GOING POSTAL AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE: A RANT

It's official: the phrase "going postal" should not be used to mean "freaking out with rage and mowing down your co-workers with a shotgun." That's because, according the recent findings of a commission established by Postmaster General William J. Henderson, "postal workers are no more likely to physically assault, sexually harass or verbally abuse their co-workers than employees in the national work force."

Henderson established the commission in 1998, promising that relations with employees-- who have more than 100,000 grievances filed with the U.S. Postal Service-- was his "#1 priority." We thought that was kinda wack when we heard it, because we've spent way more of our valuable time on line at the post office than anyone should do, so we would have thought that Henderson's #1 priority would be relations with customers, who during the last 50 years of postal service meltdown have racked up a thousand times more grievances than bureaucratically ensconced employees have.

The commission said going postal is "a myth," that not all that many Postal Service employees have followed in the footsteps of the Edmond, Oklahoma letter carrier who killed fourteen of his co-workers and wounded six others in 1986. The commission surveyed 12,000 poster workers and 3,000 employees in other jobs around the country-- and spent nearly $4 million doing so! We believe the commission is right, but only because it takes some wit and energy to kill somebody, let alone a lot of people, and our commission, which met yesterday and only cost $47 (for beer), determined that postal workers were the dimmest and laziest creatures on the planet, invertebrates included. So that "going postal" should mean "devolving from human form into useless organic material."

P4M ART REVIEW: DAMIEN HIRST: "THEORIES, MODELS, METHODS, APPROACHES, ASSUMPTIONS, RESULTS, AND FINDINGS"-- GAGOSIAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Why do people insist on calling Damien Hirst a "bad boy" of art? Because he split a pig down the middle and exhibited the separated halves suspended in glass tanks of formaldehyde that you could walk between? People who aren't looking closely at Hirst's "sensational" work think he's concerned with death, but life and the way we use it-- the way we study, conceptualize, and commercialize it-- are his true subjects. That makes Hirst, in our book, as good a boy as there is.

Hirst's current show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York presents the fullest and most entertaining example yet of the artist's dissective yet life-affirming showmanship. Entitled "Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," the exhibition takes the form of a five-room, walk-through, mini amusement park whose theme appears to be anatomy. Among the displays: a glass cabinet of mammal skeletons; a human skeleton on a glass cross with bobbing ping-pong ball eyes; two not quite fastidiously-kept autopsy tables (complete with cheese sandwich and covered cadavers that gallery notes say are fake); another glass cabinet neatly displaying 8,000 hand-crafted, jewel-like, actual-size pills; a giant beach ball kept aloft by a column of air over a field of knife blades (a guard stands close by); still another glass cabinet with garbage bags of "body parts" and air fresheners; a commanding 20-foot-high painted bronze anatomical figure; and a couple of large glass tanks containing, in addition to water and fish, the mute remains of some potentially devastating or potentially harmless medical procedure: an examination chair, a table of surgical instruments, etc.

The show is both amusing and horrifying, dopey and majestic-- kinda the way life seems when you're not conceiving of it in sit-com cliches and feel-good movie formulas. Hirst seems to be drawing attention to the growing virulance of these cliches and formulas-- in fact, to the radical contingency (the fragility!) of both life and our ways of thinking about it. Ironically, this is best summed up by the show's least sensationalistic installation: two large, apparently identical glass cubes with ping-pong balls blowing around inside them. In one box, the balls are flurrying in a much more satisfying frenzy-- and this is the box whose floor slopes downward at a slightly greater angle toward the central air blower, making it easier for more of the balls to roll inward and get caught up in the updraft. The point seems to be that one tiny factor, easy to overlook, can make the difference between an idea that just barely works-- like "the sanctity of life"-- and one that doesn't.

The Opinionator on... The New Camel Ad Campaign

Cigarettes are evil, but some of us love 'em anyway. What we hate are wack-ass ad campaigns that try needlessly to cute-ify or sex-ify the image of smoking, or campaigns that try to position cigarette advertising as a noble expression of freedom of speech-- when clearly, after decades of lies by cigarette manufacturers, it's an embarrassingly venal form of freedom of speech. So how lame is the new Camel campaign, that according to Fran Creighton, vice-president of marketing at R.J. Reynolds, as quoted in Advertising Age, is "a spoof of advertising itself, as well as social cliches, scandals, and myths." Dream on, Fran. Debuting this week, the new ads incorporate supposedly tongue-in-cheek viewer discretion notes, a la "Pop-Up Video", warning against "subliminal imagery," "pop mythology," and other dangers. RJR's strained irreverence is irrelevant, as far as we're concerned. It's clear we're gonna keep sucking in product no matter what, so it's kinda stupid of them to spend all that ad money and not really fool or charm anybody.

The Opinionator on... Sex and Boys

BOYS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN-- THOUGH THEY DON'T NECESSARILY WANNA TALK ABOUT IT

Ask teenage guys about their sexual behavior and they'll tell you one thing on a paper questionnaire. To a computer, though, they'll tell... more. In a recent study by Washington's Research Triangle Institute, 1600 guys between the ages of 15 and 19 were asked a bunch of questions about sex-- sex and drug use, sex and alcohol, and sex with another guy. Some filled out a paper questionnaire, while others responded by way of a computer and headphones. According to the New York Times, the computer group "were almost four times as likely as the pen-and-paper group to report some type of male-male sex (5.5% vs. 1.5%), 14 times as likely to report sex with an intravenous drug user (2.8% vs. 0.2%), and 5.5 times as likely to report that they were 'always' or 'often' drunk or high when they had heterosexual sex (10.8% vs. 2.2%)." Nice guys were the worst. The largest gap between computer reponses and paper-and-pencil responses occurred among top-student types, who may feel that they would have the most to lose if they came clean. Forget face-to-face sex questions. Researchers have known for a long time that actually sitting opposite a teenage guy can produce some major dishonesty. If you really want a sense of what guys are up to, just check out the chat rooms. The truth is out there, in some form-- a fact well known to America Online, which gets 55 cents of every dollar it earns through chat.

The Opinionator on... Quaker Oats Dinosaur Eggs

Is the idea of reptile eggs hatching in your breakfast bowl completely repellent? Of course it is, but that's only half the reason we're so eager to hook up with a box of Quaker Oats' new hot cereal, Dinosaur Eggs. All you do is add boiling water to a bowl of this stuff-- regular oatmeal infested with several nut-sized eggs-- and voila! Tiny monster spawn. Since it's obviously aimed at kids, we know that Dinosaur Eggs is going to be incredibly sweet, and we love that. But we can't wait to evaluate all the special effects that Quaker's cereal technologists have spent time and money developing: Exactly what crawls, erupts, or leaks out of the eggs? Is the baby dinosaur matter a different color from the eggs and the oatmeal medium? How sauromorphic is this matter? Is there some kind of hatching sound? Are the egg shells hard? How long do they stay hard? If you pop the eggs in your mouth before they've had a chance to soften properly, do they hatch there? Wouldn't it be great if the babies were, like, grey slimy gel candies that kinda died and started to decay if you didn't eat them right away? Kudos to Quaker for proving again that breakfast is truly the most important meal of the day.

The Opinionator on... Khalid Abdul Muhammad

Khalid Abdul Muhammad-- the man who wants to lead a million youths in New York on September 5-- needs our help. Why? Because Muhammad believes that "there is absolutely no evidence to substantiate, to prove that six million so-called Jews lost their lives in Nazi Germany." This is wrong. Muhammad has referred to Jews as " bloodsuckers," and has warned a university audience against the "hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, perpetrating-a-fraud so-called Jew who just crawled out of the ghettoes of Europe just a few days ago..." This is hateful. Muhammad has reminded Jews that "somebody must look you in your cold lying blue eyes and pull the cover off of you today. I don't give a damn about you and I will give you hell from the cradle to the grave." This sounds self-important. Staggering historical crimes do require redress, but the best tools for revolution are true knowledge, genuine love, and selflessness. Anyone who's been blessed with any of these needs to take some responsibility and help correct our brother, and soon. For though it would be lamentable if Muhammad never understood history better, and sad if his alliance with Allah's Good never became stronger, it would be a real tragedy if a great opportunity to lead a new generation were squandered through demigoguery.