urious French protestors continued to riot over the weekend, gently overturning traffic cones and unleashing salvos of pithy wit at assembled riot police across some of the roughest neighborhoods in all of Paris. The riots began the previous week in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb northeast of Paris, sparked by what officials believe was a disagreement over food.

“Those incorrigible police buffoons know nothing of fine chocolate!� said impassioned teenage rioter Jean Touloc, only in French.

The urbane French police were overwhelmed almost before the rioting even began, requiring the French Army to be brought in last week. The army surrendered four hours later, and plans were being drawn up for a transitional government when some joker switched out the treaty-signing pen with a novelty model that laughs electronically when you try to write with it. The rioters, perhaps correctly believing that they were not being taken seriously, stepped up their boisterous chants of “We beg to differ!� and their disorderly milling-about.

The riots reportedly got out of hand on Saturday, when protestors began hurling water balloons in the general direction of riot police. French officials, however, claim that the reality wasn’t as bad as these reports imply, since the balloons were actually filled with a very pleasant brand of spring water flavored with a spritz of lemon.

Police attempted to crack down on the rioting Sunday, bringing out a top-secret book of salacious insults on loan from the French armed forces. The crowds were clearly humiliated by these witty rejoinders, but in response began a menacing chant that translates as “You are wrong, we are right, let’s not argue, let’s not fight,� which spread like wildfire all across the Parisian suburbs.

Within hours, however, the chanting had escalated to the inflammatory “You’re not right, we’re not wrong, won’t you come and sing along?� and French officials were considering turning to the UN for help, the nation’s domestic situation cart-wheeling dangerously out of control.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the French state, president Jacques Chirac went on national television late Sunday night to beg for an end to the verbal violence, acceding to the protestors’ demands and stunning the nation by admitting that yes, perhaps there are some varieties of milk chocolate that are not entirely without their charms, reversing the government’s decades-old hard line stance.

The immediate reaction to Chirac’s broadcast was a positive one, with riot officials quickly retracting a statement made my one rioter hours earlier that the hats worn by the police were neither tasteful nor well-made.

“Really, there’s rioting, and then there’s going too far,� explained riot Treasurer Philippe LaRoc. “And those hat remarks were really full-well out of line. Let’s bring this all to a close before someone says something they’re really going to regret later.�

MySpace Premieres in Communist China as OurSpace

Pain in the Ass Hawking Demands Handicapped- Accessible Space Shuttle

“Blond Highlights the Devil’s Work,” Says Iran, Straight Men

Dow Reaches 13,000, Tao Reaches ∞

All that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.

But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.

The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.

Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's, it was glass eating. Linebacker Greg Luzinski started the trend when he accidentally ate an entire beer mug while drunk, thinking it was a beer popsicle. The trend spread across the nation at the speed of stupid and before long college kids everywhere were eating light bulbs whenever they didn't have time for a sit-down meal. University facilities budgets went through the roof and Charmin released a new line of red toilet paper that hid evidence of inconvenient anal bleeding. Unfortunately, the fad proved short lived when Luzinski did, dropping dead of a glassasscopy in 1977.

Every decade, or pseudo-decade, also has its brilliant way to bilk doofuses out of their cash, and the 70's version was the pet rock. Created by a California inventor who dreamed of finding a way to turn the rocks on his front lawn into weed, and unleashed on a public tired of feeding freeloading animals and starving African children, the pet rock was an enormous hit among Americans who didn't know what to get their brother's kids for Christmas. The versatile pet rock also served a dual purpose, both as a gag gift and a weapon to be thrown at gag gifters.

No overview of 70's fads would be complete without a mention of disco, which was not so much a fad as aural wallpaper for the fad of the 1970's themselves. What more can be said about the most misguided musical idea since Mozart's tuba sonata? Not much, though in all fairness you could do worse if you want a soundtrack for doing cocaine and screwing your sister. What you couldn't do much worse than, however, is "Disco Duck," 1976's answer to New Age theories that there was no Satan.

As you're probably starting to catch on, everything in the 1970's was a fad, and thank God. One of the more embarrassing was the practice of talking to plants, originated by hard-up stoners chanting "Grow, weed, grow!" to their closet garden creations and crossing over to the flakiest strata of the mainstream, who took the April 1st edition of Scientific American at face value. Other notable fads originated in this "April Fool's" issue include aromatherapy and cancer research.

Nixon brought acupuncture back with him from China like a rat in his suitcase, and this fad spread faster than you could stick a sewing needle into a yuppie's ass. While certainly high on unintentional humor factor, acupuncture sacrificed some of its usefulness as a fad by looking really uncomfortable and causing people to cringe at the same time as they were laughing at the yoyos being stuck with the needles.

The 70's fad that probably least deserved to die was EST therapy, a revolutionarily hilarious idea based on putting the patient into a room full of assholes and yelling at them. The suicide rate during treatment was 100%, and as a result the fragile members of the species were weeded out of the herd in time for the alpha dog orgy known as the 1980's. The psychiatric profession has seldom known a treatment so efficient or fun to watch, and EST will be sorely missed.

The 70's also saw the invention of the hacky sack, which finally gave American teens something to do while they were in college. George Abrams, the inventor of the sack, was inspired by watching a Massachusetts mental patient who would compulsively kick himself in the nuts as if he were playing one of those ball-string-and-paddle games. Abrams was struck with the idea of how fun this might be if in didn't involve getting kicked in the balls so much, and something sort of like a sport was born.

While 8-tracks, CB radios and hideous string art creations all held their own as ridiculous 70's time-wasters, the moped really takes the cake as the defining piece of 1970's crap. With all the danger and inconvenience of a bicycle, but none of the exercise, the moped captured the cheap-assed imaginations of a country that thought gas was expensive. Hundreds of thousands of mopeds were sold during the Mideast oil embargo in 1973, with every last one of them being traded away for pocket fuzz and spare buttons at garage sales or pushed off a cliff six months later when the Arabs turned the gas tap back on. Which, if you've ever tried to ride a bike in bellbottoms, you know was probably the best thing that happened during the 70's.

º Last Column: Did You See That Shit? The History of Accidental TV Nudity
º more columns

I am the last person anyone would call a homophobe, given my highly litigious nature, but I admit I am not comfortable with the thought of two men acting like two women together. Which is exciting. No, the two-man thing isn't my thing. Still, I say live and let live, especially for me, and whatever you do behind my back is fine with me. Or in front of my back. It's hard to say which is less unsettling with this particular subject.

So I am not "cool" with manly love, that's my business. I don't know why people find it so necessary to make everybody know all the details of their little private life. Ick. And if they find out you're uncomfortable with gayiety, trust me, they only want you more. The gayists, that is. At least, that's what I suspect this is all about. Mario still says it was the kiss of death, but I can't be sure.

The "Mario" in question the head of the Lambito family, the person Camembert and I met with last week to seek an end to all this senseless death, which I of course caused. To everyone's great surprise, things went better than expected. Mario and I took an instant non-homosexual liking to each other, finding we had many things in common, like our diminutive stature and making fun of Camembert's paralysis. Not only did we largely end the mob war, we became the best of friends.

I was so glad to see the mob war come to an end, if for no other reasons I was tired of getting thank-you cards from the FBI. They claim I took out more gangsters in two weeks than 50 years of RICO statutes, but the FBI is known for their sense of humor, maybe they just thought it funny. Regardless, even without the saving of so many innocent-until-proven-guilty lives, the event seemed a blessing just for making the acquaintance of Mario. Never have I heard so many tales of death and mayhem told with so much laughter. His charm was quite infectious, like the hot tub rash we shared.

True, we did share a hot tub, and went shopping for clothes together, and we saw a few theater plays. I did not take it that we were "dating," but maybe Mario got the wrong impression. I tried to steer things to more manly sorts of things, like working out at the gym or going hunting for endangered animals. It was no good. Like fate was drawing us together, every plan I came up with eventually left us either naked, sweaty, or alone together in a tent on a moonlit night. I'm not afraid of my own feelings, but I worry even a straight man put in that situation might find me irresistible.

It was becoming too much for me, so I had to tell Mario I was only interested in him as a friend, in case he was starting to develop feelings. Plus, I was married. Experimenting sexually with another man when you're single or merely engaged or have recently gotten rid of your wife is one thing, but you can't betray your marriage vows. It was a complicated scene, to say the least, made all the more complicated by the fact some of my gangmembers chose that night to whack Mario's brother, the next in line to head the family. Apparently that was why they borrowed the key to Mario's log cabin from me, but when I pieced it together out loud it only made things worse.

And that was when Mario laid the kiss on me, which freaked me out to new levels, and as you know, good people, I'm no stranger to freaking out. I tried to reaffirm how ungay I am, but Mario insisted at that point it was the kiss of death. I suspect he was just covering, though I didn't want to hurt his feelings.

So the war is back on, with gusto. Still, a few hundred dead mafioso or one sweet man's broken heart—what's the greater casualty here?

º Last Column: I May Have Started a Gangland War
º more columns