Hit and Run No. CLVI

Freetown in ruins. An air war over Iraq. Mad bombers ravaging Kisangani, and a Roberto Benigni movie playing at theaters everywhere. As offenses against international peace continue to rise, Tom Cropper’s “Simple Song of Peace” may be just what Kofi Annan ordered. In a manually circulated email, Cropper, who hails from a part of Maryland close to Wye Plantation, recounted his meeting with Oslo native Maarten Willemse. The meeting led to the realization that “we were both from areas identified with the furtherance of Peace” and, finally, to a visionary dream in which thousands join in singing a song for “those struggling without Peace.” Sure enough, the song is now a reality, and you can join the chorus with a sound file of your karaoking self, which will be mixed into a LiveAid of global unknowns. We caught up with Cropper to see how we could help spread the message.

Would you say “Simple Song” is closer in spirit to Hands Across America or the Harmonic Convergence?

“It’s along those lines. I’m a programmer, so I think in programming terms. The idea is for people to record in their own homes; then we digitally mix the voices together.”

Are you related to the legendary guitarist Steve Cropper?

“No. Good call, but my background is in writing software.”

When writing software, people usually include comments to explain what their code is doing. Will you provide comments — say, “This verse will really help out the Angolans.” — to explain “Simple Song”?

“When I put together a Web site for it, I may go into the meaning behind some of the lyrics. For example, there’s a line about enemies that says, ‘Meet him and hug him and help him to soar / If you kill him today, sir, his sons will kill yours.’ The comment there might be, ‘Hate breeds hate; violence breeds retribution. That’s not what peace is all about.'”

That “sir” has kind of a Springsteen feeling to it. But right now, heavy metal is supposed to be making a comeback. Will “Simple Song” have any kind of metal feeling?

“It’s more of an acoustic guitar, keep-Peace-alive type song.”

The Israelis and Palestinians both accuse each other of violating the Wye Agreement and the Oslo Accords. Will that affect the singing of the song?

“No, absolutely not. We’re thinking of it more on a personal level — people to people — rather than on a governmental level. We’ve had a lot of response from people around the world: Russia, China, Gaza. People are getting the word through the Net.”

What’s a fjord?

“There’s a great one that leads right into Oslo. It’s a really gorgeous waterway. I don’t know if they always go out to the sea.”

What can our readers do to help out with the “Simple Song of Peace”?

“Right now, we’re just asking people to email me for information about the song. I’m working with text to make an easy way for people to listen to the music, sing it, and mix it on an MP3 box.”

Increase the Peace! Just a few weeks ago, we were getting spammed for Alan Marshall’s book Brothers Beware: Games Black Women Play. Now we’ve been propositioned again, this time for Stefan Feller’s book How to Juggle Women: Without Getting Killed or Going Broke. This essential guide for the seasoned dating man who needs help organizing the women in his life offers tips on scheduling, time-saving methods that will increase availability, and financial planning for the man who’s surrounded by grasping gold diggers. Like R. Don Steele and the men of Steel Balls, whose How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35 has been bought by more than 12,000 hopeful Anthony Quinns, Feller’s book (motto: “Forget the saying, ‘For every man there is a woman out there.’ Now it will be, ‘For every man there are at least three women.'”) is an e-commerce product that hints at the profound evolution of Internet users over the past few years. Whether or not these prospective sultans and aging studs are actually getting any results from their training, it’s pretty clear we’ve come a long way from the days when the ideal book to sell online was How to Say Hello to a Real-Life Woman Without Breaking Out in Shingles.

If none of these books can perk up your love life, you might want to try Blue Nitro, the available-in-stores GHB substitute that promises to help you sleep better, lose weight faster than a barrel of Herbal Therm 777, and most important, put a whole lot of lead in your pencil. Unlike GHB, Blue Nitro has not yet been named as the Michael Finn in any date rape cases, but the minty green liquid has been connected with a series of comas in California. One 71-year-old Monterey resident was hospitalized after a wacky hey-that’s-my-denture-glass mix-up in which the aged Romeo accidentally took a swig from what he thought was a bedside water bottle. Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Poison Control Center are conducting a public information campaign to warn of the drug’s dangers. But even if this doesn’t turn out to be another example of the DEA’s antidrug disinformation (like the old strychnine-in-LSD canard), a drug that makes you lose consciousness after coitus seems like it would just be giving us more of what we already have. Then again, if instruction manuals and drugs don’t help, there’s always the home-alone score. Proving those old dual principles — everything old is new again and real hooters are better — Retroraunch is offering a catalog of backward looking sex highlights. But unlike such established practitioners as Nostalgia Porn, which have only managed to pimp the Cocktail Nation’s hunger for cheesecake, Retroraunch’s century and more of smut shows a breadth of historical interest worthy of Edward Gibbon. Items include fetish pix, Tijuana Bibles, and interracial hard-core “from as far back as the Civil War!” Which begs the question: Given the prehistoric pedigree of porn, how far back will we go in creating new niche markets? Shakespeare in Love, with its realization of the myth that the Elizabethans were as randy as they were unhygienic, would seem to have opened up the Renaissance to more daring artists, but beyond that, what’s next? More Roman films with “additional footage directed by Bob Guccione”? Interspecies hard-core between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals? Hot trilobite-trilobite action?

Drudge Report readers now know for certain that Danny Williams has “been told all of his life by his mother that Bill Clinton is his father.” This phrase was included in every one of the reports Drudge filed on Clinton’s “Latest DNA Nightmare,” and right now we don’t know who to feel sorrier for: Williams, who turns out not to share DNA with the man over 35 who can score with younger women, or Drudge, who has been reduced to filing an ungodly number of stories (estimated by experts at somewhere near umpteen) on an 8-year-old rumor that, even if true, would have left Clinton guilty of a peccadillo that has been accepted presidential behavior for more than 100 years. If Drudge had an ounce of self-deprecation, his current debacle might seem pathetic in the Greek sense rather than merely lame in the geek sense. As it is, we’re left to speculate on how low yesterday’s hero’s star has sunk. For our official estimate of the situation, tune in tomorrow. We’ll report further as circumstances warrant.