Important research being done in Germany:

He added that women who dyed their hair red from another colour were signalling they were looking for a partner, and added: “Even women in a fixed relationship are letting their partners know they are unhappy if they dye their hair red. They are saying that they are looking for something better.”

Andrew links to an article tracking National Review’s longstanding sympathy for fascism. It’s a lively and eye-opening read, made all the funnier given that one of NR’s current editors has just published a book titled Liberal Fascism.

It reminds me of a clip of Gore Vidal debating William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968.

Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi, and Buckley in return threatens to punch Vidal’s lights out. When I saw this clip a year or so ago, I thought Vidal was just being nasty. Given the above-linked article, perhaps his gybe wasn’t completely unfounded.

Towards the end, the article excerpts a section out of NR editor Jeffrey Hart’s 1987 book, From This Moment On, which includes the following fascinating snippet:

Mussolini liked to interrupt his working day several times with sexual intercourse, often standing up and in his uniform, a very rapid performance.

I’d need to see it in context in the book to make out if Mr. Hart really is lionizing Mussolini here. But if he is, I’m puzzled. Fine, the man was horny, had to have it several times a day, so busy he did it standing up and clothed. Got it. But is quick ejaculation a sign of virility? I suppose one could say that it signals utmost disdain for those on the receiving end of his effluence, which could be an admirable trait for thug-worshippers. But apart from that, I’m at a loss.

Hitchens is in his obituary best. Apparently, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a bad novel. That sounds about right.

I do want to look up this 12 page “heroic struggle to bring a stubborn woman to orgasm.” Nice bedtime read. If it’s online somewhere, I’ll link to it here.

EDIT: Here’s one description:

What is one to make, for instance, of the shocking story ”The Time of Her Time”? It recounts a sexual encounter between the narrator (Mailer in the guise of an Irishman named Sergius O’Shaugnessy) and Denise Gondelman, a middle-class ”Jewish girl” in her third year at New York University. Denise, though sexually experienced, has never reached orgasm, never lost her ”final virginity.” It takes three sexual encounters, an act of sodomy and a touch of Jewish self-hatred (Denise’s and perhaps Mailer’s as well) before she finally arrives at ”her time.”

Sounds promising.

EDIT 2: It gets better and better:

He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example—a fictional sketch that concludes *Advertisements for Myself* and of which Mailer was particularly proud—the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”

Off I go to Borders. This stuff is comedy gold.