News about sexually frustrated people in funny glasses

I believe today’s the day the June issue of Playboy hits the stands with its 3D centerfold.

This latest frontier in wanking technology is all very exciting, but I suspect it’s just a temporary distraction from the bigger problem, a glitter pastie on a Sumo wrestler.

Playboy isn’t what it used to be. Or, rather, it is exactly what it used to be. Playboy was hardly the first girlie- or even pornographic magazine. What Playboy did to shake up the culture was to put the girlies into a glossy, high-end book – a tart in a business suit, if you were looking to replace the image from the previous metaphor – and give it a certain legitimacy, even prestige. Hugh Hefner didn’t give us the naked lady. He gave us the phrase “I read it for the articles.”

The magazine doesn’t appear to have weathered technology nearly as well as it conquered the existence of imagination and actual women. In either form, porn is more common than the former and much more convenient than the latter. Technology isn’t the issue. Technology isn’t even close.

The home theater and the Internet didn’t improve on the image quality of a glossy magazine page. I somehow doubt that amateurdiscountmilfsonparade.com improves on the beauty of the models Playboy hires. I suspect what Playboy is up against is convenience and immediacy for starters – no more trying to sustain the mood while you run to the Walgreen’s magazine rack – but, even more against its old nemesis, imagination. Pretty as they are, the bunnies just sit there. And ultimately, Playboy suffers from the very shamelessness the magazine helped to foster.

Nobody feels the need anymore to say, “I only read it for the articles.”

Me, I always enjoyed it for the cartoons. And the day they bring back those Buck Brown cartoons with the naughty, saggy-boobed granny in 3-D, I’ll be the first in line at Walgreen’s.

Classic case of metaphor overload

Every spring I declare my overwhelming preference for the one-day classic bike races in northern France, Belgium and Holland over the grand tours in Italy, France and Spain, and then the Classics are over and the Giro d'Italia begins and I can't pull my attention away from that, either. Not that it matters. Both are so far out of my league that having a preference for one over the other is like a pimply 17-year-old announcing his preference for Kristen Bell over Christina Hendricks.

But to carry the comparison perhaps (no, assuredly) too far, like the pimply teen-ager and his dream-girl choices, I'm happy with whatever cycling I can get. And like the pimply teen-ager's father, I can climb that little hill by the river while I imagine it's the Mur de Grammont.

Truth is, I like following, fantasizing about and emulating both types of racing. And me being me, I carry both out to a broader perspective. Beyond riding, beyond racing, beyond Esquire Magazines Women We Love feature, all the way to life in general. Sometimes life is a one-day, do-or-die, winner-take-all affair. Other stretches require a little more pacing and strategizing. And really, in either style of racing, there are going to be stretches where it's ridiculously difficult, and if you fall behind you might not ever catch up.

So maybe the big difference between classics and stage racing is how long you have to suffer after you screw up. Great. Life itself is even longer. It lasts the rest of your life.

I'd better get back to it.

The opposite of regret

I don't have many regrets. Not because I haven't done anything dumb - far from that. But regrets by definition involve looking backward, and my attention span is so bad that it's all I can do to scan the future.

But I do have a few (we will pause while my wife and anyone who shares her trademark attention-span issues breaks into a few bars of Frank Sinatra), and one of them is being lifted today.

The Grand Rapids Press is starting to run Frazz today. The Press is probably the paper I most identify as "my" paper. My parents subscribed to it while I was growing up, and it was a really good paper. It's the paper that made me want to draw for newspapers. And while it's not the first paper I did draw pictures for - that would be the Big Rapids Pioneer, one of the other papers I consider "mine" - it's the first one I drew for to make an actual facsimile of a living. I left college - nursing school - to work for them as a full-time freelancer, a move that could easily have turned out to be a regret but turned out quite well.

Things didn't go well with the editor there.

Now, just so you know, that's as harshly as I'm going to badmouth the editor. Sorry. That sort of thing is entertaining, but about as long-term healthy and satisfying as half an orange marshmallow circus peanut. This is about my regrets. If he has any, he can write them in his own blog.

Actually, it was worse than that. Things did go well, and then they didn't, which I'm sure gave it the taste of betrayal. It also gave me the knowledge that he did, indeed, have a sense of humor, the confidence to try to patch things up with humor, and the hubris to try to match his style of humor. That third one, I think, was the one that did it. He seemed to prefer a certain kind of elbow-in-the-ribs type of teasing, but apparently it was more fun in outgoing form. Or maybe I was just that ham-fisted. I nudged -- elbowed -- him and his paper in an episode of the strip, which, to my knowledge, remains the one and only cameo that didn't make everybody involved happy, and boom. Not only did I anger someone I was trying to patch things up with, but I did so with someone powerful enough to ban my strip from "my" paper. Regret.

The sick thing is, it worked well for me. When you're starting a comic strip, you don't quit your day job for a while. The money comes in slowly, and most strips fail. So I worked a lot of long, long weeks in a row with no break. I did a lot of drawing tired. Really tired. Tired enough to affect intrapersonal-relationships judgment, we've learned. Tired enough to feel really wronged by the outcome - and mad enough to make sure I did everything right from there on in, because the only way I was going to make sure he didn't have the satisfaction of thinking he contributed to my downfall was not to fall down. That anger fueled me through a lot of late work nights.

I'm still here. He's not there. The new editor is superb. I've known him almost as long as that first editor and known of him even longer, and I have thought the world of him the whole time. I still do, and he's brought Frazz into yet another one of his papers. This is the opposite of regret, but not the opposite of motivation. If there's one thing you want to do more than make your enemies look dumb, it's make sure your allies look brilliant.

So, yeah. I sure hope the first Frazz that happens to run in his paper isn't a juvenile bathroom joke or anything …