More news on the David Letterman and playing bouncy bouncy with the staff story. Nell Scovell, who worked as a writer for the show in the 90s, talks about the atmosphere that led her to quit in Vanity Fair.

Scovell’s point is not that she was sexually harassed directly, far from it. Letterman paid her a little attention (as men are wont to do with young women) but certainly nothing objectionable. Similarly, no other manager forced themselves upon her nor made lewd suggestions. However, she does say that she felt she had to quit because of the atmosphere of sexual harassment. The problem, as she saw it, was that managers were indeed conducting affairs with the younger female staff. Nothing particularly objectionable about that: wives might object but that’s a personal matter, not one for public policy. Similarly, as long as the affairs are between consulting adults not really anyone else’s business as long as no one tells the pastor.

No, her point is that those young women who were having affairs were privileged in the workplace. They got more leeway, more power, over those who were not doing the horizontal rhumba with the bosses. And that in itself is, in the modern formulation, sexual harassment.

Now I’m not all that in love with many elements of the modern world myself and I’m sure most here agree. But some rules about what is and is not allowable really rather do need to be worked out. It’s entirely clear and obvious that men and women working together is going to lead to at least some of them deciding to play Doctors and Nurses whether on a temporary or permanent basis, exclusively or in a rather more secret manner. It woiuld seem absurd to insist that no one can ever date a co-worker. But that is indeed the implication of this description of what constitutes sexual harassment.

In one way, the complaint is that if someone does attempt to sleep with me at work then that is harassment: and if they don’t attempt to do so this is also harassment.

Perhaps the way out is simply to ask that everyone behaves as an adult?

The FBI always gets its man: or so it is said. They certainly think they have got their man in Michael David Barrett. They arrested him in Chicago last night as he got off a plane from Buffalo over the case of the Erin Andrews videos.

A Chicago-area man arrested at O’Hare airport who is accused of taping surreptitious nude videos of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews was due to appear in federal court late Saturday morning, authorities said.

Michael David Barrett was arrested Friday night as he arrived on a flight from Buffalo, N.Y., the FBI said. He faces federal charges of interstate stalking for taking the videos, trying to sell them to celebrity Web site TMZ and posting the videos online, the FBI said in a statement.

For those who are a little behind the gossip curve: Erin Andrews is a quite delightful popsy professional sports reporter working for ESPN. Her looks and figure have absolutely nothing at all to do with her employment, of course, although they did have a lot to do with Michael Barrett surreptitiously filming her through a hotel room peephole. At the time that the Erin Andrews peephole video thing all kicked off, when a tape of her naked was released onto the ‘net, I have to admit I was a little puzzled. Yes, she’s good looking and yes, she was naked, but finding good looking women who are prepared to go naked for the camera these days is no biggie. We’ve acres of magazine racks dedicated to them and yet more tens of thousands of films and videos are made every year.

With the arrest of this Michael David Barrett things are becoming a little clearer. He was apparently stalking her across the country, made at least 8 videos in at least two cities: at least, that’s what the FBI think he did. He also tried to sell the videos to the gossip site TMZ who promptly informed the authorities, thus the arrest (how about that eh, a gossip site with morals?). Clearer that is, if you separate out the two great motivating factors for most of us human beings, lust and money.

The point was not to take pictures of a popsy, not even to take film of a naked popsy. That is indeed simple these days: the point was to take film of someone naked which would be worth a lot of money.

Which leads on to an interesting question: what would be the most valuable picture in American journalism right now? David Letterman in the shower perhaps? After all, it can’t just be because he’s rich, talented, famous and funny can it?

In an interview with the French version of Marie Claire, Demi Moore denies ever having had plastic surgery. This has caused a number of raised eyebrows (those eyebrows that cannot be raised amongst those who have had plastic surgery) for Moore has long been thought to be one of the most devoted customers of the surgeon’s art. Indeed, London’s Daily Mail is the source for a list of the surgeries she has had, costing some $220,000 over the years to add to her $300,000 or so bill for trainers, diets and so on (which, if true, means that we now know what looking like half a million dollars means).

It does have to be said though, some of the “evidence” is pretty thin. For a start, consider the source: The Daily Mail. As one who has worked with UK newspapers I would probably believe them if they told me it was Tuesday but not on a celebrity story. Another claim is that Moore has had a knee lift: you what? A knee lift? A third is that her breasts are noticeably larger than when she was a teenage starlet (for of course, as part of the rite of passage of any such she appeared topless in a scene or two at the start). Well, yes, she’s also had three children since then which is something known to have an effect on the front buoyancy tanks as many a husband will attest. It is also claimed that she has had tooth veneers: this really isn’t considered surgery these days, rather just top notch dentistry.

Something that militates against her having had extensive surgery is the fact that she can still move her face but perhaps that’s just evidence of an extremely good surgeon.

Given the above, whether Moore has or Moore hasn’t is something for you to make up your own mind upon. Rich woman looking good at 46 or someone in training to be the next Bride of Wildenstein?

The story of Eric Dane, Rebecca Gayheart and Kari Ann Peniche and the sex tape brings bad news for all of us that might be wondering when we might be able to spice up our sex lives.

Yes, of course, we are all absolutely delighted with our current sex lives, never once thinking of straying from the one to whom we have plighted our troth. No, really dear, never has it ever crossed my or our collective minds to fantasize about sex in any manner with anyone other than you. Honest.

The story is that Eric Dane (very handsome actor in some show or another: famous in the 90210 zip code at least) and his wife, Rebecca Gayheart (famous in 90210 and yes, extremely good looking) made a sex tape which has now leaked out onto these here intertubes. Put aside the oddity of anyone being interested in the fact that a married couple actually do have sex with each other: there was a third participant, Kari Ann Peniche (very pretty, former Miss Teen USA and Playboy model, yes, not quite 90210 type famous).

So far, rather so what? It’s not as if fame, wealth and looks have not been known to lead to the ability to garner sexual attention from those good looking but not famous nor wealthy over the annals of human history. However, Kari Ann is thought to have been proffering her attentions for rather more mercenary reasons than the law thinks she should. Consenting adults can do as they wish but not if one of them is being paid. Whether or not she was is something that the police are still investigating and the tape itself is part of the evidence (which we can be sure the police are indeed scrutinizing minutely).

The bad news here, assuming that Kari Ann does indeed negotiate over her affections, is what it implies for the rest of us who might be hoping for an addition of some of that libertine spice to our sex lives. If the rich, handsome, agreeable and famous, such as Dane and Gayheart, still have to go out and pay for it, what hope for the rest of us of getting it for free?

Vanessa Hudgens is the latest Hollywood starlet to find that nude photos of herself have leaked onto the internet. Actually, we’ve had Vanessa Hudgens leaked photos before, not just those of other poppets baring their all. The last time around, in 2007, it was Hudgen’s then boyfriend, Zach Efron, who was thought to have leaked photos which had been taken specifically for him. We’ll not point you to the actual leaked photos themselves as Hudgens was apparently under age when they were taken: making it illegal for us to show them and illegal for you to look at them.

There are two schools of thought as to why this keeps happening, that varied starlets, both would be and not quite A List, seem to find that photos of them in fewer clothes than they might wish in public are splattered all over the internet. The first is that they are simply dim and do not realise that photos of pretty young women deshabille have a ready market and it’s all the larger if the kid in his mother’s basement can actually put a name to the face over the more normally private bits.

The other explanation is that such revelations seem to coincide with the opening of a film starring our starlet. There was very definitely a suspicion of this when Megan Fox photos (sorta topless, but wearing stripper type pasties) “leaked” the week before the latest Transformers movie was released. Megan’s pasties had more acting talent than the rest of the movie put together so it is said, so one can understand why the promotion.

But back to Ms. Hudgens, what is the current betting on the dim/calculating question? She has a film coming out in a few days? Really?

Now there is a surprise.

As we all know the mainstream media are all getting terribly excited about this “social media” thing that all the cool kids are doing. Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, established journalists are watching all of this wander past them and realising that they really should get involved. However, there are possible problems in the way some use it. Take, just as today’s example, the case of Amanda Rodrigues, the newly minted widow of Arturo Gatti, the boxer.

The essential background is that Gatti, twice a world champion had, in his mid 30s, contracted a marriage with an ex-stripper in her early 20s. The relationship was volatile and over the weekend he was found dead and she was arrested by the Brazilian police over the matter. At which point everyone went crazy looking for photos of this Amanda Rodrigues Gatti, with results that I’ve described elsewhere.

That is, that someone dived into Facebook, searched for “Amanda Rodrigues” clipped the image and started offering it around as a picture of Ms. Gatti. There’s only one slight problem with this, which is that there are at least 215 entries on Facebook for that name. We don’t even know whether Ms. Gatti has a Facebook page at all but even if she did taking simply the first of 215 as “the one” would be pretty low odds of getting the right one.

Now it does have to be said that none of the print papers made this mistake but some of their online offshoots did. As did a larger number of online only publications. Various lessons could be pointed to here: always check your sources, don’t believe what you read on the web, good points all. But perhaps the most important is that new technologies don’t change the mistakes we human beings are prone to, just allows us to make them faster.

Sahel Kazemi seems to be the latest young woman to fall foul of the bright lights of stardom and celebrity. Kazemi and Steve McNair, the ex-quarterback, were both found dead of gunshot wounds over the weekend.

As background, the football star McNair had retired from the game just over a year ago and had been married to his wife Mechelle for some years. Sahel Kazemi was 20 years old and working as a waitress at Dave & Busters when McNair met her. Things happened as things do when rich and famous men meet young women and the pair started dating. The relationship progressed over the four months to the point that a Cadillac Escalade was registered in joint names (we know this because of a police stop last week in which Kazemi was charged with DUI, although she claimed she was “high” rather than drunk).

While many might think this reprehensible it would be difficult to claim that it is uncommon. Rich men and young women have been swapping their assets for some millenia, after all. What came next is not so common. In what the police are currently calling a murder/suicide McNair died with two gunshot wounds to the head and two to the body: Kazemi of one to the head and the gun was found near her body.

What tangled webs we weave when first we set out to deceive.

The latest of the Hollywood madams has just offered/accepted a plea bargain for the heinous crime of matching up willing buyers and willing sellers of the same product. It’s not going to make much difference to how much sex gets bought and sold of course, there’ll be someone along in a moment to fill the niche, just as Michelle Braun herself filled the one left by Heidi Fleiss.

But beyond my headscratching at the law being so down on a simple free market there are two more points that puzzle me:

FBI agents conducted a two year undercover operation to trap Miss Braun, who apparently filled in the void left for high class call girls after the arrest and jailing of the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss in 1997.

Seriously? The country is fighting two hot wars and at least claims to be fighting two others as well, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. And someone, somewhere, seriously thought that limited Federal law enforcement resources would be best deployed to capture the female version of a pimp? Forgive me if I consider this bizzare: even the authorities admit she was paying her taxes on time.

But what really gets me is this, that at least some of the girls she was finding work for were porn stars. So I’m not even sure what crime was being committed. Is it really true that someone can be paid to have sex in front of a camera but it’s illegal if there is no camera? For most certainly such “actresses” have agents who arrange their roles, they travel to them, but no one goes around arresting them, do they? In fact, didn’t the Supreme Court rule that it was protected free speech?

No, I understand all of those who are repulsed by prostitution, by the whole sex industry, those who regard them all as repugnant transactions. But can it really be true that if only a film crew had accompanied these women as they kept their assignations, then there’s no offence committed? Is the law really that much of an ass?

The name “Paul Erdos” sent the search engines buzzing yesterday and I have to admit that it caused a little wry amusement around my way. The cause was this slightly obscure joke in the web comic XKCD. Slightly obscure to non-mathematicians that is. For Paul Erdos is rightly famous amongst that select breed.

Erdos was an Hungarian emigree mathematician who was famous for co-operating with all and sundry on any number of mathematical problems. Someone would explain a problem from just about any area of science, Erdos would elucidate the maths of it, provide a solution and then, usually at least, leave the original questioner to write up the solution as a proper paper. He co-operated in this manner with so many people that there’s an almost parlour game (perhaps that should be faculty room game) of working out what one’s Erdos number is. If you co-authored a paper with the Great Man himself then your Erdos number is 1. If you’ve written one with someone whose number is 1, then yours is 2, if with someone with a 2 then 3 and so on. If you think this sounds a little like the Kevin Bacon game then that’s no surprise, for it’s based upon the same sort of idea. In fact, there is an arcane variation of both, where you calculate the Erdos/Bacon number, looking at who has authored a maths paper and who has been in a movie. Apparently the winner of this is Brian Greene.

But recently, following a spate of mathematical films such as “Good Will Hunting”, an elite group of people have emerged, namely those who have appeared in films and written mathematical papers, and therefore qualify for Erdos-Bacon numbers. For a long time, the physicist Brian Greene had a clear lead with score of 5. He appeared in “Frequency” with John Di Benedetto, who was in ““Sleepers” with Kevin Bacon. And he wrote a paper with Shing-Tung Yau, who wrote a paper with Ronald Graham, who wrote a paper with Erdos. This gives a combined number of 2 + 3 = 5.

That isn’t what caused my mild amusement though. It was that upon being presented with this, to non-mathematicians, obscure joke, thousands of people (if not tens of thousands, at least, the sort of number required to get Google Trends to note what is happening) decided to hunt around and try to understand the joke.

Which is a little bit odd, for of course a joke that needs explaining is no longer funny, is it?

The great political story from over the water this weekend is, well, I’ll spare you all of the names and details because they bore even me and it was one of my friends who broke the story in the first place.

In essence the current ruling Labour party were going to launch a blog containing all sorts of gossip and tittle tattle aimed at the opposition Conservative party. Not pretty stuff either: that David Cameron (likely to be the next Prime Minister) has or had a sexually transmitted disease, that the wife of the likely next Chancellor (think Treasury Secretary) was mentally flakey, that one famously morally upright MP (think congresswoman) had had a night of unbridled passion with a married man…one not married to her.

All part of the rough and tumble of politics you might think, certainly it’s not unusual for people to float these sorts of accusations. However, they normally come from fairly low level operatives and these ideas had come from the current Prime Minister’s most senior communications strategist. He has now resigned of course (the strategist, not the Prime Minister unfortunately).

But that’s not the really fun part. The man who was to be running the blog is now complaining that the only way these discussions could have been discovered is if his email system had been hacked. This complaint coming in the week that a new law came into force: one that says that the government he supports now has the right to hack into anyone’s email, anytime, without a warrant.

He then signs off his week with the statement, live on national television, that “I wasn’t lying on purpose”.

Who needs satire when you’ve got politicians to play with?