When I was a contributing editor for the National Lampoon in its early years, we did a pornography issue with the heading: Pornography: Threat or menace?

It’s in that spirit that I now wonder about Joe Biden, who seems on the path to becoming our next vice-President. Never much of a fan of his, I now have to ask, “Joe Biden: Dumb or stupid?”

Whatever could have possessed the Senate’s top tongue recently to announce — twice, in two different cities — that in the first six months of an Obama presidency, foreign governments will try to test this young president much like they tested JFK?

Comments(0)

Mr. Blackwell: Dressed In Peace

Mr. Blackwell, who yearly created a worst-dressed list of celebrity women and sometimes men, has died from complications of an intestinal infection at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Blackwell’s acerbic criticisms of celebrity fashion spared no one. Madonna was “The Bare-Bottomed Bore of Babylon,” Meryl Streep “Looked like a gypsy abandoned by a caravan” and Patti Davis packed “all the glamour of an old, worn-out sneaker.”

Most of the on-duty hospital personnel agreed that Blackwell’s infection was ironically one of the ten worst they had ever seen, a gastric gaffe of the first order. One doctor described the infection as a “haggard harlot in a harem of viral wannabes.” Another doctor said he had seen “better fungi at a faux pas fecal festival.” A nurse at the scene who requested anonymity said that “Blackwell’s infection was pathetically pathogenically challenged. It looked like gangrene with gummy bears.”

Comments(0)

While surfing the web recently I came across a 2004 story which reported that in Montreal, there had been a decrease in the prevalence of drug resistance in HIV-1 transmitters among men who have sex with men.

Any positive report about this terrible disease is a welcome oasis in the desert of bad news about AIDS, but in reading further, a similar decrease had not occurred among men having sex with men in other parts of Canada, specifically Ontario and Vancouver.

Scientists must be puzzled by the Montreal phenomenon. Why should that city, with a sizable, active gay population and its fair share of needle junkies, have escaped an increase in AIDS cases among their sexually active men?

Comments(2)