Praise the Lord.  I have seen Johnny Depp’s apotheosis and it is named Rango.  It’s like he’s pulled together all of his work since Edward Scissorhands into one masterpiece symphony in the form of an animated feature.  It all makes sense now.  Rango tips its mottled cowboy hat to Ed Wood, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but most of all, intentionally or not, to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, the last Jarmusch film I truly enjoyed, as opposed to feeling flattened by enervation.

If you haven’t heard by now, Rango is truly trippy, brilliantly written, gorgeously animated, superbly voiced, and I have serious doubts it will ever make its real cost back.  If the studio reported a budget of $135 million, it’s bound to be much more than that.  Rango is basically an art film with a big Hollywood finish, which you really don’t mind because the whole journey is so jaw-droppingly audacious and bizarre.  It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever been sexually attracted to a rattlesnake.

Regarding my most recent blog, which was about the spineless penis, my virtual cohort Old Ancestor commented:

“Do the creationists know why the penis has a helmet? It’s to scoop out the last guy’s love potion and increase the chances of his own getting to the promised land. Of course, that only makes sense if the woman has multiple partners in short succession.  That’s right, creationists. God wants women to have multiple partners. In one day.”

Barf.  This is particularly revolting to me because I am so cum shy.  Yes, I am a homo who can’t stand ejaculate, which might disqualify me from being a homo in the first place.  Between that and hating musicals and steroids, you might well be thinking that I’m faking being gay in this blog just to attract the elusive, finicky Pink Reader, to worm my way into the ultra-exclusive Hollywood Velvet Mafia.  As an ex of mine once noted, “You’re your own sexuality.  I’m not sure what it is.”  Maybe I just sleep with men because I crave gay companionship.

Nah.

Leaping right ahead in a streaming hot jet of conscience, my personal style guru Tuttle tells me that the muscle-bound steroid look is finally at an end, some twenty years after steroids were introduced in HIV med cocktails and the look took off amongst the gheys.  Suddenly, in the late 80s/early 90s, fagelahs who were the size of bicycle inner tubes inflated to Michelin Men.  They were almost as believable as real men until they opened their mouths or you saw them walking from behind, with that tightly controlled wiggle I call The Bottom Bitch From Ipanema Strut.  According to Tuttle, the new chic body look has gone back to natural and athletic, and that has always been sexier to me, not to mention how exhausting it is to have sex with a mountain of inflexible synthetic muscle.  However, like The Man said, I’m a sexuality all my own.  Not only do I not find the pneumatic steroid look appealing, the thought of spending over a thousand dollars for a cycle two or three times a year, of turning my liver into pâté and shredding the valves around my heart seems ludicrous, even if I could afford it.  (I can hear Tuttle piping in here, “Don’t forget to tell them about the pimples and the stench!” Yeah, them too.)

Maybe it’s also because the first Muscle Mary I ever knew well, a guy named Rich who worked at a media buying company I slaved in when I was a kid, died of a heart attack while bench pressing at the gym.  He was twenty-six, but, hey, his biceps were larger than my thighs.  It’s the important things in death that matter.

People are still landing at my blog via Google searches for Amanda Seyfried’s boobs/breasts/or just plain singular breast.  Do they understand that Amanda is a midget?  Seriously, she’s barely topping five feet and with those bug eyes she looks like Frodo’s sister.  Liam Neeson is colossal, like six-foot-five.  They must have had her on a cherry picker to do that scene in the conservatory when she jerks him off.

I can’t tell whether it was the tsunami or the word penis in the title of yesterday’s post, but readership was down to almost half pre-Spanking Galliano levels.  Obviously dick doesn’t have as much appeal as boob.  Maybe guys were landing at the site expecting boob, saw the title, read the first few lines and thought, “Gross, this is all about cock.  And there’s spine in them, too!”  I have to confess that when I first read that penis spine piece, my legs clamped together and I thought about pre-penicillin gonorrhea remedies, when they stuck the umbrella down your urethra and then opened it and … ARRRRRGGGGHHH!  I’m sure the clap umbrella came to everyone’s mind, too, when they read that, ergo the drop in readership.

The last tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 happened during a Charlie Sheen Weekend I was enjoying over that Christmas break.  The person I was with had such an allegedly unprecedentedly powerful orgasm that we later remarked, when we had sobered up enough to pay attention to the news, that it must have caused the disaster via a butterfly effect emanating from Kentish Town in London to Sumatra in Indonesia.  This gallows quip was particularly not funny a month later when I spoke to my friend Stephanie, who almost lost her children to the disaster when she was vacationing in the Maldives.  And, yes, it would be in even more grotesquely bad taste to mention this story now were it not for the fact that I used the word “tsunami” three times in my penis blog two days ago.  A few hours after I posted, look what happened.  I feel like Lord Shiva the Destroyer.  (Note: I have since gone back to that post and changed the word tsunami to “tempest,” in honor of Julie Taymor’s last flop.)

The truth is, whenever I think of tsunami or tidal I think of a horrifying illustration from my parent’s Time magazine when I was a small child.  We were doing something for the relief of children in Bangladesh who were the victims of the Bhola Cyclone, the deadliest cyclone in recorded history, which wiped out half a million people in the blink of an eye.  The illustration in the magazine was of screaming people running down the street with this wall of water towering above the palm trees bearing down on them.  In the foreground was a terrified, crying child my age.  From then on, tidal waves and tsunamis have been a pet phobia, and maybe one of the reasons I became such a strong swimmer as a kid.

As Temple Grandin said when she was playing Claire Danes in that HBO movie, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.”  Is anyone keeping an eye on Mama Gaddafi right now?