When that little blue pill was just a gleam in its Daddy’s eye, no-one was ready for the extraordinary effect of its coming into this world. Not that this was the coming of the Antichrist or anything bad. In fact, it’s been quite the reverse with suffering men suddenly restored to the full power of their youth – as young gods, they date and enjoy life to the full all over again. So to celebrate the tenth birthday of this revolutionary pill, it’s time to let our hair down and have some fun. Here are some of the latest stories, ripped from the headlines and designed to raise a smile (if nothing else).

We’re going to start off in South Carolina. It’s the night before Halloween so, to put yourself in the mood as a sixty-six year old deputy assistant attorney general, you pack your car with sex toys and those little blue pills, pick up an eighteen year old stripper and head for the cemetery to celebrate whatever it is you celebrate on the night before Halloween. Presumably, he was just starting to practise those ghostly groans when the police cruisers surrounded his car. Apparently, the local residents were tired of sex between the gravestones and had persuaded the police to mount guard. Little did they expect to catch this leading Republican at his wiccan best. The humor lies in the man’s name. Have you noticed how often the letters “r” and “n” often look like an “m”. Well this guy needed pills as he was Corning, but ended up going into police custody before he was done. Actually, no-one will be prosecuted but the old guy has lost his job – something about not living up to Republican standards in a state made famous by Mark Sanford and his South American girlfriend.

Now we’re off to Miami International Airport. You have to imagine this is a slow day. The guys at customs have had little to do. And then there are these, like, strange boxes weighing in at fifty pounds. So because they are bored, they decide to have a look see and find each box full of pills. The color is blue and there’s that magic mark suggesting they have found a lifetime supply of happy sex and don’t need to buy viagra anymore. For those of you interested in the details, fifty pounds translates into 21,600 pills – that’s enough to keep you going for 59 years assuming one pill per night. Except, when these pills were tested, they turned out fake. We must assume the testing was undertaken by trained operatives who can tell a counterfeit when they see it. Armed with this information, they are now using the address on the packaging to track down the intended recipient. Will he turn out to be an innocent victim or a distributor with criminal intentions? Well, using these pills, he certainly won’t be an outstanding citizen.

So there you have it – a small celebration of viagra‘s birthday. The little blue pill that revolutionized sexual healing in ways that Marvin Gaye could not have imagined. So, as most men discovered, “Just one pill, that’s all it took, yeh!” for those of you old enough to remember The Hollies.

It seems the imagination of the people who work for TV corporations is limited to the same basic formula. Reality shows are big business. If you want to earn the maximum revenue from selling ad space on TV, have a group of people running round the world doing strange things in a search for suitcase dollars or follow a group of families as they compete against each other to see who can lose the most weight. In these shows, the biggest losers are the winners. They become fan favorites and find their public lives transformed with fans approaching them as they walk down Main Street. Actually, for weight loss, this can be a big plus because fans can embarrass people into keeping to a diet. Imagine how a participant in a weight loss show would feel if everyone pointed them out as they bought another donut.

Recently, one of the broadcast channels has announced a new version of the same-old tired show. It’s to be called the Extreme Weight Loss Show. Note the touch of originality by adding “Extreme” to the title. You can always tell producers are desperate when they start using words like “extreme”. So the hook to convert the ordinary into the extreme is that each of the contestants in this competition must aim to lose an amazing amount of weight: the men must be on a program to lose not less than 200 pounds, the women not less than 150 pounds. Now the writer has a conceptual problem with these numbers. He weights 170 pounds in total so the idea that someone could lose more than he weighs boggles his mind. Yet ABC expects the world to line up outside its doors in Nashville to volunteer their time and sweat. The lure of the fame or notoriety is just too great. Sorry, perhaps that should be the lure of the extreme cash prizes for the winner is just too great. It’s amazing how many people will humiliate themselves just to earn a dollar.

The show does have a realistic timeframe in mind. It is employing a team of personal trainers who will visit each contestant’s home to bully them into action. No reality show is complete without all those tears of frustration when contestants find their comfortable bubble punctured by aggressive trainers. The cameras will record these sessions and follow the contestants over a one year period. The person losing the most weight wins the prize. This is not unrealistic. It rules out all those who might try to starve themselves into a winning loss, offering a gentle and safe weight reduction approach. But only someone really motivated will keep to a high-intensity exercise program over a year. This is a fair test. Which brings us to phentermine because, when your motivation is running down and hunger is about to send you back into the kitchen for a soda and snacks, this drug steps into that gap in your stomach and sends out the message, “No” to the brain. Buy phentermine and find out why millions of people have lost weight over the last fifty years (and counting).