All Thumbed

Way, way down, deep in the bowels of a long, strange story in Harper's magazine, I stumbled upon the sentence -- actually the half- sentence -- that sort of, kind of, almost made sense of all the bizarre stuff printed in American magazines in 2006.

The story was called "The Blind Man and the Elephant." It was about the Super Bowl, but there were lengthy digressions about the Rolling Stones and Pizza Hut and Wonder Bread and Stevie Wonder and the history of the Moog synthesizer. And on the ninth page of the piece, just as I was beginning to wonder why the hell I was still reading, the author, David Samuels, wrote a sentence that started out about Stevie Wonder's oeuvre but ended up with this:

" . . . the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempts to make us seem like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."

Wow! Dude nailed it, didn't he?

Contemporary American life, God love it, really does seem like a "furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality." So let's keep that in mind as we chronicle the "free-floating weirdness" that washed up in American magazines in 2006.

In 2006, Bicycling magazine published a story called "The Secret Life of Asphalt." Philadelphia magazine ran a story called "Soccer Moms Who Shoot Up." Marie Claire published an article titled "I Surfed Naked for a Pair of Manolos." And More, a magazine for over-40 women, ran a story called "Moms in Menopause, Daughters in Puberty, Dads in Hell."

In 2006, Details published a photo gallery of hip luggage tags. Rolling Stone published a cover photo of rapper Kanye West with a bloody face and a crown of thorns. And Esquire announced that "hipbones are the new cleavage."

"Fake Is the New Real!" Blender, the pop music magazine, proclaimed on its April cover, which featured a fake photo of comedian Dave Chappelle setting fire to a check for $50 million.

In April, New York magazine's cover seemed to show Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with a baby. The cover line read: "Exclusive: Baby Brangelina! First Photos" and then in teeny tiny type: "Requisite disclaimer: This is a fake picture. Brad is an impostor; Angelina is a computer clone. The baby has not yet been born . . . "

About a month later, after the baby was born, People magazine published pictures that it bought for a reputed $4 million. The kid in the fake pictures was actually cuter.

In 2006, Runner's World magazine surveyed its readers, asking them whether they'd rather go for a run or have sex. In the United States, sex beat running 59 percent to 41 percent. But in Australia and New Zealand, running beat sex 54-46. Which raises the question: Is the running better in Australia, or is the sex better in America?

In 2006, B.B. King, the 80-year-old blues guitarist, told Esquire: "I have an excellent medical team. There's Dr. Viagra, Dr. Cialis and nurse Levitra." Actress Rosario Dawson told Esquire, "My brother and I got my mom her chest pierced for Mother's Day." And actor Tony Curtis told Esquire about his 1949 affair with Marilyn Monroe: "I never felt her figure was so proper; I thought it was a little lumpy in places." Curtis also recited a poem he'd composed: