Several of our straight porn boxes have a cheerful little blue circle on the front. It's designed to look like a sticker and it says "Gaping Asshole Inside!" in the same sort of cheerful font one might use for "Now with more fiber!" or "New fresh scent!"

It is clearly meant to be a feature, a sort of guarantee of quality: whatever else may or may not happen in this film, you are guaranteed at least one gaping asshole. Frequently there is also a gaping asshole holding the box, but that issue is not addressed.

"We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him," Mr. Lomax once reflected. "Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."

The future doesn't appear on earth all at once the way a stock offering might, or even roll around with the rising sun. Instead, it blossoms in discrete locations, spreads in ponderous waves, and fills the wind with sporelike memes than can settle and bloom without warning. These outbreaks are hardly random - Tokyo and Silicon Valley and lower Manhattan are more prone to them than places like Des Moines - but when it comes to the transfusion of blood, the future has skittered down to the unlikely South African province of Gauteng, a hilly, semiarid region 1,500 miles south of Olduvai Gorge.

Blood shortages also threaten the stability of a multi-gigabuck industry. Today, patients are rarely infused with a donor's raw substance, unless they choose to freeze and store their own for medical or other reasons (think Olympics). Instead, donated blood is filtered and centrifuged into a variety of specialized products, including plasma ($195 per unit), clotting factors ($175 per unit), red blood cells ($225 per unit), and assorted proteins and immune factors, which wholesale for hundreds or thousands of dollars per milligram. That means every unit you donate can be repackaged to fetch $1,000. If you're prohibited from donating - as are Britons, South Africans, gay men, and other demographic groups - that's a blow to the system. A lifetime ban of a donor willing to give four times a year for 15 years amounts to 60 grand.

Suddenly, he is pelted by fruit! The New Yorkers on the bridge are attacking him!

CGI WILLEM DAFOE
What, seriously? This is just mindlessly pandering to our unusually strong sense of national unity.

CGI TOBEY MAGUIRE
Ha ha! That's right, New York! When you let six-foot action figures kill costumed superheroes, then the terrorists have already won!