Lions, Tigers, and Bears

Oh my! On Saturday, you guys might want to peel yourself away from the section of the magazine rack with Maxim and slip down furtively to the Nature section, where, if there are any left, you'll find the first annual National Geographic Swimsuit Issue. One might imagine a koala bear in an ass-compressing bikini, or maybe an air-brushed, languid-eyed tit mouse covered in sand shadowed by a tropical sunset -- shame on you if you had such thoughts, pervert.

So as the United States girds for war and weathers a shaky economy, here comes Hanna Hobensack, a fashion design student in Sydney, Australia, who posed for the cover shot in Hawaii wearing three scallop shells and partially submerged in slightly sandy water.

The cover is one of the few pictures specifically shot for the special large-format edition, Allen said. Most are from the magazine's archives, showing how people dressed for swimming over the last 100 years.

[. . .]

One of the earliest photographs is from 1900, showing a Red Cross swimming instructor demonstrating strokes while propped up on a stool, wearing the cover-up swimsuit of the day, with only her head and arms uncovered. When wet, such a costume would have weighed about 22 pounds (10 kg), the magazine said.

Hmm . . . methinks this maybe isn't so good after all. Oh, but wait! We read further:

A pair of bare backsides from Cable Beach's ``clothing optional'' zone at Broome, Australia, is a more modern archival image, from 1988. Two more posteriors were shown in a 1908 shot of surveyors near a rocky pool along the Canada-Alaska border.

A photo from 1917 showed two bare-breasted women from the Marquesas Islands, ``where women dressed simply for the Polynesian weather -- to the dismay of Western missionaries.''

Hell's bells! Just as John Ashcroft's subscription is hitting the flames, a generation of new subscribers is bound to be fanning the flames of their own fire down below very soon.