Unreal chatted up club founder and president Molly "Colon Queen" McMaster, who was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 23 in 1999 and modeled in the 2005 edition.
Unreal: Now that you've made "Colondar" calendars to promote awareness, any thoughts about producing "Colonder" colanders?
Molly "Colon Queen" McMaster: No, actually -- although it's funny, because a lot of people call these calendars "colanders." We're striving to do crazy things trying to glamorize the disease so that people will start to talk about it, and therefore we can get them screened. We do everything we can to make people pronounce the word "colon."
The models are really hot. Do you think that's due to post-enema glows?
I don't know. It could be. We joke about that quite a bit. Have you ever heard of Eneman? Fleet is a drug company that makes enemas, and in order to make enemas more likable they have Eneman: a man in a suit, a six-foot-tall enema with a big giant orange thing sticking out of his head. They're trying to soften their image also.
Who's the sexiest person ever to suffer from bowel obstruction?
That's a tough question. Let me think.... You know who I believe had colon cancer, but I'm not positive: from NYPD Blue -- Dennis Franz. Darryl Strawberry had colon cancer; he's a sexpot who's pretty cute. Eric Davis, who also played baseball, I've met him. He's a babe.
Any thoughts about doing fully nude shoots, or some hardcore colon action?
Probably not. These people are pretty normal. A lot of us have pretty good senses of humor about it. But it would cost an awful lot to get me naked.
LOCAL BLOG O' THE WEEK
"Jihad of Umar"
Author: Umar Lee
About the blogger: "In many ways I am very American; I am a sports nut, I work in boxing, and I face many of the problems that non-Muslims Americans face. I do have my American heroes and my American villains. However, Islam supercedes any American identity I have. My neighbor in America is my neighbor but the man in Kashmir I have never met is my brother."
Recent Highlight (October 16, 2005): These people, these Muslim bloggers, who think it is so great to surround yourselves with as many non-Muslims as they can and to think and act like them have there reasons and I have mine. When I became Muslim at age seventeen I was just out of jail, I was a convicted felon, a high school drop out, had just had my skull literally bashed in, was soon to be a father, unemployed and was on a fast-track to nowhere.
My initial attraction to Islam was in the message of racial and social justice. The America I grew-up in, and the poverty and racism that surrounded me, was unjust. Whatever idealized version of America these Muslim bloggers who all probably live in fancy neighborhoods and have had the best educations have is one thing; but I lived through some bitter realties of America that your college professor didn't teach you and they aint talking about at the Whole Foods Market or the coffee shop. A lot of these immigrant Muslims, and even the second-generation, just don't get a lot about American culture. All they see is the idealized version they are taught in college and think that is real. This is the ignorance that led to Muslims endorsing Bush in 2000; hey the Republican Party said they are all-inclusive and since we haven't read otherwise it must be true!
Know of an Unreal-worthy local blog? Send the URL to [email protected].
Anheuser-Busch to discourage acceptance of quarters as currency for beer
By Gregory Cancelada
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Cos. today announced it would urge retailers to stop accepting quarters as valid currency for its products, which include traditional lager, light beer and ginseng-infused swill.
The surprise announcement comes on the heels of A-B's decision to discontinue its "Bud Pong" drinking game in the wake of a New York Times story that revealed college students preferred to play the boozy ping-pong offshoot with plastic cups of beer instead of A-B's recommendation of water.
"Quarters are too closely identified with the drinking game of the same name," said Anheuser-Busch spokeswoman Francine Katz. "So to accept quarters in exchange for bottles of Budweiser would be an ad hoc endorsement of binge drinking, which Anheuser-Busch naturally seeks to discourage."
Allegedly popularized during an epic bender on the set of Smokey and the Bandit involving Jackie Gleason, Burt Reynolds and Macon McCalman, the premise of the game "Quarters" is as follows: Multiple drinkers alternately attempt to bounce a quarter into an empty cup at the center of a table. If a contestant successfully bounces the quarter into the cup, everyone else at the table must take a swig of beer. If that contestant successfully sinks three attempts in a row, he or she may make a rule, such as "no saying the word 'periwinkle.'" From then on out, if someone says "periwinkle," that person must take a swig of beer.
Anheuser-Busch's recent attempt to distance itself from college binge culture is hardly unprecedented. In 2004 it dropped its sponsorship of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane when it learned that college students were staging "boat races" in which teams of four to six undergrads rapidly drank beers in succession at keg parties. In 1999 the brewer transformed the locks on its Pestalozzi Street facility from key entry to computerized card entry after it learned that some consumers were using metal keys to "shotgun" cans of Busch.
"Drinking's not a game," said Katz. "It's a very serious activity that can have positive social ramifications if practiced in moderation. Many successful courtships have their roots in level-headed consumption of Anheuser-Busch products, while drinking games inevitably lead to emotionally damaging one-night stands."
The public relations staff of Anheuser-Busch contributed pretty doggone heavily to this report.
Blog City
The ability to blog requires more than a second-grade education and not possessing crippling arthritis, don'tcha know. It also requires that you pony up $125 for a daylong session at the most prestigious institute of higher learning in Webster Groves, Webster University.
At least that's according to the folks behind the "In the Fog about Blogs?" seminar, held at WebU's Emerson Library on a recent Monday. And how! No fewer than 35 folks showed up to take in the wisdom of presenter B.L. Ochman, a "nationally recognized Internet and Outernet marketing strategist, publicist, author, and A-List Blogger." Whoa!
Unreal missed the event because we were at a $450 workshop being taught how to clip our fingernails. But no matter -- the blogging workshop was captured by blog workshop attendees on a blog workshop blog. (Follow along at prinstitute.blogspot.com!)
At 9:15 there was "Blog 101: How to tell a blog from a bagel." By afternoon Mayor Slay was on the scene, holding forth about "Blogging and Politics." According to the blog workshop blog, Hizzoner enlightened the crowd by telling them, "We have 20,000 that log into web site every munch." Later, Craig Hildreth, M.D., a.k.a. "The Cheerful Oncologist," wrote, "No matter how fancy you're website is, Blogging is writing."
SIC but so what?!? Blogging is totally awes, no matter how you spell stuff. And Unreal's not the only one who thinks so. Seminar attendee Beth Lammert said as much in the blog workshop blog: "Wow! I knew nothing about blogs, and now I have enough knowledge to know that."
