Several colleagues tried to dissuade me from extolling last week’s missive in which I predicted every corporation would inexorably congeal into a single behemoth. But how can I resist given the intervening week has seen Proctor & Gamble swallow Gillette and SBC initiate AT&T’s demise? Self-glorification, they argued, is nothing more than intellectual masturbation. Yeah, well, I like masturbation.

It’s no big deal; if it’s serious mayhem you’re after, try grabbing someone else’s wiener. Like Boston priest Paul Shanley or Michael Jackson. While Shanley’s rape case has gone into deliberation, jury selection is just beginning in Jackson’s child-molestation trial. And already Judge Rodney Melville is on course to become the Lance Ito of the new millennium. His honor ruled that Jackson’s porn stash could be displayed in the courtroom but that the images could not be referred to as “pornographic” or “obscene.” It’s unclear if prosecutors can hold up images of a man’s dangly bits while blurting out “throbbing hog” or “sweaty bishop.” The bench, however, has yet to rule on the relevance of the pop star’s (reputed) $15 million payoff to a prior victim and the admissibility of his collection of SpongeBob SquarePants videos.

Defense attorneys are on edge after evangelist James Dobson denounced the porous cartoon character’s role in a “pro-homosexual video” produced by the We Are Family Foundation. The video is being distributed to 61,000 elementary schools in an effort to promote tolerance and celebrate diversity. Dobson, for one, wasn’t swayed: “Their inclusion of the reference to ‘sexual identity’ within their ‘tolerance pledge’ is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line.” Dobson went on to note that he had spotted SpongeBob doing poppers with Tinky Winky, the purple, purse-carrying Teletubby.

Dobson desperately wanted to use a pejorative but was muted during the second annual “No Name-Calling Week.” The program, created by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, is endorsed by dozens of organizations including the national associations of elementary and secondary school principals and the Girl Scouts of America. Conspicuously absent from the list of supporters is the Concerned Women of America, whose director, Robert Knight, is apoplectic. “You can teach civility to kids and tell them every child is valued without conveying the message that failure to accept homosexuality as normal is a sign of bigotry.” Why Knight is head of a women’s organization remains a mystery. Is he transgendered or merely a crossdresser? Either way, he’s one angry dame: “I hope schools will realize it’s less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pan-sexual agenda.” Huh? Personally, I’ve never had sex with a pan – a melon perhaps – but I can’t imagine there would be a great number of people open to conversion. I mean, do you have to take it off the stove first?

Not in Guantanamo Bay where female interrogators cranked up the heat in an attempt to break Muslim detainees. Sergeant Erik Saar reported that one female investigator, unable to gain information, stripped off her uniform to reveal thong underwear and a tight T-shirt. She proceeded to rub her breasts on her prisoner and when that failed to do the trick, she resorted to smearing him with fake menstrual blood. (Although this seems rather barbaric, it does work: when my girlfriend breaks out the phony monthly discharge I give her whatever she wants.) When British inmates first claimed that prostitutes tormented them in their cells, they found few believers. But that’s all changed in the wake of recent revelations. The FBI has reports of women grabbing prisoners’ genitals while the Pentagon acknowledged yet another incident in which a female guard ran her fingers through an inmate’s hair and gave him a lap dance. I’m not sure if this is what Alberto Gonzales had in mind when he penned the infamous torture memo. Perhaps he confused the Geneva Convention of 1949 with the Drunk-Driving Conviction facing an Austin stripper in October 1996. In that case, then-governor Bush was called for jury duty and had Gonzales not persuaded the judge to release the high-profile juror, W would have been required to disclose his own 1976 DUI conviction.

But no matter, ramifications of the techniques used in U.S. military prisons are spreading faster than Paris Hilton. Bill O’Reilly now claims that his former producer was a Taliban operative and that his frequent and lurid attempts at phone sex were in fact sanctioned by the Department of Homeland Security. Michael Jackson’s attorney, Thomas Mesereau, Jr., is considering a similar defense tactic, although it remains to be seen if he can sell the plausibility of a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda posing as a twelve-year-old cancer patient. Only time will tell.