Barbara Bush bounced back today from her embarrassing faux pas last week at the Houston Astrodome.

As you recall, during a radio interview with American Public Media, Mrs. Bush surveyed the thousands of evacuees crammed into the arena and told the reporter: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas!” She could not contain her amazement. “Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.” (read the full article)

Apparently some psychologist has written a book about post-game sex antics between major league baseball players. We can’t recall the title, but it read something like: Two Balls and a Bat. (read the full article)

The father of fifteen minute famewhoring, Andy Warhol, couldn’t have devised a better set up: A sitcom about a desperate reality show star that’s set amidst a doomed Three’s Company-flavored-for-the-00s sitcom (idiotically titled Room and Bored) — that stars — in real life — a star from Friends, one of television history’s most successful sitcoms.

My mind reeled.

Here’s what I’ll miss most about Lisa Kudrow and her series The Comeback:

1. The Entertaining Mind Fuck. I loved watching a thirty-minute show that miraculously managed to generate equal portions laughter, compassion, horror and disdain — all in one short swoop.

Ibsen couldn’t have done it better. Big chunks of time would pass while watching the show before I snapped to and realized that I hadn’t been laughing — and shouldn’t I have been? And that sort of head scratching made me think about, and appreciate the show even more. There was a lot to, ultimately, cherish. The show just needed time to reveal its skewed direction. (read the full article)

"Just a quick observation," said Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night. He had just shown a montage of nervous Republicans reciting the Karl Rove talking point that they didn’t want to “play the blame game” when questioned about the jaw-droppingly inept response of the Bush Administration to the Katrina disaster. "I think it’s something Aristotle said," Stewart continued. "When people don’t want to play the blame game — THEY’RE TO BLAME!" (read the full article)

“Nature has done what the Civil War couldn’t do,” writes author Anne Rice in a New York Times op-ed this Sunday morning. The drowning of New Orleans has laid “this strange and beautiful city” to waste, she laments, “with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.” (read the full article)

His July trip to Florida is just a misty, kegger-fueled spot of amnesia. And too much loot was blown on distressed jeans from Ab and Fitch. And those CDs of Rascal Flatts and Weezer — were they worth it?

And never mind all the cash he lost on the Miami hooker who turned out to be a tranny.

It’s back to San Diego U for Evan — our latest Cruiser Boy discovery.

Log in (or join us in the Circle) to see what a little 11th Hour Thinking, nudity and lube can do to ease the summer time, per-school blues.

Both his — and yours!

(MEMBERS / non-MEMBERS)

Italian strega Camille Paglia — author of my favorite book of the summer: the electric hot-pink Break, Blow, Burn (a poetry primer for brainy imbeciles) — has finally assumed the role I always knew, always hoped, she would: Pagan High Priestess rumbling out spooky Pop Icon Prophecies that she channels from magazine photos and Access Hollywood.

Case in point: Kabbalah kibitzer Madonna and her recent tweedy romp through the August issue of Vogue:

Camille, like myself, didn’t want to miss that issue, but unlike the rest of us who casually scanned its series of staged Grand Lady Madonna photos, Paglia saw misfortune in the photos. And yet what were they but typical Vogue fare (at least to the naked, uninitiated eye). There was Madonna feeding chickens … Madonna in cozy bed with children … Madonna on the lawn in a summer dress that foamed like a wave on the ground … Madonna on horse… (read the full article)

In one short, pin-prick of a paragraph, the New York Times summed up the most incompetent president in U.S. history. The occasion was a speech, delivered yesterday from the Rose Garden, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest natural disaster to hit this country since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, according to CNN. (read the full article)