Porn, Porn, It’s Good For Your…

More on that porn study we mentioned the other day: “According to his research, said [University of Montreal Professor Simon Louis] Lajeunesse, men search out pornography that relates to their earliest sexual fantasies, generally conceived at age 12 at the onset of puberty. They are not looking for new tricks to show off…. Lajeunesse also dismissed suggestions that avid pornography enthusiasts seek to imitate in life what they see on screens, or that they watch X-rated videos in an attempt to purge vile sexual impulses. ‘Both arguments are worthless,’ he said. Men make a distinction between their real lives and sexual fantasies, he argued.” So maybe it’s the women who are pushing all the facials you hear about these days.

“There’s a real void in the marketplace since Columbia Record club is no longer active, so we’re hoping to hire a staff of tens of thousands to call our valuable membership over and over again and harass them until they cry.” Good. Beastie Boy Adam Yauch seems to be recovering well from cancer. He’s starting a subscription service for DVDs of the movies he produces through his company Oscilloscope Laboratories. And making funny jokes. There is a also a funny Columbia Record club joke running through the Coen brothers’ recent movie, A Serious Man. Which really is a pretty great movie, despite the fact that some Jews say the Jewish Coen brothers don’t understand Jews. I think the Jews who say that are wrong. In fact, A Serious Man has in it the most accurate depiction of how it feels to be a Jew who is thirteen-years-old and being Bar Mitzvahed in front of a large congregation of other Jews in a Jewish synagogue that I have ever seen in any movie. I’d bet the Jewish Adam Yauch would agree.

I was walking to the Awl offices this morning and I got all the exercise I need for a month, according to a city Health Department study. SUCK IT, medical professionals who worry about my triglycerides! I am fit as a fucking fiddle! I will NEVER DIE! I can take cabs for the rest of December and still make it through the end of the Nads in one piece! I AM IMMORTAL and all it took was one lousy walk. God, I love this town.

“An article on Nov. 13 about Sean Bedford, the Georgia Tech offensive lineman who is also an aerospace engineering major, misstated the terms that David Scarborough, a senior research engineer, used in teaching the jet and rocket propulsion class. The terms were ‘isentropic flow,’ ‘stagnation states’ and ‘adiabatic efficiency for the diffuser’ — not ‘isotropic stagnation state’ and ‘idiomatic deficiency for diffuser.’”

Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter was born December 4, 1969 weighing in at 10 pounds, 8 ounces. He was the last of Gloria Carter’s four children, the only one who didn’t give her any pain when she gave birth to him. That’s how she knew he was a special child.

“I was recently treated to an early prototype of a dessert that Marina Abramović, the ‘grandmother of performance art,’ created with the pastry chef Dominique Ansel.” –James Franco, in the Wall Street Journal.

“Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point — not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews — have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States,” says Sarah Palin. Not that she doesn’t think it’s a “fair question.”

Hello, New York Times most-emailed list on the iPhone this morning! Why Gail Collins, you naughty feminist! It’s just like I always said-sooner or later, technology will demean us all.

And then things took a TURN.

Says our correspondent: “PLEASE EMAIL MORE DOWD TO GET IT PERFECT.”

Dear person who lived next to Kris Friendly in Harkness at Connecticut College during the fall semester of 1989,

I’m sorry for calling you at 2:30 in the morning on a Tuesday and asking you to knock on Kris’s door and tell him he had an important call.

It was not an important call. In fact, as I believe he told you when you did go and knock on his door, my friend Amy and I had been calling him repeatedly for the past half hour, at first yelling “party!” over and over again, then, for some reason, simply honking into the phone like geese, until he finally took his receiver off the hook. He didn’t know our names, though. He didn’t know us at all. We were crank calling him.

I don’t know your name. You are a female, I remember from your voice. But that is all I know about you. I’d guess from the way that you sounded that you were asleep when I called. I don’t know if you maybe had someone next to you in bed at the time, another person I may have woken. (If so, and in the off chance you might still be in contact with this person, please extend my apology to him or her.) I don’t know what you look like. We might have sat next to each other at the student center the very next day, not enjoying the same soggy pizza.

Kris-whose name, by the way, I am altering so as not to have to later apologize to him for this very column-and Amy and I were all freshman that fall. What precipitated the calls, besides all the pot Amy and I had smoked that night, was a photograph of Kris in the freshman register-the “facebook” as it came to be called, a term now made so famous by the social networking website. (I’d hear my favorite name for it a couple years later, sitting around an off-campus living room, when a notorious upper-classman lothario nodded at a register on the coffee table and casually asked that someone pass him the “menu.”) The picture of Kris showed him with a beer bottle in each hand, at a table full of more empty bottles, wearing sunglasses indoors and a big drunken smile. Silly. But certainly not that big a deal.

Still, that night, after finishing the jar of mustard in the minifridge of another of our dorm-mates, we decided it was deserving of punishment. We looked up Kris’ phone number with the college’s fancy new high-tech phone system, woke him up, and started harassing him. After three or four calls we’d slipped into the honking. (Again, I have no idea why, other than: it must have been really good pot.) After five or six calls, he did what any reasonable person would do and took the phone off the hook.

Needless to say, Amy and I thought the whole episode was fall-out-of-our chairs, roll-on-the-floor, clutch-at-our-sides-gasping-for-air funny. We were especially impressed with ourselves for thinking to triangulate your phone number through the new system so as to bother Kris one last time. Admittedly, this still brings a guilty smile to my lips. But I am sorry it happened at the expense of your sleep. You were right to curse at me when you came back to hang up the phone.

Unsurprisingly, at a college of only 1,500 students, I ended up meeting Kris junior year. I’d been told many times what a very nice and smart guy he was, not at all like the image portrayed in his facebook picture. We were finally introduced by his girlfriend Becca, who’d become friends with Amy. He’d already heard the story, he’d been told it was us who’d called and honked. Amy, who’d remained one of my best friends, had already endured meeting him.

“Hey, Kris,” I said sheepishly, shaking his hand. “I’m, uhh, Dave Bry.”

His eyes shot wide. “Oh my god!” He was smiling, but obviously, and appropriately, still a little sore. “You’re a fucking asshole!”

I couldn’t disagree and I apologized and Kris was cool about it. He was as nice and smart and as different-from-his-facebook-picture as everyone had said. His mom, it turned out, had sent that picture in without telling Kris she was doing so, in the mistaken assumption that it would help him make friends. He would never forgive her, he told me. We went on to become pretty good friends ourselves, Kris and I.

You, I still have never met. But if I’m ever woken up by a crank call at 2:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, I’ll know who it is. Perhaps you’ll be honking like a goose. I’ll know I’ll deserve it.

Dave Bry is much better now.

My favorite part of this study-conducted at the behest of shoemakers Jeffrey West-on “the language of feet” is that Professor Geoffrey Beattie, who supervised the research, “was the resident psychologist on all nine Big Brother series.” That is some serious expertise right there. Anyway, your takeaway here is that if a woman moves her feet toward you, it means she totally wants you to do it to her. So keep that in mind.