I dropped my nephew off at the condom distributing table of his high school the other morning. Business was brisk, as you can imagine whenever the potent combination of sex and freebies is offered to a teenager.

This?

Or This?

The condom distributing table is — no sacrilege intended — a godsend for adolescents like my nephew. He’s easily embarrassed when he tries to get a condom the old fashioned way– from a pharmacist. He even blushes when he tries to buy them anonymously from a dispenser.

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I took some time off from a script deadline to watch a repeat of a Law and Order I hadn’t seen — yes, there are some left — and it got me thinking about masculinity. So before I got back to work, I wanted to put those thoughts into some order.

The story was about the accidental death of a participant in an informally scheduled, lunch hour, fight club type event in a New York park, which later led to a revenge “rumble” between friends of the dead man and the “murderer’s” co-workers, which led to three more deaths and twelve injuries.

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Christmas Tree

Well, it’s that time of year again, when the annual battle between secularists and religionists is again engaged, though not as virulently as in the past. However, the question still remains: Will we be having a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday?

Last year, here in Durham, neighbor to the liberal hotbed of Chapel Hill, the “Christmas” trees that once graced the lobbies of the Wilson and Davis libraries at UNC’s Chapel Hill campus during December are now being kept in storage. You can ask a custodian to let you in to take a look at them if you want.

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Just saw again James Marsh’s wonderful documentary Man On Wire, about Phillipe Petit’s extraordinary wirewalk thirty-four years ago between the two rooftops of the now destroyed twin towers of the World Trade Center. Petit, France’s busking performer/provacateur, had been obsessed by the towers from the moment he read that they would be built. The film details the meticulous and sometimes haphazard preparations leading up to Petit’s jaunty trek on August 7th, 1974.

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I had an eye-popping experience at Durham’s Teen Fest performance at NCC’s B.N. Duke Auditorium this past Saturday deserves a bit more.

Teen Fest presented a talent show for and by teenagers committed to fighting drugs, alcohol, abuse and gang violence among their peers. I got the heads-up from a John McCann column in the Herald-Sun, along with the notice that a long ago friend and colleague, Clifton Davis, of Amen fame was to be one of the judges. So I went.

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I didn’t see the Joachim Phoenix appearance until the videos the next day and I was as mystified by it as everyone else.

At first I thought it was a hoax, contrived by Phoenix and Letterman — talk show Dadaism — and found myself laughing at its absurdity. My partner, Norman Stiles, and I had written a number of such spoofs for the celebrities who guested nightly on America 2Night when we were head writers there. The Phoenix thing just smacked of comedy and that thought was uppermost in my mind.

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With the swearing in of Obama as President and an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, we can look forward to an accelerated dash to green living. As the great comedian Jimmy Durante famously said, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”

Companies that make everything from diapers to cars won’t be able to crank out Green stuff fast enough, giving consumers yet another thing to consider besides price, ingredients, reliability, durability and do-we-have-a-coupon-for-it. Now, more than ever, consumers will be asked to decide between a product that can save the planet or one that will do it harm and possibly tilt it off its axis.

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In the noisy and bitter aftermath of Proposition 8’s failure in California, national protests by gay and straight groups are sweeping the country. Today is Day Without A Gay Day and gays are being encouraged to call in sick and donate the time to help in the battle for gay marriage.

Their efforts might gain even more traction if the issue were exclusively political. But it isn’t. The gay marriage issue isn’t really about marriage, it’s about homosexuality which, like abortion, is viewed by Christians as a moral issue and not a political one.

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Deadly Obstretician

From Senator Obama: “Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t’ want them punished …. With an STD.”

That’s punished with a baby, conception as a mistake.

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Rutgers Brian Leonard in a drill

I’m trying to step off the emotional cloud of my Giants’ indescribably glorious Super Bowl win and get back to reality. Euphoria is a great place to live, but life is an insistent creature that wants to move on and has a way of kicking you in the jujubes if you don’t. Wearing a cup won’t help, so I’ll start making the transition.

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