No personality has appeared on the cover of Playboy more often than Pamela Anderson. Her appearance on the cover of the January 2007 issue will mark the 12th time she’s graced the front page of America’s most successful magazine.

Pam’s Playboy career started when she was selected as a Playmate back in February 1990. That was a simpler, sweeter, more-natural Pam than today’s version. She’s starred in a couple of TV series, made some not-very-good movies, been married and divorced from a couple of famous musicians. Throughout it all, she’s maintained her celebrity because Pam is one of those larger-than-life personalities who fame transcends their actual accomplishments.

How does that happen? I remember Jayne Mansfield occupying a similar position in the psyche of the American male. And then there was Brigitte Bardot to whom, by the way, Pam bears a rather remarkable likeness. It’s an almost indefinable quality of sexuality and vulnerability, something makes a guy say deep inside himself “If she only knew me, I could make her happy and complete.” At least what fun it would be to try.

The photos in the January issue are shot by photographer Sante D’Orazio. The shooting, initiated by Playboy, ended prematurely with Pam and Sante having what almost appeared to be a lover’s quarrel, not that anything actually happened between them. Playboy put the photos away with the knowledge that some day would seem like the right day to publish them.  

It’s been 2 1/2 years since Pam’s last Playboy cover and pictorial (May 2004, pictured). Her divorce from Kid Rock has her back in the headlines although she never really is very far out of them. Pam, we’ve missed you and thank goodness we have those D’Orazio photos.

And Pam needs a new boyfriend. The line forms behind me.

If you’re feeling underwhelmed with the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live, you’ll want to check out Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s Saturday Night Live: The Complete First Season, which debuts on DVD December 5, and remind yourself how the show became a late-night institution. This handsome eight-disc set is packaged with a collectible book and features all your favorites from the SNL Class of 1975, including John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris. The set includes all 24 unedited episodes (digitally remastered) with guest hosts such as Richard Pryor, Rob Reiner, Candice Bergen, Buck Henry and George Carlin as well as musical guests Simon and Garfunkel, Jimmy Cliff, Carly Simon and Patti Smith.

After watching over 30 hours of unforgettable characters and hilarious sketches, the only thing that won’t seem funny about SNL is thinking about all the comic geniuses who have graduated from the show and left it where it is now. Do you think SNL can recapture the glory of its early years? Let us know.

What do you get when you mix cement, sulfuric acid, quicklime, gasoline and a few hundred pounds of coca leaves? OK, maybe that last one is a bit of a giveaway. The real question is, do you want to put something up your nose that's made by Colombians stomping around on it in their workboots? We'll stick with espresso, thanks.

This fascinating inside look at jungle cocaine processing comes from the video camera of Matthew Bristow, who also writes the fascinating Colombia News blog.

After just one night as the opening act for Guns 'n' Roses, the Eagles of Death Metal have been kicked off the tour. As pointed out here, it was an odd pairing. But after one night? According to the NME, Axl Rose addressed the audience about EODM as soon as he took the stage at the show in Cleveland. "So how'd you like the Pigeons Of Shit Metal?" he said. "Don't worry, that's the last show they're playing with us."

In a statement released Monday, the Eagles Of Death Metal responded to their banishment from the Guns tour: "At first the audience refused to welcome us to the jungle, but by the time we took our final bow, it had become paradise city. Although Axl tried to November rain on our parade, no sweet child o'mine can derail the EODM night train. We say live and let die."

In case you didn't know, burlesque is back. At least among hipsters in New York, where several spots — among them the Slipper Room, the Cutting Room and Galapagos Art Space — host burlesque nights featuring retro-cool chicks shaking their shimmies in lace and pasties. Professional illustrator Molly Crabapple takes it a step further with Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, a life-drawing class founded "on the principles of fair pay for models and boozy fun for all. Artists draw burlesque dancers, compete in contests, and win liquor and prizes." In just a year, the New York Dr. Sketchy's has spawned 10 chapters in four countries.

Molly's first book, Dr. Sketchy's Official Rainy Day Colouring Book, will be published later this month. You may enjoy this lesson on how to Draw (Breasts) the Dr. Sketchy Way.


Dr. Sketchy's Official is (or will be) available from Sepulculture Books.

 

Love him or hate him, Michael Moore somehow manages to keep saying things in a blunter, more direct way than most people dare. To mark the occasion of the Iraqi War now lasting longer than World War II, Moore wrote an open letter about the war on his website where he calls for an immediate withdrawal of US troops.

Now, he may not be right, but honestly: where is he wrong?

I'm always amused at the media frenzy that accompanies any type of new illness (I'm looking at you, Avian Flu and SARS). To read reports on these afflictions, you'd think it was the Black Death, part deux. But avian flu, for example, has killed exactly zero Americans.

Am I saying that this news shouldn't be reported? Of course not. But perhaps more pieces like this should accompany it. (For the full article from Time, click here.)

The article is best summed up in this passage:

AIDS ... takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.

We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way.

This neatly explains why we’ve become a cheeseburger-eating, cigarette-puffing, non-exercising — but condom-wearing! — society.

A couple of weeks ago, a familiar name reappeared in the news when Daniel Ortega, the one-time leftist president of Nicaragua, was reelected to that post. Playboy was privileged to have interviewed Ortega in its November 1987, and our crack intern Cherise Watts mined these nuggets from our conversation:

Playboy: Isn’t it probable, Mr. President that you are one of the few chiefs of state who actually know how to use a machine gun?
Ortega: Yes. I know how to use it.
Playboy: What kind is it?
Ortega: AK-47. Russian.
 
Playboy: We seem to remember President Reagan’s saying that he thought Nicaraguans had picked up their interest in baseball from the Cubans and that this was yet another example of Castro’s influence on you.
Ortega: No, no! We got it from you! I grew up a New York Yankees fan. After three U.S. interventions by the Marines in Nicaragua, it was a legacy we got from the Americans — the only good one.
 
Playboy: That reminds us of what President Reagan said of you, that you were a “dictator in designer glasses.” What did you think when you heard that?
Ortega: I laughed I didn’t think I was so important to President Reagan that he would worry so much about me. It seems such a waste of time for a President of such a powerful country to be so obsessed with this small country.
 
Playboy: Comandante Borge mentioned Reagan’s visceral feelings toward you. Why do you think they’re so personal?
Ortega: There has been talk ever since this Iran/Contra scandal broke about Reagan’s not being in charge.  But I know for certain that there’s one thing he’s really on top of, the only thing he’s really interested in Nicaragua. He’s taken us as his thing, like a little kid with his toys making a little war.
 
Playboy: You know, of course, that many American politicians say that you use the invasion threat as a way of consolidating domestic support and drawing attention away from your own government’s deficiencies.
Ortega: People say that we’re like the boy who cried wolf. The problem is that Nicaragua is a country that already has been invaded on several occasions by the United States. Unlike the boy in the fable, Nicaragua has already had the wolf come.
 
Playboy: Do you like being president?
Ortega: I don’t think so.
Playboy: Why not?
Ortega: It’s a quite complicated task. One is subjected to many pressures. The state of our economy is something that puts enormous pressure on me: inflation, the war, the standard of living. I feel a tremendous weight on my shoulders, when we discuss economic problems. We’ve struggled to improve the standard of living for people, and the people have sacrificed themselves for this. So it is a moral obligation on our part.

Here at Playboy, you might envision us spending our days in individual office hot tubs, sipping martinis and shuffling through layouts. At times the reality is much more mundane, such as when our health-insurance forms are due. Keeping a long story short, it’s a confusing system, involving  pre-tax dollars, deductibles and out-of-pocket limits, that seems to require a Nobel-worthy mathematical model to fully grasp.

Such is the state of healthcare in America. As expensive as it is confusing, rates across the country continue to increase in double digits every year, while the rate of inflation hovers around 3 percent. But you get what you pay for, right? Well according to a landmark World Health Organization study among 191 nations, America rates first in healthcare expenditures while in overall performance, it is 37th. Two things come to mind, one practical, another ideological: First, where is the money going? (To the insurance and pharmaceutical company execs, we’re guessing.) Then, does it matter how wealthy a country is if it can’t adequately take care of its own?

If the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan didn’t quench your thirst for uncomfortable confrontations with everyone’s favorite Kazakhstan reporter, you should check out the character’s origins on HBO Video’s Da Ali G Show: Da Compleet Seereez, released on November 21.

The four-disc set contains both seasons of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s hysterical series that, in addition to Borat, features his other alter-egos: Ali G, a hip-hop journalist and wannabe rapper of indeterminate ethnic origin, and Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian TV reporter. As you watch Ali G, Borat and Bruno explore different aspects of American culture (Ali G enlists as a recruit for the Philadelphia Police Department, for example) and make interviewees such as Gore Vidal, Buzz Aldrin, Pat Buchanan and Sam Donaldson squirm in their chairs, it begs the question: What did the producers tell these professionals to convince them to sit down with Cohen’s triumvirate of ass-clownery? Now that he’s a household name, Cohen is going to need to split into more personalities to prank anyone in the future, but it was fun while it lasted. Extras include Ali G’s Harvard Commencement address (oh yes he did) and other hilarious deleted clips. Big up yourself and check it. Respek.

This week, as we commemorate with turkey and pigskin the first Thanksgiving, let us remember that very few of us today, and especially few of us reading Playboy, would have all that much in common with the Pilgrims who got New England rolling. As Nathaniel Philbrick pointed out in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, the first settlers were a sour, dour bunch of religious fundamentalists who often settled the problems they had with the natives by killing them, sometimes in a genocidal way. So they were courageous, yes, but not quite the best role models for a 21st-century American.

That’s why, when I toast early settlers this week, I’m going to salute the Dutch. As Russell Shorto describes in The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, the Dutch who settled in Manhattan were wonderful role models. Residents of the colony included whites, blacks, Jews, and people of other origins, and they were not the sexual blue-noses that were the settlers of Plymouth. Shorto even makes the argument that governments exist by the consent of the governed got ingrained in America thanks to this group. And if that’s not enough, they gave us the words for cookie and cole slaw.

Granted, that’s not quite as good as turkey, but toleration and democracy more than make up for it.

Photographer Caitlin Mitchell, originally form Anchorage, Alaska, braves the cold.

 

The college bowl season will kick off December 19 when the Mountain West champion squares off against a yet-to-be-named at-large team in the Poinsettia Bowl. In case you didn’t know, the poinsettia plant/flower (poinsettia pulcherrina) takes its name from Joel Poinsett, a 19th-century political figure who was the first US ambassador to Mexico. Poinsett, also an amateur botanist, introduced the Mexican red flower to America on one of his trips home. Poinsettias, the flower that is, look great on the holiday table and also on tables and desks on morning news shows. And they make a terrific graphic symbol in the end zone of a football field. But are we certain that the bowl is named after the flower and not the politician/botanist and what would Joel’s profile look like chalked into an end zone?

Not to worry if you happen to miss the Poinsettia Bowl because it will be followed by 30 other bowl games meaning that 62 of the 119 Division I football teams on this planet will get to play in a post-season game. It’s almost like the NHL where just about everybody makes the playoffs.

It’s not that I’m against all these bowl games. After all, they give countless alumni an excuse to get out of town and get drunk for a few days. They provide student/athletes with an opportunity to do something other than visit Aunt Minnie’s for the holidays. And they provide me with almost a month’s worth of holiday television fare. After all, how many times can I watch A Christmas Story and It’s A Wonderful Life?

Plus, the commercial tie-ins to these bowls are part of what keeps America’s economy humming, reminding me that I’ve got a taste for a Chick-Fil-A or perhaps need to upgrade to an MPC computer. So let’s hear it for all 31 bowl games and their assorted products and cities — for the Emerald Bowl (walnuts?), the Birmingham Bowl (Alabama, right?) and the Meineke Car Care Bowl — which reminds me — judging by the noise my car was making on my drive to work this morning, my muffler probably needs replacing.  

Carrie Fisher is a survivor, although she cringes when she mentions that word during her uproarious new one-woman show, "Wishful Drinking," which is playing now through December 23 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

The author of four best-selling novels, including the autobiographical Postcards From the Edge, as well as the iconic actress with the heavenly hair buns in the original Star Wars films, Fisher has led a colorful existence punctuated by personal tragedy. “If my life weren’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable,” she says at the beginning of her show while descending a staircase surrounded by a galaxy of stars. “What I’m finding now is I have a lot of jokes I’ve come up with over the years to deal with difficult things. That’s how I’ve coped.”

The husky-voiced Fisher uses charts, movie footage and other aids as she narrates the chaotic chapters of her life with brutal honesty, dry humor and even a few apropos songs. From her beginnings as the daughter of Hollywood royals Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher to her tumultuous marriages to Paul Simon and her relationship with Bryan Lourd (who failed to mention he was gay before she gave birth to their daughter) to her battles with booze, pills and bipolar disorder, Fisher finds hilarity in the most unlikely topics. As outrageous as her recollections are, she admits many details have fallen through the cracks (“Imagine what I’m leaving out,” she says).

Yet despite her then-altered state of mind, Fisher is haunted by one experience that will forever overshadow her entire life. As she recounts what she calls “A Poem by George Lucas,” which is actually Princess Leia’s laser-brain message she recorded for R2-D2 in Star Wars, she reenacts the scene accompanied by a strobe light before pleading to the theater, “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” We, like Yoda, say there is another: one genuinely hilarious therapy session in front of a receptive audience.