Underneat That, It's All Good

Hey, Friends!


We're moving this party to a bigger and better joint!  Please join the party at 
http://www.looksgreatnaked.com

The move is a really, really good thing.  It’s means I’ve attracted enough followers to justify having my own website.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  (Profuse enough?  Not yet?  I’m getting there . . .)

Here’s where I really need you:  To get a book deal, I must have a kabillion (give or take) followers and a jillion hits to my new site.  Comments – good, bad, or downright evil – are also valuable to me. 

So please.  I’m begging here.  Please visit my site, register, and leave a comment.  And if you really want to keep the party going, subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.

I promise to love you forever and to sign every copy of my book you purchase (ha!).   As a matter of fact, I’ll do pretty much anything for you except babysit your kids.

When in Rome, Do as the Enquirer

Rome was the last stop on our Italy trip.  Sandra, our tour guide, led us to the top of the Palatine Hill, where legend has it the twins Romulus and Remus were kept alive by a she-wolf after being abandoned by their mother.  Romulus later founded the city of Rome on that hill, and excavations have determined that people have lived there since 1000 B.C.

As we reached the top of the hill and looked down at the remains of the Forum on one side and Circus Maximus on the other, Sandra said, “The history of Rome is this:  if you dig, you will find something.”

She meant, of course, that digging in Rome means finding, say, the ruins of an ancient temple or an arch some emperor had constructed and named after himself.  In fact, it’s extremely difficult for Rome to add new subway routes because digging almost always uncovers an ancient ruin that must be preserved.

If you dig, you will find something.  Those words are true about a lot more than just the city of Rome.

Take, for instance, good old John Edwards.  His mistress, Rielle Hunter, was pregnant with his child while he was posing with his wife at Wendy’s and making a big hooha over his 30^th wedding anniversary.   A tabloid dug and, by golly, found something.

(And for the record, I love how Ms. Hunter told Oprah yesterday that she trusts John Edwards.  She’s special, you see.  He would never cheat on her.)

In fact, I'll bet Elizabeth Edwards, Sandra Bullock, Elin Woods, Shawn Southwick (the girl married to Larry King, himself an ancient ruin), and Tiki Barber's wife all wish they'd done some digging before the tabloids did.

Several years ago, my teenage daughter came into my bedroom and told me she’d found evidence her father was cheating on me.  Then she crossed her arms over her chest and, with eyebrows raised, said, “How much more are you going to take?”

See, I already suspected he was cheating.  I just didn’t want to know.  But when your daughter thinks you need to get out, it’s time to do some digging.

So I dug.  And of course I found something.  It wasn't the Arch of Constantine, but I found the email of Niedra and the airline ticket of Delta and the “three new flirts” confirmation of his AdultFriendFinder account.

My advice:  when in a troubled marriage, do as the Romans and dig.

Dollars and (a Lack of) Sense

I try, and I try, but I can't comprehend this one:  basically, while our financial system was melting down, our financial watchdogs were watching porn.


According to reports that came out last week, employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission were, quite literally, playing with themselves while my retirement account was vanishing.  That pisses me off!


Apparently, one senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington was logging 8 hours a day on porn sites while he was at work.  One accountant, a woman, viewed porn sites 1,800 times in two weeks.  Another employee made 16,000 attempts to view blocked sites in one month.


Out of 31 serious alleged offenders, 17 were senior employees who made between $100,000 and $222,000 a year.
Makes Tiger Woods seems like an innocent little pussycat, doesn’t it?  And the comparison begs the question of whether serial cheaters like Tiger and Jesse James are really sex addicts.


I mean, Tiger was at least working 8 hours a day and winning major tournaments while getting his action on the side.  These idiots at the SEC were working full-time with their porn.  It makes one wonder if the people around them didn’t notice that productivity had taken a nosedive.


I love what author Mike Leahy said about the SEC boys (and girl, apparently).   The author of Porn Nation:  Conquering America's #1 Addiction, he candidly said on Good Morning America, “Trust me, these guys are addicts.”   And for those who must know exactly HOW in the name of Hugh Hefner someone could jeopardize a $100,000-a-year job with pictures of things that make some people lose their lunch, click on Leahy's link.  He explains it well.


But really, I'm not so interested in how those folks got to be so addicted to porn.  I’m just wondering if the whole mess could have been avoided if Bernie Madoff and the boys at Goldman Sachs had just been wearing leather chaps and spiked collars while they were screwing with our financial system.


Come to think of it, Bernie's prolly wearing chaps these days.  Punishment for the SEC idiots should be having to turn their retirement funds over to Bernie's investment expertise.


That would give me a little satisfaction.

Next Stop: Sanity!

Positano, Italy, might be the most beautiful place on the planet.  It’s certainly the prettiest place I’ve ever visited, and that’s saying something, given that I’ve been to Paris, Venice, Hawaii, Jamaica, the English countryside, and Columbia, South Carolina.

Or maybe I just have strong feelings for Positano because I almost didn’t live to see it.

I should explain that, accompanying my group was a guy named Rick Steves, the travel guru, in the form of his 8-pound guidebook.  In the section on Positano, Rick encouraged us to take the bus from Sorrento to Positano, and he specifically said to get off at the second Positano stop.

Positano, you see, is built on the side of a mountain.  Its narrow streets wind back and forth down the side of that mountain to its gorgeous beach.  And on the way down to the beach, Rick Steves said, Positano has more women’s designer clothing stores per square foot than any other place on earth. In addition, the Positano sandalmakers create custom-made sandals while you wait.  I had found my mothership.

About thirty minutes after we left Sorrento, the bus stopped, and the driver yelled, “Positano!”  and people started getting off the bus.  Just to be sure we didn’t miss our stop, the SECOND STOP, someone in our group asked the driver.  

“No, no, this is first.  You get off next stop,” he said.

We sat back down and gawked at the view from our bus seats.  And ninety seconds after the first stop, the bus stopped again.  We stood up and got off and watched as the bus pulled away.  A woman who had gotten off with us then said, “Where are you going?  This is my house.  If you want the bus stop, you have to walk down the road.”

Holy hairpin turn, Batman!  We were on a narrow mountain road with a rock wall on one side and a sheer cliff on the other.  The shoulder on each side of the road was a good 18 inches deep.  We began walking single file, hugging the rock wall and cringing as cars whizzed by and the people in them pointed and laughed at the estupido Americanos.

We griped about the bus driver the whole rest of the afternoon.  Why hadn’t he stopped us from getting off when he did the woman a favor and let her out at her house? 

Then again, why hadn’t we thought to look for the bus stop sign and the crowd of folks waiting to board our bus?  

We got off at the wrong stop because of a rigid adherence to a guidebook.  Rather than looking around at the circumstances and thinking for ourselves, we were committed to getting off at the second stop because that’s what Rick Steves said to do.

That was the last day I read the Rick Steves guidebook.  That day in gorgeous Positano, I decided that I’m not going through life any longer with my nose so buried in a guidebook that I miss the view. 

Weighing In on the Pompeii Porn Debate

Mt. Vesuvius blew its top in 79 A.D., spewing molten ash and poisonous sulphuric gas into the air for two days.  Because of the way the wind was blowing, the city of Pompeii was buried in nearly 66 feet of ash and perfectly preserved before it was rediscovered in 1592.  Careful excavation, which began over 200 years ago, has yielded unbelievable insight into what life in Pompeii was like.

The people of Pompeii obviously understood the importance cleanliness played in preserving public health.  The four public baths – two for men and two for women – were available to all citizens. 

The city had an aqueduct that provided fresh water to the public baths, to wealthier private homes and businesses, and to some 25 public street fountains.  Most interesting is that during a drought, the water supply to less essential places could be cut off so that it was directed solely to the public street fountains.

Pompeii also had its nightlife.  The Lupanar is the most famous brothel discovered in the remains of Pompeii, and archaeologists know it was a brothel because of two things: the graffiti scratched into the building’s stone walls and the frescoes above each doorway.  The frescoes served as sort of a menu for clients, who merely had to point to a picture of what they wanted or say something like, “I’d like the number 4 combo, please.”  The name, Lupanar, by the way, means “she-wolves,” and it apparently got the name because the prostitutes stood outside in the evenings howling to prospective customers.

Needless to say, the moral codes of Pompeii were a little looser than what we’re used to.  In fact, the city was full of erotic frescoes, and even many household items had sexual themes, leading some to call it a second “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and pointing to its destruction as God’s judgment on the city’s immorality.  But others argue that the ubiquitous sexual imagery is really religious fertility imagery invoking the blessing of Priapus (pictured above), the god of fertility and protector of male genitalia.

Note the scale in the picture of Priapus and let me know what you think:  religious fertility imagery or porn? 

I just wonder if someone is going to uncover a nude photo of Pamela Anderson 2,000 years from now and ponder the question of whether it’s porn or some religious offering to the Baywatch ocean goddess of saline implants.  

New Things To Do on the Back of a Vespa

Raffaele Esposito was a chef in Naples, Italy, at the end of the 19^th century.  He was asked to create a dish in honor of the Queen consort of Italy, a woman named Margherita.  Different versions of pizza – sauce on flat bread – had been around, oh, since the Neolithic Age.  But Esposito, who wanted to use the colors of the Italian flag (red, white, and green) garnished his bread with tomatoes and basil and brilliantly added cheese.  He named it Pizza Margherita.

Cheese makes everything better, doesn’t it?

So Naples, Italy, is the birthplace of pizza as we know and love it.  Ten minutes after we got off the train in Naples, we were in a car headed to Pizzeria da Michele, purportedly the best pizza place in the place that invented pizza.

The line was out the door.  Michele had a 45-minute wait, and we had a tour of the ruins of Pompeii in one hour.  We asked our driver, Franco, if Michele had carryout.

“Si, si,” he nodded.   He elbowed his way through the crowd and ten minutes later came out carrying six large pizzas (a bargain at less than $6 each).

We were on the sidewalk of a crowded city street.   Cars and scooters were randomly parked up and down the street, three cars deep in some places.  Franco set the pizza boxes down on the back of a Vespa, and we inhaled those pizzas while standing around that bike.

Yes, it was delicious.  And yes, it would have been worth the 45-minute wait. 

And yes, we wiped the wayward sauce off the stranger’s Vespa before we climbed back into our cars and headed to the ancient city of Pompeii. 

A New Appreciation for Mondays

After only 1 ½ days in the world’s most romantic city, our tour guide, Vania, a native of Venice, met us at our hotel and guided us, suitcases in tow, through the narrow cobblestone streets of Venice, over two bridges, and through two campos to a waiting water taxi, which took us to the Venice train station. 

At the train station, Nathan’s lovely wife pulled the group train ticket out of her packet of travel documents and confirmed that we had 45 minutes until our train, the #10 to Florence, departed. 

Thirty-five minutes later, Nathan’s lovely wife had every person in the group searching their bags for our ticket.  After I searched my bag, I sat down on my suitcase in the middle of the train station and began playing iPhone solitaire. 

Five minutes after that, a panicked Vania went to the train office with a photocopy of our ticket and begged on our behalf for mercy.  She came back sadly shaking her head.  I could tell she was worried about having to take care of the stupid Americans for another day.

That was when a conductor for the #10 train, seeing the looks of dismay on our faces, approached us.  “Did you lose a ticket?” he asked.

“Si, si!”  we all yelled in unison.

He held up our ticket.  Apparently, someone had found our ticket on the ground and turned it in.  I turned to the relieved Vania and said, “You’ll have a good story to tell at dinner tonight.”

She smiled for the first time all morning.

If Venice is the world’s most romantic city, Florence has to be the most artistically inspired city on the planet.   It’s the birthplace or chosen home of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Dante, Botticelli, and Galileo. 

And for those impressed by art that's a little more modern (not to mention the architecture of today’s high heels), Florence is the birthplace of the great fashion designers Roberto Cavalli, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Guccio Gucci.

It’s most famous resident, though, is a 17-foot marble statue named David. 

David’s story is interesting.  He was commissioned to a sculptor named Agostino in 1464, who hacked away at the legs for a year or so before losing the commission in 1466 when his master, Donatello, died.

A guy named Rossellino took over the job but quickly lost the contract.  The hunk of marble lay neglected and exposed to the elements for 25 years before a young Michelangelo thought he saw something in the miserable piece of marble and beat out Leonardo da Vinci for the job of completing David.

He got the commission on August 16, 1501.  And then the 26-year-old got up and started the job on a Monday morning.  

Michelangelo famously worked under the premise that David – now the standard of artistic perfection -- was in the stone all along.  The rough edges just had to be chipped away.  It’s a metaphor for us all, I think.

And isn’t it great to know that inspiration is possible on a Monday?