January 4, 2002

Ever Hear of "Working Late"?

They say if you're gonna lie, you should lie big. Yeah well, that may be true, but there's a corollary, and it's that if you're going to lie big, you should try not to be a complete idiot about it.

We're speaking, of course, of the Lyin' Dutchman, a sixty-year-old Rotterdam man who let loose a fiction of Nixonian proportions on Christmas Eve when he called his wife from his mobile phone and announced that he'd been abducted. Alas, the old man had not been kidnapped — rather, he was engaged in a holiday tryst with the other lady in his life, his faithful mistress. "The man had decided to spend Christmas in the company of his ladyfriend instead of with his wife," read a Rotterdam police statement, "and thought up a ruse that was appreciated neither by his spouse nor by the police." And that's where the story gets sticky for the old guy. According to the Reuters report, the fabricating philanderer's phony phone call resulted in more than a dozen extra cops being dragged away from their mistresses — uh, families — on Christmas Day, though it didn't take long for them to find the Dutch Bastard. Now, according to a police spokesman, the cops are planning to file a civil claim against the man for making a false statement and wasting police time, and they're considering criminal proceedings. And we don't even want to think about what's in his stocking back home . . .

Chapter Eight: You'll Go Blind

Oh sure, you ask your older brother about sex, you have to expect some misinformation. Ask the kids on the playground and you'll get an earful of vagaries, evasions, and outright lies. But the Kama Sutra? They gonna tell us the Kama Sutra's wrong now?

Well, yeah, apparently so. According to one historian quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, the widely accepted translation of the ancient text is littered with mistakes, including one significant mistranslation regarding the G-spot. Says Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago, "There are lots of little errors that really start to add up" in the translation of the nearly 2,000-year-old Sanskrit text. "You start to get a number of misunderstandings." For instance, Doniger says that the original translation, performed by English scholar Richard Burton way back in the 1880s, vaguely mentions the G-spot as the part of the woman's body that should be touched while making love — specifically, the part "on which she turns her eyes." (What's that, her forehead?) The correct translation, according to the professor, says that "when a man is inside a woman and touches her and when her eyes roll around, he should touch her more in that place." (Uh, yeah.) Doniger plans to publish a new translation of the sex manual in May. Misinformed teens rejoice!

Searching for Bobby Flasher

There are some activities that just seem to lend themselves to nudity, activities which, for lack of a better description, almost demand that the participant strip naked from head to toe. Sunbathing, for example, and of course, sex. And, um, sunbathing. Anything else? Oh yeah — driving and chess.

Well alright, maybe you don't think of those last two as big naked activities, but Dave Wolz does. He's the forty-seven-year old Midwesterner who sent an e-mail to the Des Moines Register last week trumpeting the completion of his 2001 project: namely, to drive 15,000 miles during the course of the year completely naked. According to the paper, Wolz says he motored in the buff all year long, racking up the big miles during several trips to Midwestern chess tournaments. The hairy Kasparov says he accomplished his journey with minimal harassment, though he was pulled over a few times after passing motorists reported him to police. Each time, though, he managed to get his shorts on before being stopped, and Wolz says one deputy who pulled him over was "not at all distressed and was amused when I told him of my goal." If so, then 2002 should get plenty more amusing: Wolz says he plans on clocking 20,000 miles on the remarkably open road in the new year. "I may decide to rent a car to do it, though." Which may make you think twice before you rent a car in 2003.

Quotes of the Week

"He was very, very happy, and only disappointed that it was over so quickly."