HEFNER WATCH: Little opinion piece from one of those new Chicago tabloid youth-market things (and via the Bomis Babe Report) on Hef hiring a Maxim guy to make Playboy profitable again. This will apparently involve turning Playboy eliminating the nudity and turning into another one of those cretinous lad magazines--British imports, I hasten to ad, relics of a more primitive popular culture. What's the appeal in those things? I don't get it, but maybe the lad mag target audience are married men who want a safe form of pornography. I dunno. But what's the point of FHM or Gear if you can get better articles in The Atlantic or Vanity Fair, better interviews in--yes--Playboy, better pornography in Club or Penthouse? Who are you people, and why are you eroding the sexual revolution?

But basically I think Playboy is sort of a lost cause anyway, so whatever Hef wants to do with it to make it relevant or whatever again is fine by me. (The Tia pictures were pretty good, by the way, not especially revealing but not especially annoyingly faux-arty either. The fact that these were pictures of Tia Carrere without any clothes on sort of overwhelms any minor artistic concerns.) Just as long as he doesn't do away with the 96 pages of cheap, tasteful, continous nudity that are the Playboy newsstand specials he and Johnny Maxim can do what they want, import the prurient tastes of British people onto our shores or put the cast of Gilmore Girls in bikinis or whatever. Leave me my tasteful nudity; it's what Playboy's always done best.