Aug
29
by Michael WinshipMonday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. The GOP always seems to purge its leadership ranks on Mondays — just when I’m sweating the deadline for this column, so I have to start all over. I swear, it’s the work of that vast right wing conspiracy. Go pick on somebody your own size, dammit.
The Tom DeLay resignation story broke late on a Monday night. Karl Rove resigned on a Monday. And now, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
What’s more, I’m out of town on business in Chicago, staying in a lovely hotel but the designers went for the sixties retro look. I think the interior decorator was Our Man Flint. And techno pounds out of the elevator speakers until my head comes to a point.
But I digress. For those of us old enough to remember, the increasing thud of falling White House personnel is reminiscent of those halcyon days when Richard Nixon was announcing on a regular basis the departures of soon-to-be-indicted members of his administration: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, Colson; augmented by the slaughter of the innocent: Richardson, Ruckelshaus, Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre.
In the Bush White House, the resignations trickle in; Nixon often did it with a Grand Guignol flair, multiple head choppings with a single swing of the blade, desperate to save his own noggin. Like Macbeth, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Except in the case of FBI Director L. Patrick Grey, who Ehrlichman infamously told Nixon to leave “twisting slowly in the wind.”
God, I miss those guys.
Aug
7
Sex and the Silly Season
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by Michael Winship
As anyone who has ever read Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books knows, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is, “How many roads must a man walk down?”
The answer, calculated over 7.5 million years by a computer called Deep Thought is, simply, 42.
Now, researchers at the University of Texas have announced the number of reasons people have sex.
237.
No more, no less.
Beyond pleasure, romantic passion, procreation, material gain and revenge, they include, “It seemed like good exercise,” “I was bored,” “The person was a good dancer,” and “I wanted to feel closer to God.”
Word of this research came last week as the media slid into what is commonly known as “silly season,” those final weeks of summer when the news cycle slows to a creep, much of the press is on vacation and editors look for the story that writes itself: whether sex surveys, shark attacks, the face of the Blessed Mother in a wedge of iceberg lettuce or Lindsay Lohan touring as the demoiselle of detox du jour.
I have no need to wallow in such journalistic jejunity. For one, when it comes to observing vital sex research, no matter the time of year, a very special silly season plays itself out under the windows of my West Village apartment in Manhattan every day.