HEFNER WATCH: Rapmaster was trolling for hits and he pointed out this Salon story by a guy who toured with the bus tour looking for the Miss Millennium Playmate and wound up thinking that porn and strippers weren't all that bad after all, and so I will join Rapmaster in his hit-trolling enterprise on this here Internet, where a man's value is counted by mouseclicks. Anyhow, there is an anti-Hefner nugget in there:

Salon: And so, in the end, were you happy with Miss Millennium?

Leif Ueland, who wrote this book: They picked these twins ... Playboy is always a little behind the curve of what's hip. Apparently, there was a day when they were in the forefront. Now, they're embarrassing. Their effort to leap on the Latin American explosion came a couple years after Ricky Martin. Getting the twins for 2000 -- it was so hokey. Those were women we never saw on the bus. It felt like Playboy just went to a modeling agency and got them from there. But I don't know.

I like the idea that we looked for the Playmate of the Millennium and didn't find her. You know -- she's not out there! Time to shut it down!

The twins were attractive in the attractive-but-useless way Playboy seems to reserve for their big Playmate-Of-The-Whatever nominations, by the way. So the point is, they went through this whole big bus tour, picked these two twins out of a catalog anyway--that is Ueland's speculation, anyway, and he says they were never on the bus and he was there--and wound up producing some forgettable pornography. The bus trip was a sham; the Girls Next Door had already been decided on, and they were just going through the motions to make us think Hefner was still interested in finding somebody interesting for us all to look at naked. How long can the Playboy brand keep coasting?