Bad news, potheads: Your drug of choice is making your wang as lazy and useless as the hippies who extol the virtues of different strains of bud. “[A] new review of research on marijuana and sexual health suggests that male smokers could be courting sexual dysfunction… recent research — including the finding that the penis contains receptors for marijuana’s active ingredient — suggests that young men may want to think about long-term effects before rolling a joint, [study researcher Rany] Shamloul told LiveScience. ‘It’s a strong message to our younger generations and younger men.’” There is also the suggestion that men who claimed marijuana helped them to do sex longer “may just have been experiencing the drug’s altering effects on the perception of time.”

About ten days ago, I found myself thinking, Hey, here it is February and I haven’t yet gotten sick this winter. Of course, even just thinking this was as good as eating a double-scoop ice-cream cone where the ice-cream was replaced by germs. Or having a large, germ-covered housefly fly straight down my throat and directly into my lungs and buzz around in there splotching its hairy, germ-covered body repeatedly against my vulnerable alveoli. Or going outside soon after a shower, while my hair was still wet, having forgotten a hat, and walking fifteen blocks in twenty-degree weather. That last one is what I did, the very next day.

That night, I had a sore throat. The next day, I had a cold. Nothing major. Nothing life-threatening. (I hope.) I’ve been taking Theraflu at night so I can get the same fitful five hours of sleep that I regularly do. And I’ve been able to get a little bit of work done and still make it to my kid’s school to pick him up ten minutes after I was supposed to have everyday like usual. But lots of phlegm, sinus pressure and some coughing — and the sore throat has stuck around. By the looks of things, ten days into it, with no signs of abating, this is the cold I will ride out the winter on.

Coincidentally, I’ve been listening to Jonathan Richman’s first album, The Modern Lovers, and it’s been making me feel better. I hadn’t listened to it in years, and, man, it’s so totally great. Has anyone ever sung better with a stuffed-up nose?

“We’re guessing that Em’s pre-show style ritual breaks down like this: Five minutes before rolling out the door, he a) looks in his massive closet filled with free hoodies, Starter sweat pants and Hanes white tees, b) does a quick smell check on his first choice, and c) says fuck it, and wears whatever he already has on.”
 — Yeah. Except when he wore the “Free Yayo” t-shirt. That was obviously carefully thought out.

by Bethlehem Shoals and Pasha Malla

Bethlehem Shoals: About an hour ago, you told me that “I feel like Blake Griffin is ruining my enjoyment of the NBA the same way pornography ruins sex.” Care to elaborate on that?

Pasha Malla: Well, I don’t think that’s entirely true about pornography, and I was mostly kidding, and I’m wary of sports/porn allegories… But, okay. I mostly keep up with the NBA through highlights online. And all I want to see anymore are the money-shots of Blake Griffin dunks. As pure spectacle, he’s come to supersede everything else in the league.

BS: I agree that using sex as a way to, well “sex up” or dude-ify the fan experience is dumb, if inevitable. As a cultural reference, I don’t think porn can ever be trotted out as anything other than camp. But on the web, highlights and porn are consumed in similar ways: as an aggregate of quick-hit, pleasure-center clips, with the goal of finding that one, superlative moment. Griffin is the next step: because he’s always “on”, the excerpt becomes incomplete. I will go ahead here and compare him to the rise of free, forty-minute streaming web porn.

PM: I used to be invested in the completeness of players, but with Griffin I don’t care. I just want to watch him throw down. There’s a thrilling sort of violence to the way he attacks the rim: he’s a “monster,” he “crushes,” he’s “nasty,” etc. I mean, though I trotted out the comparison as a half-joke, the way he’s talked about does feel pornographic — and, sometimes, as was the case with Timofey Mozgov, it isn’t much of a stretch to think about Blake’s opponents as his “facialized” co-stars.

BS: You’re really missing out. Watching Blake Griffin, you can spend two hours in the presence of non-stop basketball porn. Just like, if you felt like it, you could spend your entire day streaming endless hardcore. Previously, that took effort, curation, even a little imagination. Now we can just watch the porn float by like it’s scenery. There’s still preference involved, but instead of searching frantically for exactly what (or who) you want, there’s this deadening tendency toward “down for whatever, by whoever”.

Even the star is defined as much by actions — or in the case of Griffin and porn, great feats — as swagger or aura. Existence precedes essence. Fuck yeah. Also, the barrier separating reality from between discontinuous, or specialized, fantasy, falls away. Porn is the new real; Blake Griffin is … wait, were we talking about basketball, right? It did just occur to me that LeBron James is a lot like the Kinsey Report.

PM: This sort of conversation always starts to descend into self-parody at some point. It’s like going through Jekyll & Hyde giggling at all the surreptitious back-door entrances — it quickly becomes juvenile and more or less misses the point. I mean, sure, there’s something sexual and porny and sorta gay about watching video of a guy dunking on another guy, nevermind celebrating the emasculation and humiliation of it. But pointing out the homoeroticism of sports isn’t exactly a revelation.

That said, when people (i.e. a certain contingent among fans) do talk about this sort of thing, it’s usually in mocking, ironic terms that distance ourselves as participants. Like: “these hyper-macho-men don’t know how gay they are!” (There’s obviously something homophobic in that, too — using “gayness” as a term of ridicule.) I’m more interested in how fans, as audience, engage with sports’ homoeroticism. And I don’t mean that as some strategy for straight men to confront something gay and somehow sinister about ourselves, but more that it’s worth thinking about as an element of spectatorship — straight or queer, men or women, whoever. Is watching Blake Griffin the same as watching gay porn? No. Is it in some way bearing witness to a sexualized performance — of course.

BS: I don’t think straight men necessarily identify with the victim of the dunk. Also, despite being told the opposite by someone who works in the industry, I don’t think that the holy grail of porn is something approaching violated (interestingly, “violated” is part of basketball slang). Everybody knows that if you’re pitching, not catching, it’s not gay — it’s practical necessity or out-manning someone. It’s more like men who can only get off on porn if there’s a dick they can relate to (or suppose to relate to) in it. I know you don’t want to get too Freudian or whatever, but I do think it’s worth discussing gender and spectacle, and what this does to out notions of passive and active participants.

There’s a reason why the women are paid so much more than the men in porn: they’re the performers. No one ever said to Timofey Mozgov, “Hey, I’m a big fan of the way you took that flying crotch in your face”. So, by that logic, the breakaway dunk is totally a woman masturbating, and the two-man break is girl-on-girl porn. I am on fire! SEX FIRE. Actually, it really might be more like atrocity porn than anything else. That or a guy running around with a hard-on and a cell phone yelling about his sex life.

PM: Coaches are the directors. Trainers are the fluffers. Earl Boykins is a midget. Cheerleaders are cheerleaders — you’re right, it’s just simple math. The NBA: Where Interracial Happens.

BS: My wife just left. I think we may have to break for a second so I can go jerk myself raw.

PM: I’ve been balls-deep in a Fleshlight this entire time.

BS: Is this the part where we talk about how America likes to endow black men with hyper-masculinity while feminizing them in ways that keep them from being truly threatening? Isn’t that why the internet likes to argue endlessly over whether or not the game’s best players are, in fact, clutch? What is Wages of Win, if not a way of explaining that he likes porn but still likes his wife better?

PM: I think I get you: in order to become truly legendary NBA players have to be not just showmen, but winners. Maybe. That certainly used to be true, but I think YouTube is changing how sports are documented and remembered. Legacy is becoming less a product of championship narratives (an official history written by/about the victors) than it is decided by fans, in terms of spectacle — history written by fetishists? A people’s history of whoever swung their sword the awesomest, anyway.

BS: The NBA has supposedly been dying for years, even before the highlight rose to prominence. Now, players who perform “like a video game”, like Griffin or Derrick Rose, are celebrated. They’re certainly not subversive, in terms of the league’s image. We can talk about porn as more objectifying than ever. But, at the same time, porn stars are all over social media. They make YouTube of themselves hanging out, fully clothed. The acts themselves dehumanize like never before, but externally, personality has become a commodity. Porn has succeeded in making itself less real than ever, but at the same time, the mundane is being infected with porn. Maybe Blake Griffin is proof that, like quadruple penetration of someone whose kitchen we know all about, fighting a war on two fronts is the best way to unite a people.

PM: Totally. The internet has brought something private into public conversations, though oftentimes writers seem to be trying to define an evolving meme and end up grasping at specious conclusions. In that spirit: porn is ruining straight couples’ sex lives but making men cuddle their wives more, as Blake Griffin’s dunks are making me love basketball again.

Bethlehem Shoals is a founding member of FreeDarko.com, whose Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History was published by Bloomsbury, USA in November.

Pasha Malla is the author of two books and a contributor to FreeDarko’s Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History.

“Ghostface: But anyway bein that Imma 10304 nigga to the heart n was raised in Stapleton where basically niggas aint really up on global politics n shit of that types of evolutions nahmeans…what the god pretty sure niggas all over is thinkin is basically like…word….ayo how it feel to like run shit all over the map nahmean? Word yo cos niggas be holdin down they squares namsayin. N yo it’s like every nigga motivation to accumulate more corners n shit so that they square get bigger n shit namsayin to the point where they holdin down major spots n they ain’t even have to work that spot theyselves no more n put theyselves in harms way like that nahmean. They got little niggas puttin in they work while they sittin in the v.i.p. sections up at the Marquee or Nobu wit they broads n shit namsayin. But they still able to rock they fly gears n buy they moms new stoves n fridges n shit nahmean.
Obama: I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand the question. Could you…”
 — This is not, in fact, an actual interview with president Obama conducted by Ghostface Killah. But whoever writes the material on Big Ghost Chronicles has an acute ear for Wu-speak and a very good sense of humor.

Pull apart the word “Menudo,” it’s like a little NAMBLA pop-up word.less than a minute ago via web

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

If you have ever performed “celebrity interviews,” and of course you have, because it is the number one form of income in these here United States, you will know that mostly it is terrible and no one wants to say anything and it’s all awkward. And then there are the Craig Bierkos of the world. In a lunch interview a few years ago, at some point I was like, listen, you’re extraordinarily hot and incredibly amusing and wildly intelligent, but it’s like hour three and I wasn’t planning on quitting smoking today, so I’m just gonna go now? Fortunately he took to Twitter not long ago, so now he is accessible all the time. One thing you could do is make an animated gif of him with his mouth moving, and then you could pretend his Tweets were talking to you. And also you could dress that gif up in little fun outfits. It’s your digital Craig Bierko boyfriend! So this is why he is the only “famous person” to follow on Twitter basically.

I firmly believe that A) @SarahPalinUSA affixed the “USA” onto her twitter name out of patriotism and B) I am Barbara Eden.Mon Feb 07 02:07:55 via TweetDeck

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

He tends to spend a lot of time interacting with total randoms, which is kind of awesome!

Ryan, I’d be hard pressed to recall a time I WASN’T winning an MTV award. @RyanPom Have you ever won an MTV award?Sat Feb 05 05:03:40 via web

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

No, we get in the van and come to you. Sometimes we’re pretty drunk when we show up. “@murraymaker: Is Unhitched out on DVD?”Sun Jan 30 17:20:23 via Twitter for iPad

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

Also apparently he wants a job.

DON’T ask @rosannecash 2 record your “Replace Regis w/ @MrCraigBierko” CAMPAIGN ANTHEM! GORGEOUS GENIUSES r 2 BUSY 2 write FREE anthems!Thu Jan 27 20:59:51 via Twitter for iPhone

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

Right? @OldChapleBack someone give @MrCraigBierko a fucking job already. His twitter is goddamn depressing.Wed Jan 26 00:22:51 via web

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

Also is never afraid to make Jew jokes.

Jewish Twitter Fight! Fuck You! How’s your mother?!! “@Fred_Stoller:
Cool, this is my first famous twitter fight! Fuck you too!”Thu Jan 27 20:13:34 via Twitter for iPhone

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

And the like.

Hard to believe it’s nearly White History Eleven Months again! #blackhistorymonthTue Feb 01 07:47:17 via web

Craig Bierko
MrCraigBierko

Previously:

Joe MacLeod

Britt Julious

Wears the Trousers

DCJourno

Kate Riley

Roger Clark

Emma Gilbey Keller

Sorry, fake smokers, you can’t use your fake cigarettes on airplanes. Suffer like the rest of us!

I guess this is a good transitional place??? Eek: “President Mubarak has gone and the army has been entrusted with the republic, it has just been announced.” This is an amazing thing. Just (“just”) 18 days of protests! And now the really complicated stuff begins.

We always love renderings of things that are allegedly going to be built, particularly those things that probably won’t, as happens in these cases. We don’t think you should hold your breath for “BOOM,” which is a proposed development in Southern California for community living for the gay “retiring” population. (And before we enjoy the fun architect porn, may I somberly and joylessly point out that there are huge, monster, enormous issues facing the gays, particularly those between 35 and 55? The next generation will likely have family structures not dissimilar to straight people to assist in aging issues; the previous generation often just died in silence, particularly prematurely. But what becomes of us current childless gays in our coming golden years — particularly the un-rich ones? Not that this is something that keeps me up at night every night or anything.) So this planned community idea is a “$250 million love child of BOOM Communities, Inc., a Los Angeles-based real estate investment company,” which has no public-facing information. (Development projects are so annoying: sure we’ll talk about the potential architects, and the competition: but, like, whose money is it?) Here is a very comprehensive look at the architecture and marketing challenges, and here you may enjoy renderings by all ten architects that have submitted, including some of our faves like LOT-EK.

Apparently, there has been a debate raging within insectology circles for 44 years as to whether fleas jump with their feet or their knees. It’s their feet, it turns out. (Or, “tarsi,” as opposed to the “trochantera” knee joints). I’m glad that’s solved. And it was also interesting to learn about resilin, the super-springy protein fleas have that allows them to leap distances more than 200 times their own body-length. But most of all, I just think it’s incredible to watch them do their thing in hi-tech, high-speed, close-up video.