Is it pulp? We’ll let you decide, but it certainly is entertaining. In Changchun, China, a police raid on a brothel sent prostitutes and johns fleeing pell-mell along a rooftop. Across the street a surprised high school student caught most of the fiasco on his camera phone, and shot a sequence of one panicked man scuttling down a rusty drainpipe totally naked. The desperate fugitive probably thought he was the unluckiest person on the planet right about then, but because he had to face inward while descending, he unwittingly managed to avoid having his face photographed, giving him the most precious gift of all where cops are involved: total deniability. And even though today our intrepid free climber probably needs a tetanus shot in his wang, we suggest that’s a small price to pay, considering the alternative. Suggestion to police: start your search for this guy by questioning all citizens with giant, clanking, brass balls, because that's what it took to make an escape like this. 

And what the heck—since we referenced Eraserhead, how about a man whose head has been erased? Been a while since we’ve posted a mugshot, so today, courtesy of Deadspin, this unaltered booking photo shows a 25-year-old Miami man who was arrested for soliciting prostitution over the weekend. Word is he asked for some head. Oh please, don't get all high and mighty with us—you were thinking the same damn thing. 

Here’s something you’ve probably never seen before and which we’re glad to say we’re posting for the first time on any website. They’re…well we aren’t really sure. But we think they’re advertising posters for a Japanese strip club in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, circa 1970s. Asakusa is one of the city’s main centers of geisha culture, but you’ll notice the posters don’t feature geishas, but western women, called “kinpathu (kinpatu)” or “blonde” on one poster, and “gaitin (gaijin)” on another. We also see symbols for “sale” and “skin house” and that’s as far into this as we need to go to draw conclusions. For Americans, going to strip clubs has an unshakeable aura of sin clinging to it, but apparently in Japan, it’s kind of like going to Disneyland. At least, that’s the fun-loving feeling we get from the posters. We’ll ride the spinning teacups while you give the gaijin a try, and later we’ll all meet in front of the Magic Castle, ’kay? 

It’s come to our attention that, in advance of the big Copenhagen summit on CO2, city officials placed tens of thousands of flyers in hotels, bars, and other establishments urging visitors to avoid a different type of emissions altogether—namely the sticky kind associated with patronizing the city’s many sex workers. We can just picture the bureaucrats patting each other on the backs after coming up with this idea. But the prostitutes are cunningly offering discounted rates to any customer who presents a flyer to them. Not only does this make the suits look like amateurs for being so easily outmaneuvered—in effect, it turns the flyers into coupons. We aren’t scientists, but that sounds like true sustainability at work. Now the question is: Can we somehow put the sex workers in charge of the summit? They’d put together an emissions deal that leaves everyone satisfied.     

For years the sex blog belledujour was one of the most scandalous and popular blogs in Britain. Funny, explicit, and well-written, its popularity led to a series of bestselling books and even a television series called Secret Diary of a Call Girl starring Billie Piper. But it was all driven by an anonymous mystery woman—until this weekend, when the pseudonymous Belle du Jour revealed her identity in an interview with London’s Sunday Times and followed that up with a posting on her blog. Turns out she’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist from Bristol, England.

We’ve posted another nice Hush-Hush cover, this one from March 1961, with Brigitte Bardot, Fidel Castro and Sue Lyon on the cover. These tabloids always have such intriguing headlines, so this time we decided to do a bit of research on the stories. What we found was way too interesting not to share, so if you fancy a trip in the Wayback Machine to the year 1961, read on.

The drug Krebiozen, which is mentioned on the banner across the top of the magazine, was an experimental cancer treatment extracted from horse’s blood. Bad as that sounds, it gets downright gruesome when you consider that one horse yielded one gram of the drug, and the extraction process was fatal. That means treating America’s cancer patients would have required the death of every horse on the planet, along with some donkeys and mules, and possibly even a few humans with horsey features. But potential equine extinction isn’t what killed Krebiozen—what happened is its inventor, an Italian doctor living in Argentina named Stevan Durovic, refused to divulge to the American Medical Association or Food & Drug Administration precisely how Krebiozen was made for fear communists would get ahold of it. Or put another way, Dr. Durovic used his political beliefs as an excuse to duck legitimate questions from legislative bodies empowered to ask them.

As the saying goes, if it ducks like a quack it probably is a quack, and there seems little doubt that’s exactly what Durovic was. In the end, a very pissed-off FDA tested a reverse-engineered version of Krebiozen, which showed no discernible benefits for cancer patients. The question of whether they correctly manufactured the drug remains, but we don’t know the answer. What intrigued us most about this story was the fact that no contemporaneous articles we read expressed an iota of concern for potentially millions of slaughtered horses, nor Durovic’s stunning violation of his Hippocratic oath by publicly wishing harm on innocent cancer patients in the Eastern Bloc. Though we are retro fetishists here, we don’t believe the past, as a rule, was a better time—only that it was more glamorous and, during the 60s and 70s, more artistically daring and sexually freewheeling. None of those qualities compensates for its shortcomings, which the Krebiozen story makes clear.

Moving down the page, the story about Bardot struck us for one reason—we never heard she was suicidal. We’re actually embarrassed not to have known, but since our go-to reference site—ahem, IMDB—made no mention of attempted suicide, we were clueless. Of course, once we looked elsewhere, several comprehensive bios mentioned it. Bardot’s words on the subject are unflinching: “I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Death was like love, a romantic escape.” It was so romantic an escape, in fact, that she tried to off herself more than once. We think the suicide try referenced by Hush-Hush occurred in 1958, when the Los Angeles Times reported Bardot had swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills after a nervous breakdown in Italy. Probably the maddening Rome traffic pushed her over the edge, which is totally understandable.

Next we hop across the page to where Hush-Hush presses the button marked X for xenophobia: Fidel Castro did indeed visit Harlem. In 1960 he was invited to New York City to speak at the United Nations. His delegation was supposed to stay at the swanky Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue, but when they arrived the management asked his delegation for a $10,000 cash deposit. We don’t know much about lodging diplomats, but that seems a bit unusual, in our view. You’d think details such as payment would have been taken care of in advance, via either the UN or the host government. Anyway, Castro got upset and made a pretty big stink about it, even famously threatening to sleep in Central Park. In the end the Hotel Theresa in Harlem came to the rescue by offering the Cuban delegation rooms, and when Castro arrived there African American crowds turned out in the streets to either cheer him, or curiously observe him, depending on which accounts you believe. We doubt Hush-Hush’s contention that the visit was some sort of sex holiday, but even if it were, La Barba was divorced at the time, so it wasn’t as if he committed infidelity. In-Fidel-ity. See how we did that?

The last item we wanted to mention is the one concerning The Golden Girl of Vice. This is a reference to a woman named Patricia Ward, who was an aspiring actress pressed into prostitution by her boyfriend, oleomargarine heir Minot F. Jelke. That’s right—oleomargarine. Good Luck oleomargarine, to be precise, whose slogan was “the finest spread for bread.” Telling you, we couldn’t make this shit up if we wanted to. Apparently Jelke needed an income because his family had cut him off. The fine Ms. Ward proved able, if not necessarily willing, to go ho strolling with the intent of spreading for bread. The whole tawdry set-up fell apart and Ward’s next stroll was into court, where she was the star prosecution witness against Jelke in his pimping trial. The proceedings ended in a guilty verdict and Jelke languished upstate for twenty-one months. The Golden Girl of Vice apparently died sometime before 1961, but we know not when, where or how.

So there you have it—everything you always wanted to know about ’60s tabloid headlines but were afraid to ask. We could have researched more deeply into these stories, but frankly, actual writing was not part of our plan with this website, and we’re way over our weekly limit already. We’ll just add that a cable movie was released in the U.S. in 1995 that revisited the Golden Girl of Vice scandal. It was entitled Café Society and starred Frank Whalley as Minot F. Jelke and Lara Flynn Boyle as Patricia Ward. Reviews were generally favorable and the filmmakers presented a very stylish portrait of mid-century New York City. Might be worth a glance. Now, get back to work people.

For an update on this story click here.

Front cover of the depression-era tabloid Philadelphia Briefs published today in 1933, with a story about cut-rate prostitution, which was exposed by an investigative reporter who of course provides all the lurid details of the transaction. The cover model is actress Jill Dennett, who appeared in about a dozen films as an extra or uncredited minor cast member. We'll have more on Philadelphia Briefs later.

German nightclub-cum-brothel Pashca has seen its Cologne branch swamped with customers after offering free entry for any man willing to have its name tattooed on his arm. Pashca owners claim they were not expecting the offer to be taken seriously, but to nobody’s surprise except (apparently) theirs, more than 40 eager males so far have responded and forced Pascha’s house tattoo artist to work overtime to fill the demand.

Customers sporting the electric blue Pascha tattoo permanently save the €10.00 entry fee, and also receive discounts on lap dances and other goodies. However they still have to pay for that most crucial of amenities—time with the prostitutes, who are independent contractors and charge separately. One hesitates to guess the response if sex had been part of the package, but we can assume the resultant crowds would have made the 2006 World Cup look like two guys tossing a frisbee by comparison.

The guys who dreamed up this promo probably should have known better, because this is not the first Pascha publicity stunt to take an unexpected turn. In 2005 two Pascha prostitutes announced via internet that they would pay any man €50.00 for sex. The purpose of the offer was to find out which woman could have more partners in one day. Both had sex for 11 hours with a total of 115 men, but 1,700 latecomers had to be turned away.