I ASKED FOR IT

You’ve got to give me more time to sift through the Clinton book entries. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of emails. So far, they’re hilarious. I promise I’ll award the prize (with many runners-up) very soon. Front-runners so far: “It Takes A Spillage,” “Glands Across America,” and “Crouching Bubba, Hidden Intern.” And then there are the tasteless ones.

THAT BEARD: Slate magazine has just done a round-up of criticism of Al Gore’s beard. Don’t blame them. It’s August, for Pete’s sake. I enjoyed Maureen Dowd’s condescension toward it, but women, my recent issue of “Men’s Health” tells me, don’t like facial hair anyway. Or they don’t admit they do to survey-takers from “Men’s Health.” My own view is that it looks pathetic. To work, beards need to be strong, thick and dense. Gore’s looks like some wimpy piece of brushwood sparsely covering a sand-dune. It makes me realize why I’ve always suspected Gore’s testosterone-schtick, puffing his chest up, swaggering about, sticking his tongue down his wife’s throat in public, ‘Love Story’ etc. He’s got masculinity issues. And the scraggly teenage beard thing only accentuates it. What next? A beret?

LETTERS: How bad was Bork?; how sick are homosexuals?; etc.

HIV STATS: Worthwhile little statistical analysis of the CDC’s claim that HIV infections have remained stable at 40,000 a year for the last ten years. This guy is a stats wonk, has no ax to grind, and asks some obviously good questions about the basis for this statistic, which looks increasingly too pessimistic. Will the CDC answer? I doubt it. What will some AIDS activists say? If the recent past is any guide, they will simply accuse the guy of being racist, since (they claim) black men are now the most vulnerable to HIV infection. But slowly, the facts will surely come out. And the flim-flam designed to stop that will recede.