Playgirl offers $10,000 for naked pictures of Anderson Cooper

JoeMyGod (see bloglist) reports that Playgirl's Daniel Nardicio has offered $10,000 for pictures of Anderson Cooper sans pants. (Cooper makes millions per year.) This leads Aksarbent to several conclusions:

1. Playgirl must be close to broke,
2. Daniel Nardicio is a sleazeball, and
3. Why didn't Aksarbent think of a publicity stunt like this?

Therefore, Aksarbent forthwith and officially offers $8.37 to the first person who can send us an 8x10 glossy of Nebraska's two-faced, homophobic Governor Dave Heineman without any clothes. The winning entry, as well as all subsequent entries, will be immediately burned, now that we've located our barbecue amongst the shed detritus. Entries must be sent to our physical mailing address which we aren't publishing because, frankly, we hope we don't get any.

Anyway, the upright, morally straight readers of JoeMyGod were absolutely appalled by Mr. Nardicio's attempt to violate Mr. Cooper's privacy, and were not shy in articulating their outrage in comments, such as the following:

• How about offering $10K for naked pictures of the smoking-hot Corsican boyfriend
• WIN!
• Ooo. I'm interested too.
• DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! —  Yeah Baby!
• No shit!

Since Aksarbent doesn't subscribe to cable television (only Netflix), we barely know what Anderson Cooper looks like, much less his alleged boyfriend, Benjamin Maisani (see pictures below), so we had to scour the internets in order to educate our readers. In doing so, we learned that Mr. Cooper and his alleged boyfriend bought and are fixing up an old New York City fire station, which presumably means that instead of taking an elevator or walking down stairs, Anderson Cooper gets to slide down a pole every morning before he goes to work. No, readers, this is not a double-entendre. Aksarbent has loved fire station poles since childhood.

Now let's review some things:

• Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt (Mother: Gloria)
• He has an interesting job.
• He gets to live in a large, loft-type building with a brass pole on which he can take an exhilarating ride to start his work day
• He lives with a dude who looks better than a lot of porn stars (which would be totally awesome if Anderson Cooper liked boys, but we wouldn't know anything about that because our mothers told us never to listen to rumors, and our dads considered two guys getting it on to be a one-way ticket to barf town.)

Conclusion: Dan Savage is right! It does get better, even if you start life as the son of an heiress to the remnants of a gilded, robber baron-age fortune.