Alimentary, my dear Watson

We have begun exploring the levadas of Madeira, a series of aqueducts that snake for some two thousand kilometers in and out of the lush volcanic folds that characterize the mountain slopes of the island. The levadas carry water from the North side of the island to the South, but they also serve as accessible, easy walking paths that enable tourists to walk past small groves of bananas and avocados on one side while admiring infinite views of the sea on the other. These canal walks are all the more enjoyable since for the last few days I've been preoccupied with canals a different kind - my own alimentary version - which had become host to something nasty.

I watched a lot of TV while being chained to the immediate vicinity of the toilet. Madeira is practically an occupied territory since the local population seems dwarfed by the tourist population, 40% of which is British. There’s plenty of English television, therefore, and I’ve been able to catch up on an entire season of House, and to educate myself on the full spectrum of music videos that ‘the kids are watching these days.’ I feel that I am now quite au fait, and I have to admit, I quite like Lady Gaga; she’s sexy, she’s weird, and her name is ‘Lady Gaga.’ What’s not to like?

I never watch music videos at home. I don’t like watching all that ‘booty’ shaking around. It makes me feel even worse about my own absurd proportions and that, somewhere out there, a lot of people are having a lot more fun than me; nevertheless, they make compelling viewing when you’re suffering end-stage dehydration. In the nightmarish, hallucinatory hours I spent in a dark hotel room as my body tried to evert itself, I watched the Black Eyed Peas’ horrible video that accompanies its horrible, but aggravatingly catchy, ‘I got a feeling.’ In one of the video’s more adolescent moments, I was startled to see a breast, nipple and all, pop right out of a dress. It’s nothing, of course, to see Fergie grinding away in her thong like a pole dancing cat in heat, but actual nudity, real nipples, that’s perverted, which is why it never happens. Except that it did. I had two opposing thoughts on the matter: the world is going to hell in a hand-basket; and, things are lookin’up.

I saw the video again a few days later, despite that fact that I was now well enough to exercise better judgment, but there was that nipple, and it seemed important to confirm its presence. This time, though, it wasn’t there. Nothing. Lots of vulgarity. Lots of lewdness. Lots of adolescent masturbatory fantasy. But no nipple. Where’d it go? Did I imagine the whole thing? If so, was adding a nipple to a ‘Black Eyed Peas’ video the best I could do? The matter has niggled at me this week, so much so that I felt I had to enlist Cara’s help. She performed a Google search and found out that there are, indeed, two versions of the video: one sans nipple and one a la mode. The sanitized one--the one that merely depicts Fergie in a thong, playing lipstick-lesbian while her party friends drink themselves unconscious--plays in North America during the day when no kiddies will be maimed by the sight of a real breast. The dirty one--the one with the 0.7 second view of a nipple--plays only on specialty channels in the US. In Europe, however, where the kiddies are less psychologically fragile, the video plays anywhere, anytime. Apparently, I’d been watching a Portuguese show the first time, and had then switched to MTV. I had two thoughts concerning this; the world is going to hell in a hand-basket; and, I’m moving to Europe.