David Letterman admits he had affairs with (several) female employees. Classy, that.

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Update: His fans are OK with it.

Dave Letterman‘s a little randy and that’s just dandy with his fans.

It’s the guy who tried to extort $2 million from their favorite laughmeister who should be ashamed of himself, they said.

Kelli Lageschulte, 20, a graphic design student from Iowa, was among a crowd of people trying to get “Late Show” tickets at the Ed Sullivan Theater last night. She found a few giggles in Dave’s admission he had affairs with several female staffers.

“I wonder if he told jokes while they were having sex,” she said with a grin. “He is, after all, very funny. Anyway, everybody’s doing it.”

[Putting on crusty-old-goat-hat yet again] Har-dee-har-har.

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Andrea adds: In the Post of October 3, the Letterman tale is next to an article called L’affaire Polanski, which, until about 24 hours ago, Whoopi Goldberg and others in Hollywood also found very funny. Now apparently realizing that public support for pedophile rapists is something less than funny, Polanski supporters have gone silent. Rounding out the page is an item way up top about how the Italian PM has been been caught allegedly hiring multiple call girls in his Rome residence. Help, help! I’m drowning in the news of debauchery, and only about to start a post about a woman who was “addicted to abortions” and had 15. So the question is this: Is 9:30 am on a Saturday too early to start drinking? I’m not talking about coffee.

The next frontier: Greening the sex-toy industry. We’ll do anything for the environment, including giving new meaning to the term “tree-hugger”. [WARNING: this is for people with a sense of humour. Chronic nit-pickers, please skip this one.]

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Rebecca astutely notes: “‘When customers come into our store they’re not necessarily looking for ethically made and sourced nipple tassles,’ Roddick admits.”

How great must it be to have a job where you find that sentence leaving your mouth? Policy analysis is BORING.

At a modern gallery no less. Although in fairness it did take some work:

Tate Modern gallery has withdrawn a controversial photograph of Brooke Shields following a visit by police, amid concerns it could be in breach of child pornography laws.

[…]

The provocative picture by New York artist Richard Prince shows Shields standing naked in a bathtub, with a heavily made-up face and oiled torso. Children’s campaigners had condemned the Tate for including the picture in their latest exhibition, describing it as a “magnet” for paedophiles.

So controversial is the photograph, called Spiritual America, that it was hung in its own room behind a closed door bearing a warning that the work was “challenging”. However, visitors to a preview showing yesterday found the room closed.

The Tate chose to include the picture in the Pop Life: Art In A Material World after consulting lawyers. It has been exhibited in the US before but never in Britain. A spokesman said: “The exhibit is temporarily closed. We are in discussions with police.”

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Officers from the Obscene Publications Unit met with staff at the Tate Modern regarding an image. The officers have specialist experience in this field and are keen to work with gallery management to ensure that they do not inadvertently break the law or cause any offence to their visitors.”

Inadvertently cause any offence to their visitors? Inadvertently? With this picture? No, I am not linking to the whole thing – just the head shot, which is sick enough without needing to show her “oiled torso”. The original picture is available online if you know how to search for it. Tell me, if you do see it, whether you think it’s possible to claim you didn’t know it might be considered (what’s the expression people use all the time?) “offensive to some”.

And what’s worse, the picture was “commissioned by Shields’ mother, who was intent on turning her little girl into a child star”. She was 10 years old at the time.

I am a pretty extreme free-speecher. I believe in the First Amendment, and I wish it applied in Canada as well. But even I think there ought to be limits: You shouldn’t be allowed freely to defame other people, to incite violence, or to distribute naked images of little kids. Calling those pictures “challenging” “art” isn’t enough to get you off the hook.

That’s not how you’d plan the birth of your child, but golly, this one sure ended well for all concerned. Well done!

Jennifer Aniston reveals what, to her, is the perfect guy.

The actress — who has dated Vince Vaughn, John Mayer and Bradley Cooper since her 2005 divorce from Brad Pitt – says she’s looking for a “normal” and “funny” guy.

“Nothing other than be a gentleman,” the 40-year-old singleton said of her ideal man. “A normal, nice guy. That’s all any girl wants I think. Maybe someone who is kind and funny.”

A new book explains. As far as I can tell, the answer is: It depends.

Now that‘s useful.

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Andrea adds: There really are limitations to the things “science” can uncover.

A Swedish man does his best to appear ridiculous:

Swedish father Ragnar Bengtsson, 26, has entered into an experiment that he hopes will help him breastfeed his future children.

On Tuesday, the Stockholm family man began stimulating his breasts with a pump in a bid to produce milk.

“Anything that doesn’t do any harm is worth trying out. And if it works it could prove very important for men’s ability to get much closer to their children at an early stage,” Bengtsson told The Local.

Now that’s what I call worrying about your children’s best interests.

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Andrea adds: Wow. That’s very weird. Weird that he would try, and weirder still that he would go public with it. Classify this one under “When life imitates the Onion,” again!

Oh, I know. You’ll say these things are rare, that cervical cancer is a bad thing and that immunization programs are worth the risks. Certainly that’s what the experts always seem to say. But this 14-year-old girl was alive and now she’s dead.

Dr Caron Grainger, Joint Director of Public Health for NHS Coventry and the city’s council, said: “A 14-year-old girl took ill at a school in Coventry and was taken to University Hospital in the city where she later sadly died. Our sympathies are with the girl’s family and friends at this difficult time.”

She added that the incident happened shortly after the girl received the vaccine, but “no link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a post-mortem takes place.”

[…]

Earlier this month, the drug safety watchdog MHRA said that thousands of schoolgirls were suffering suspected adverse reactions to the vaccine. Doctors’ reports found that girls of 12 and 13 were experiencing convulsions, fever and paralysis. The analysis drawn up by MHRA found that 2,107 patients reported suspected adverse reactions, with several reporting multiple reactions.

At the risk of sounding like a worse quack than I am (I’m not opposed to all vaccines; just the flu shot and this one, really): Why the rush to vaccinate girls given those kinds of side effects?

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UPDATE: Health officials say it’s “most unlikely” the vaccine caused her death.

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SECOND UPDATE, THURSDAY MORNING: “A girl who was vaccinated against cervical cancer died from a malignant tumour of the chest and not from a reaction to the jab, it was revealed.”

Oh boy, the knives are about to come out:

In a study which will cause renewed debate over who have to divide their time between caring for their offspring and going out to work, the researchers found children whose mothers worked were more likely to be driven to school, to watch more than two hours of TV a day, and have sweetened drinks between meals.

Children of mothers who worked full time also ate less fruit and vegetables, the study suggests.

Middle class families suffer the same problems as the findings remained similar even when household income was taken into account, the paper said.

It’s funny. We are surrounded by people who seem to think that moms actually don’t matter. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of families that work well even if Mom is out working, and sure, some women really don’t have much of a choice in the matter. But that doesn’t change the main point, which is that, all else being equal, growing up with Mom is better than the alternative. So why this?

Research author, Professor Catherine Law, paediatric epidemiologist at the Institute of Child Health, said: “Our results do not imply that mothers should not work.

“Rather, they highlight the need for policies and programmes to help support parents to create a healthy environment for their children.”

If this were a study showing that, say, breast-fed babies tended to be healthier than formula-fed ones, you think the researchers would insist that what was needed was a good set of policies to help support parents?

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Andrea adds: The fantastic lengths we will go to to avoid stating the obvious are amazing. That said, I believe most women have more sense about them, and they get the results of said study, furthermore, as Margaret Wente pointed out in her recent column, know what they prefer to do too. The main thing may be in this and so many other cases–the women reporting the findings are themselves working with kids. And very few will advise themselves against their current course of action.

A man is accused of killing both his girlfriend and her unborn child – he apparently wanted her to have an abortion and she’d refused. He will be charged with double murder. If the mother had decided to abort the baby (even at 8 months), the child’s life would not count.

What a sorry mess.