mm, don't you know it—even in a world where cancer, AIDS, and any number of illnesses run unchecked and uncured, claiming victims by the millions, one other taker has been revealed as the fastest-spreading (no pun intended) disease of the 21st century: Sexual dysfunction. The revelation is based on money spent on research and treatment in America, by Americans. While sexual dysfunction hasn't seem to reached other continents at quite the same level, the western world, and especially America, suffers astronomical degrees of sexual dysfunction.

Dr. Clammy Goodtime, and yes, that is his real name, has spearheaded (again, pun not intended) an international investigation into sexual dysfunction, based on the spending of major drug companies and private citizens on treatment. According to Dr. Goodtime, sexual dysfunction has become epidemic in the western world, where up to 20% of all money flowing into the medical profession is directed. In other regions of the world, such as Africa, the percentage is less than zero, but Dr. Goodtime remains confident the low numbers are based on a lack of diagnosis and reporting of sexual dysfunction, rather than some high-quality banging going on continent-wide.

"In most cases, even here in America, sexual dysfunction was strangely under-reported right up until the 1970s," said Dr. Goodtime, stroking his charming soulpatch. "Then, in the 1980s, major improvements in diagnosing the sexually-inadequate were made, thanks to the pioneering research of those like Dr. Ruth Westheimer. You reach the 1990s and all of a sudden the sexually-impaired were coming out of the woodwork, figuratively speaking, to treat their dysfunction. We now stand, in the early twenty-first century, as having the highest population in the history of the world with diagnosed sexual dysfunction. Take that, ancient Rome!"

Dr. Goodtime reports, darling, that in thirty short years sexual research has gone from a stodgy, secretive area of study to a mainstream psychological phenomenon. Years ago, before television and the media opened up the discussion of sex for everyone, sexual dysfunction was only diagnosed in rare and extreme cases, such as those with a severe phobia to sex. These days, patients can—and frequently do—diagnose themselves.

Advertisements for medications that prolong sexual function after its normal duration, such as Viagra or Cialis, and devices such as the Intrinsa "sex patch" have attempted to restore the libido of a twentysomething to those who might not naturally have the urge to have sex as much as they used to. On the outer perimeter of such research are also medications which can enhance the physical qualities of both men and women to make them more sexually appealing to people who want nothing to do with them.

Other treatments for sexual dysfunction—regardless of the cause—are already in the works by medical companies who want to cash in on the billion-dollar tragedy of reduced sexual activity. Among other potential treatments, Procter & Gamble is developing a "sex box," a device applied to the genitals which can treat the common problem suffered by many men and women who suffer sexual dysfunction from not finding anybody willing to fornicate with them. The product is undergoing research right now, and no, sweetie, they've got enough volunteers for the study already.

Some, like Badgeport, Tennessee apple grower Wilfred Canton, are grateful to the medical profession for focusing so much attention on sexual dysfunction instead of more incurable illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

"I'm a child of the sixties, man, I grew up in the age of the sexual revolution," Canton said. "I spent my childhood wishing I was old enough to have sex, and I spent my teen-age years thinking I should be having a lot, lot more of it. In my twenties and thirties, I spent all my time having sex whenever I could, at the expense of developing more lasting relationships with people. Now that I'm going to be forty, you're telling me I'm going to start losing the urge? Nuh-uh. I didn't spend my life with an unhealthy focus on sex just to have it end now."

he disturbingly enduring English space-rock band Pink Floyd has come under fire this week, thanks to a lawsuit filed by twenty former children who sang on the band’s 1979 hit “Another Brick in the Wall.� According to lawyers for the now-adults, Floyd never paid them for their services, and also didn’t bother to use them on the band’s 1983 follow-up The Final Cut, which sucked hard because of it.

“These children gave minutes of their time, time that could have been spent in the classroom learning about fish, to contribute to this album, with only years of local notoriety and a permanent place in rock ‘n roll history as their reward,� explained the former-children’s lawyer, Theodore Chuck. “It’s time this injustice was rectified, and by that I don’t mean ‘put up your bum.’ As I’ve explained to my clients time and time again, that’s not what ‘rectified’ means.�

While recording the track for their hugemongously successful 1979 album The Wall, Floyd’s management recruited the children from nearby Islington Green School, offering the school’s music teacher Alun Renshaw 1,000 pounds and “a shot at Debra,� a reference to one of the band’s roster of loose groupies. The teacher insists that aside from getting his rocks off with the Floyd groupie, he wasn’t compensated in any way for the children’s appearance on the album. The 1,000 pounds apparently went to the school itself, which it reportedly spent on adding windows to the grim, lightless building which had originally been used as a slaughterhouse.

“We were just going to go over how they make pickles that day,� explained Renshaw. “So I figured what the hell.�

School officials were mortified when they discovered their students’ involvement in a song with the lyrics “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom – teachers leave them kids alone.�

“We just thought they were terribly hackneyed,� explained Islington’s headmistress Margaret Maden. “And at the time we were worried that this song would inspire British children to take less interest in their education. But what we quickly learned was that Pink Floyd only inspired prolonged attention in the heavily stoned, and except for those jokers who sang on the album, the rest of England’s children quickly went back to their studies.�

Those jokers, however, went about their own not learning with a passion, sure they would be able to coast through the rest of their lives on their association with the psychedelic prog-rock band. The academic habits of the twenty children involved, already questionable, took a turn for the worse after the song’s astonishing success. The children then felt like they needed to respect their newfound roles as spokeschildren for a generation, and feared being branded as sellouts if they were to learn their multiplication tables. Repeated efforts by teachers to point out that nobody in the outside world even knew who they were met with consistent failure. Convinced that stoners everywhere were praising them for their anti-establishment stance and their collective position on dark sarcasm in the classroom, the children succeeded in failing to learn anything for the rest of their academic careers.

After Floyd refused to prolong the children’s careers through more backup singing opportunities, Renshaw attempted to wrong that right with the children’s follow-up album in 1981, We Don’t Need No Hygiene, Neither. But without Pink Floyd’s publicity machine the album was doomed to fairly poor showing, selling few copies. Worst of all, Renshaw learned he’d been beaten to the punch by some knob over in Langley, Canada, and was personally sued for stealing a bad idea.

Though thoroughly uneducated, the now-adult claimants are clear on their expectations for a delayed slice of the Pink Floyd pie.

“I don’t know, I think we should get a million, trillion pounds,� offered former schoolchild Roary Mills. “A kapchillion maybe.�

“No way,� argued fellow former child Paul Richards. “I’m not getting ripped off. I won’t settle for anything less than twenty-five pounds.�

Should the matter go to trial, Mills believes the legal process will involve throwing fruit at the band until the truth is revealed. Richards, on the other hand, believes the judge will turn Pink Floyd upside-down and shake them until enough money falls out for everyone to buy ice cream. Stan Chancey, the group’s expert on the legal system due to his having seen a courtroom drama on television years ago, explains to the others that a jury of their peers will decide Floyd’s fate, meaning the jury will be made up of assorted British rock ‘n roll legends.

Chancey envisions seminal British rockers like Eric Clapton, Ray Davies and the Rolling Stones delivering their verdict via an electrifying supergroup courtroom concert the likes of which the world has never seen. If the jury decides in favor of the band, Chancey explains, look for them to reprise the obscure George Harrison classic “Not Guilty,� especially if Harrison himself is on the jury. If Floyd are found guilty, however, the band may compose a brand-new tune to unveil at the verdict reading, with a title something like “They’re Guilty,� which will likely feature each of the jury members singing a line of lyrics in turn, sort of like the Traveling Wilburys or that big Dylan benefit concert years back.

Chuck, who has long since given up explaining the British legal system to the former children, hopes the settlement will be large enough for him to retire and never have to deal with the uneducated ever again.

Few can deny that video games have had a profound effect on our lives. Millions of hours that the youths of the past spent in idle whimsy, impregnating teenage girls, curing cancer or just farting around are now devoted to virtual carjacking, rape and mayhem. Except of course for the poor, who are still investigating the plumbing problems of an LSD nightmare world in their gaming hours. But whether we're slamming a trunk lid on the neck of a witness or just trying to get our virtual selves laid, few and elderly are the lives that have not been touched by the video game revolution. So how did this all come about?

The very first "video game" was a decidedly low-tech affair called Kill 'Em, a homemade game which involved shooting a toy suction cup gun at the television set whenever someone you didn't like was on-screen. Though the game's lineage is unclear, it does date back to at least the early 1950's, when the world's original first-person shooter was passed on to my father from his older brother Drake during a particularly exciting episode of The Lone Ranger. The game skyrocketed in popularity until 1955, when a tragically excited Dirk Dreck got carried away and shot Harriet Nelson in the snatch with a bb rifle, destroying the Dreck family television set and inspiring the first of many parental backlashes against the video game industry.

The first game that actually acknowledged player input in some way other than complete destruction, however, was the legendary Pong. Never again would such a crappy game change lives of so many. Except for checkers.

What few people realize is that Pong was actually the world's first supercomputer, the product of fifty million dollars worth of research by IBM scientists in 1954. All those scientists were promptly fired when the IBM higher-ups discovered they'd spent $50 million to fund electric ping-pong, which made the scientists glad they'd never told their superiors about the progress they'd made on the world's second supercomputer, the $100 million Color Pong.

By 1972, advances in technology had made an arcade-sized Pong possible, which sucked just as much as it sounds like. Thousands of disappointed teens going Kill 'Em on the Pong consoles nationwide necessitated the rush release of 1978's Space Invaders, which placated angry arcade rats with its mesmerizing waves of colorful squid, marching happily to their inevitable doom at the hands of a user-controlled shooting sombrero. Wildly popular though utterly unprofitable, manufacturer Taito saved Space Invaders in 1979 through a vast public information campaign informing the swarms of teens flocked around the consoles that by inserting quarters into the big black box, they could actually control the killer sombrero-thing themselves. Minds were blown, and America's youth never went outside again.

Unfortunately for Taito, just when they had started to recoup the losses from twelve months of people standing around and watching their games play themselves, the Hiroshima of video games dropped in 1980 in the form of Pac-Man. Originally designed by inventor Toru Iwatani as a terrifying horror game, Pac-Man was conceived as an exploration of the emotional and psychological torment of a disturbed young man trying to escape the demons and ghosts of his own troubled psyche, only to find himself trapped within the labyrinth of his own mind while his neurosis closed in to destroy his very soul. Parent company Namco, however, though the designer's original title of Pretty Angry Crazy Man was too long to fit on the arcade console, and had it shortened to P.A.C.-Man before the game's release.

Gamers mistook the periods in the game title as an artist's rendition of the lithium pill "power pellets" the protagonist so greedily gobbled up within the game, and so the game became popularly known as Pac-Man, with millions of gamers worldwide mistaking the experience for a fun, lighthearted adventure. Iwatani was furious at the unintentional bastardization of his vision, and channeled that rage into his next game, a magnum opus about the desperate last minutes of a suicidal, manic-depressive misfit named Q-Bert.

Eventually, Pac-Man's berserk popularity led to a backlash, which some blamed on the gay community adopting Pac-Man as a gay icon, forcing millions of innocent gamers to reconsider just exactly what kind of packing this little yellow guy was doing. Then in 1981, Pac-Man's chokehold on the pocket change of America's teens and irresponsible adults was jostled loose by the release of an exciting new game called Donkey Kong. Named after an extremely bad translation of the Japanese phrase for "That monkey is fucking my girlfriend!" Donkey Kong introduced video game audiences to the character of Mario, who would go on to star in 5,711 video games, four breakfast cereals, two feature films and one mostly-regrettable porno. Though the corpulent plumber is only identified as "jumping fatso" in the original Donkey Kong game, he's clearly the same meatball that children of the 80's would spend hours piloting through countless bad acid trips in his later adventures.

In 1981, however, Mario was limited to serving as target practice for an oddly construction site-obsessed gorilla, his only defense to wildly swing a sledgehammer in all directions in a desperate ploy to drum up audience sympathy, before he was inevitably rolled the fuck over by a flaming monkey barrel. Surprisingly the ploy worked, at least until Gallagher stole his act two years later. But by then Mario had been reincarnated in some kind of weird, rubberized sewer, and he was too busy keeping an eye on his pocket-change-stealing, housepet-abusing brother Luigi to waste much time thinking about his own phallic issues.

Anyone who didn't die in 1985 (sorry, deadies) knows that this was only the beginning, since in 1986, games would, depending on your perspective, either stop sucking or start sucking forever. But that's a suck story for another day. Stay tuned.

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