!  In fact, according to commissioner Bud Selig, the game of baseball is healthier than ever!  Why, just look at A-Rod re-signing with the Yanks!  And hey!  Jake Peavy won the Cy Young!

…Seriously, though: A-Rod has to have done something since yesterday afternoon to trump this.  Did he and his wife go to a swingers party?  Did he punch out Scott Boras?  Get announced as the MVP?  Throw out some bad milk?  Dammit, A-Rod!  Give Selig something to work with.  This Bonds thing isn't gonna go away until A-Rod holds a press conference.  A press conference to read his grocery list?  Sure, that'll work.

Former Barry Bonds mistress Kimberly Bell talked to the New York Daily News to promote her spread in this month's Playboy, and it turns out that Barry Bonds is self-absorbed and did steroids.  These shocking claims come on the heels of everybody already knowing that for the last two to eight years.  But it's always fun to read about how steroids lead to sexual inadequacy:

His body had grown thicker, his back was pocked with acne, his hair had fallen out and his testicles had shriveled when Bonds asked his former mistress if she thought anyone would suspect he was on the juice. "Do I look bloated?" Bonds wanted to know. "Does it look funny? Do you think this is obvious?" …

Their sex life really slumped when Bonds started taking steroids… Bell told Playboy that Bonds suffered from sexual dysfunction, one side effect of steroid use. He tried Viagra several times but didn't like it because it affected his vision and stuffed up his nose…

He became a different person, controlling, threatening and finally violent. "It went from 'I want to know where you are at' to 'I'm gonna f—— kill you. I'm gonna cut your head off and leave you in a ditch.'"

Awww, what a sweetheart.  Ladies, take note: a man doesn't really care until he threatens to take a woman's life.  And to painstakingly cut off a head — that takes real effort.  Any chump can wave a gun in his woman's face on Valentine's Day, but that's just a half-assed attempt at romance.  Real love comes when you can explain her murder in gritty detail, and it involves effort like sawing through vertebrae to complete a decapitation.  I should introduce him to my sister.

As covered everywhere but on this website, Barry Bonds hit his kinda-record-breaking 756th career home run earlier this year, and designer Mark Ecko purchased the ball at a Sotheby's auction for three-quarters of a million dollars.   Here's what Ecko had to say:

"I wanted to democratize the ball and to give the ball to the people, to give the ball to America."

What does that mean?  It means you can go to Vote756.com and vote to send the motherfucker into space.  The ball, that is — not Bonds.  Sorry if I got your hopes up.  The other choices are to send the pristine ball to Cooperstown, or brand it with an asterisk before sending it to Cooperstown.  But last I checked Cooperstown wasn't in space, so fuck those choices.

[Complex Blog]