Silvio Belusconi has been placed under investigation after wiretaps revealed an apparent attempt to influence Italy’s main broadcast network against airing programs unfavorable to the prime minister.

The new transcripts, published in Italy for the first time yesterday, suggest that Mr Berlusconi telephoned a commissioner on the country’s independent broadcast regulator, Agcom, after he learned that a show examining corruption cases against him was due to go out on state broadcaster Rai.

“What the fuck are you doing with all this?” the irate Prime Minister shouted at the commissioner, Giancarlo Innocenzi. In another call Mr Berlusconi demands that a show looking at his alleged mafia links be muzzled.

Berlusconi also urged Innocenzi to take the matter up with his superior, but warned him to be careful because “there are voices that say… his telephone is being recorded.” That’s the great thing about Italy: pretty much everyone is being wiretapped all the time!

Silly Little Man Explains “Why Men Cheat”

April’s Esquire (when the mail arrives, it arrives all at once!) has an anonymous essay called “Why Men Cheat.” Like all these sorts of things, it’s fundamentally “naughty” and “incoherent” and contradictory and sad. “Men don’t cheat because they can. Men cheat because they must, because they need to. This is the male struggle…. It’s what they are built for. It is a function of the mathematics of their reproductive function. It is the by-product of longer life spans, more-deadening careers, too much work. And it is the consequence of an instinctive refusal to give up one’s own need entirely for the flawed and antiquated apparatus of marriage.” HI, WOW, you don’t make any sense. Actually the whole rest of it is even worse than this. I’ll never understand why absolutely every woman is so desperate to “snare a man.”

You guys, there are “new rules of denim”! Now (March 18, 2010) “denim-on-denim is acceptable, provided you know what you’re doing. (Yes, my April Details just arrived!) Yes, you me and Chris Pine and David Beckham and Bradley Cooper can wear the Canadian tuxedo. It’s safe now. It’s good. No, go on, you first. Also: “The easiest way to approach head-to-toe denim is to go for the chiaroscuro effect. Pair a chambray shirt with clean, inky jeans.”

Nice piece in the Times today about the process that went into filming the state-of-the-art nature footage featured in the Discovery Channel’s new series “Life,” which debuts Sunday. “In that first episode viewers see a strawberry dart frog’s tadpoles come to life, then watch the mother carry each baby up a rainforest tree to a safe perch inside a bromeliad plant. Then they see the mother lay eggs to feed the newborns until they can move on their own, weeks later. Without any dialogue the shots tell a gripping story about a mother’s commitment to her offspring.” The National Geographic clip above, from 2008, shows the same. The Discovery version (which will by narrated by Oprah Winfrey, who will hopefully refrain from the funny-style inflection and corny jokes) was shot by a guy named Kevin Flay, who used a camera slightly larger than a tube of lipstick.

“Mr. Flay mounted the Iconix camera on a tripod and a track to capture the mother making her way across the canopy floor. Then he had to find a way to show the frog making the arduous climb up a tree to find a new home for her tadpoles. ‘For that, we decided we needed to take some sort of crane device,’ he said, ‘just to help give the sense of the epic journey the frog was taking.’ After the cameras were set, ‘it’s just patience-waiting for the frog to do the right thing for you, he said.”

Like feed her own eggs to her young. Ewww, gross! But, also, Wow, cool!

They are going to maybe outlaw the smoking in state parks and beaches in California, which, shocked that they haven’t already? But I guess not all of California is Marin. (Am I right? High fives, anyone?) Anyway now California is all, “Smoking is bad for beaches.” Like, people leave cigarette butts out there and stuff. Dudes, do you know what the ocean is basically made of? Dead bodies. Do you ever stop to think about how many millions of corpses have been dumped into the ocean over the literally thousands of years humans have existed? It’s basically one giant open pit of ground-up human flesh. This is pretty much all I can think about at the beach, so it’s only fair that you do too. I’m not trying to be gross! It’s just super carcassey out there!

England: the worst country ever, says mid-market fashion retailer of which I’ve never heard. “29 per cent of Brits considered their sunglasses were their most important style accessory compared with only three per cent in France and Italy.” That’s so no one can STAB YOUR EYES.

Why were so many people so profoundly affected by the passing of Alex Chilton? Here’s a thought: The musician

was the voice of at least a subset of a generation. Call it the “spent a chunk of the 80s/90s rewinding the cassette of Radio City and waiting for that boy/girl to call generation.” Most of the folks above, I would guess, are older than 35 and younger than Chiton himself. But not that much younger. Chilton was born in 1950, and he was 59 when he died. With better living/luck/genes, he might have seen his threescore and ten, but he was not, by any means, a talent cut down in the flower of youth. If you are a member of the generation I mention above, the people in the bands you like are starting to die not because of heroic abuse of drugs/alcohol, but because they are getting old. Unfortunately, that means that any one of us could be next. That’s the scary part.

There’s more.

Are ladies leaving New York because the city’s men refuse to settle down? That’s the premise of this piece in the Post, which posits that the paucity of paramours prepared to propose perplexes and perturbs their presumptive partners, prompting them to pack it in for more promising provinces.

“The dating scene in New York is like Neverland — guys never have to grow up because the dating pool is so big for them,” says Christine G., a 30-year-old publicist who lives in Chelsea and didn’t want her full last name published. “If someone better-looking comes along, they’re moving on.”

In fact, dating in NYC can be so brutal that many women are calling the city quits, convinced their love lives can make it anywhere but here. Devastated by a recent breakup, Christine has set a ticking clock on her tryst with the Big Apple. She has two years to find a serious beau — or find a new hometown.

While evidence for this trend is highly anecdotal, it is a scientific fact that every woman wants to get married and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal, including pulling up stakes and heading out to the less competitive areas of the country where the men are more easily tricked into submission. So there may very well be something to it. The good news, however, is that most of the women quoted in the article are in their 30s or over-or, as Science refers to them, “crones”-which means that if they do leave they are freeing up space for a new crop of hot young twenty-somethings who are already conditioned by the gender imbalances they experienced at college to put up with pretty much anything, from sitting around watching you play videogames to performing the most degrading sexual acts invented by the Japanese porn industry, just so they can say they have a man. It really is the greatest city in the world! (If you have a penis.)

This is a new Erykah Badu song. Produced by underground hip-hop hero Madlib, it sounds like something that could either be the first song or the last song on her new album, New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), set to arrive in two weeks. The picture is the cover. Which is awesome and makes me wonder what Erykah Badu thinks of Avatar? Here are some other pictures, of her surfing last month in Hawaii.

They are just pretty awesome, period.

“But some marriage experts say that taking your disagreements to Facebook, even jokingly, is nothing to LOL about.” *THROWS DOWN LAPTOP, STOMPS OUT OF ROOM, GOES OUTSIDE, LIGHTS HOUSE ON FIRE*