She found a lot of the stories in her native state, but after doing research she found that a whole sex underground network existed in the South -- even though the outward image of that part of the country is socially conservative. Mostly it's religion that defines the region. "We're a region that is absolutely dominated by religion," says Parker. "It's not uncommon to find a town with more churches than liquor stores. In such an overtly religious region, folks naturally develop split public versus private personalities when it comes to sex ... that kind of repression leads to some serious pressure building up, a pressure that gets released in some unusual, creative ways."

This excerpt is from the first chapter of "Sex in the South" and it's definitely about pressure being released.

"Dildo-a-rama"
Vacuums and Vibrators

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Sanders has a clear and simple mission: to sell caskets cheap. He'll sell you a coffin with cherubs on the corners and the Lord's Supper on its handles for $1,800. That's half what a funeral home charges, and if you can't pay for it outright, that's fine with Sanders, who worked for 43 years at a local funeral home.

"Funeral homes demand the money on the spot," says Sanders in his Southern drawl. "A lot of people just don't have the money. I try to work with them. I think this would be pleasing to the good Lord."

Sanders buys his caskets from a company in Houston. At any one time, he has 12 to 15 of them in stock with price tags that range from $950 to $2,000, including free delivery to anywhere in Arkansas. Business is good, but pressure from funeral companies is a constant thorn in his side. It's not uncommon for Sanders to get an anxious call from a customer whose funeral home has refused to use a casket from Sanders' store. What the home is doing is against the law, Sanders tells the customer, and, in Arkansas at least, he's right.

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Before Giuliani's press conference Thursday morning, Rudy stock was trading at 50 cents on the Iowa Electronic Markets, run by the University of Iowa's Henry B. Tippie College of Business. After his announcement at 10:05 a.m., buyers started selling.

By 10:20 a.m., his price had plummeted to 10 cents -- the lowest price possible. By noon, the stock had crept back up to around 30 cents, where it stayed all weekend, and seems to be holding.

The markets started in 1988 as an academic experiment by three Iowa professors who looked at Jesse Jackson's presidential race in Michigan and realized his primary win had never been predicted in the polls. The trio decided to set up a system that would create a better, more accurate predictive model -- and tried to lure people to log on, invest in politicians and maybe make a little money.

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But the Republican candidate for president has a richer political pedigree than the immediate family that gathers for Christmas dinners and birthday celebrations. They are, in fact, related to 16 U.S. presidents, a slew of British monarchs and even the American Indian princess Pocahontas.

Gary Boyd Roberts, a prominent genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, documented the remarkable Bush lineage in his little-noticed book "Ancestors of American Presidents," published in 1995. According to Roberts, the list consists of George Washington, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush.

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With Tuesday's victories, both Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore are expected to receive enough delegates to secure their respective parties' nominations.

That didn't stop the two putative nominees from going through the motions.

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Well, it did.

On Tuesday, McCain failed to win the state of Georgia, big time. McCain supporters in his Atlanta headquarters acknowledged their candidate made a fatal mistake by setting foot in Georgia only for one two-hour book-signing event this primary season, leaving the state to George W. Bush, who visited Atlanta last week to drum up energy in a state that prides itself on being the beating heart of the New South.

On the basis of incomplete returns Tuesday night, Bush walloped McCain by roughly 67 percent to 28 percent, claiming all 54 of the state's delegates to this summer's GOP nominating convention in Philadelphia.

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By contrast, it's all volunteers who fill McCain's headquarters, and as for the campaign signs, they're recycled from last month's South Carolina primary. "You'll see that our signs have dirt marks, and that's because they came from South Carolina," says Harry Geisinger, vice chairman for McCain's Georgia campaign. "After Tuesday [when Georgia's GOP primary is held], we will gather them up and they will go to Tennessee or Florida or Mississippi."

"This is a poor man's campaign," said Geisinger. "We'd love for him [McCain] to be here, but money and time won't allow it."

Both the Bush and McCain campaigns are concentrating their time and money on New York and California, of course, where the highest number of Tuesday's delegates are up for grabs, 101 and 162 respectively. In Georgia, 54 delegates are at stake, but neither candidate has chosen to air television ads.

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He grabs a magazine, takes his change and quickly turns to leave. A policeman at the door spots the boner. Busted! That'll be a $2,000 fine and maybe a year in jail for that hard-on kid. Sounds far-fetched? Come again. The Mississippi Legislature is considering a bill to ban erections in public. While the bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom King, is aimed at strip clubs, the literal, almost forensic wording of the legislation is raising, um, eyebrows.

It defines nudity as "the showing of the post-pubertal human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering, the showing of the post-pubertal female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple or areola, or the showing of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state."

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Because of his bestselling family memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," which details the lives and military careers of his father, Adm. John McCain II, and grandfather, Adm. John "Slew" McCain, veterans flock to his campaign appearances and book signings. They trade stories about his heroic forebears and share anecdotes.

The family's storied military history stretches back to Carroll County, Miss., where McCain's great-great grandfather William Alexander McCain owned a plantation, and later died during the Civil War as a soldier for the Mississippi cavalry.

But what McCain didn't know about his family until Tuesday was that William Alexander McCain had owned 52 slaves. The senator seemed surprised after Salon reporters showed him documents gathered from Carroll County Courthouse, the Carrollton Merrill Museum, the Mississippi State Archives and the Greenwood, Miss., Public Library.

"I didn't know that," McCain said in measured tones wearing a stoic expression during a midday interview, as he looked at the documents before Tuesday night's debate. "I knew they had sharecroppers. I did not know that."

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That didn't happen, however, because last month, Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster suddenly canceled the state's Jan. 15 caucus, citing the likelihood of a low voter turnout, which would have been an embarrassment to the state.

When Foster made his announcement, Bauer smelled a rat. Though he is running dead last in the crowded Republican presidential field, according to a recent CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll, Bauer had been hoping that conservative Louisiana would offer his sagging campaign a lift.

Furthermore, although only three of the six GOP candidates--Bauer, Sen. Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes-- had planned to compete in Louisiana, the caucus might have had an influence on the outcome in the much more important Iowa caucus on Jan. 24.

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When he announced that he also would be taking a quick tour of the base and making an announcement, he definitely had people's attention.

After all, Lott and his fellow Republican, Ark. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, had been sparring openly for several months over the fate of this very base, which has long been an important economic powerhouse in central Arkansas.

Hutchinson, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has charged that a proposal supported by Lott to split the C-130 training mission at the Arkansas base with Keesler Air Force Base in Lott's home state of Mississippi and Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia was unfair, and might well force the Little Rock base to close.

The Arkansas base currently trains air crews from all military branches and 27 allied nations. For months, Hutchinson and the rest of Arkansas' congressional delegation had been worrying out loud that Lott would stab his neighboring state in the back in favor of his own state's interests.

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But on Monday, Buchanan finally returned to the state now known as Clinton's playground, spreading his message of one nation under God and throwing in a shot at the evils of sexual liberation for good measure.

First, the would-be Reform Party candidate visited the Central Arkansas Christian School where he spoke to 800 high school students. Later, he spoke to about 100 supporters at a book signing fund-raiser at the Embassy Suites Hotel -- part of his money tour through Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma this week.

"I'm applying for a job held by an Arkansan," Buchanan joked to the students.

Buchanan used familiar sound bites to address his switch from the GOP to the Reform Party: "I'll have to body slam Jesse Ventura," though not "literally," Buchanan stated, in describing how he would be putting the Reform Party leader in his place.

The TV commentator/candidate said he is campaigning on two main issues: war and peace, and communist China. No one ever said Buchanan discusses warm and fuzzy issues, of course, and no one said he sticks to just two.

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Last week, Hatfield burst on the New York publishing scene with his explosive, if unsubstantiated, charges that the leading GOP presidential contender had once been arrested for cocaine use.

But then, just as suddenly, Hatfield disappeared again, when it turned out that he is the one with the record -- as a convicted embezzler who had once tried to car bomb a colleague who was a witness against him in a federal investigation.

Though Hatfield has denied that he is the man who was convicted of these crimes, a spokesman for St. Martin's has told Salon News that a private investigator hired by the publishing company has confirmed that the Social Security numbers and mug shots for Hatfield match up with those for the convicted felon.

As he escaped from the media glare in New York, Hatfield made his way back here to Bentonville. Like many towns up here in the Ozark Mountains, this is a strange, secretive place, where people know how to protect their own and stay out of each other's business. It's a good place to settle if you've got a past you don't feel like talking about. Nobody around here is likely to start asking questions you don't want to answer.

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Bush raced through his paces for Mississippi's GOP elite at a $1,000-a-plate luncheon for Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Parker, then held a seven-minute press conference before bolting out of the Crown Plaza Hotel and heading off to Florida.

Afterward, the Parker campaign said it raised approximately $300,000 at the event. In 1995, it took former President George Bush a day-long series of four events to raise $500,000 on behalf of Gov. Kirk Fordice's reelection campaign.

On Friday, Southern hospitality was everywhere as "W" arrived at the hotel ballroom. Magnolias -- the Mississippi state flower -- were laid out with bluebonnets -- the Texas state flower -- on all 36 tables, alongside miniatures of the two states' flags. A pianist played Dixie tunes in the background.

"This is so exciting," said one woman in front of the press riser. "Mississippi never gets anything like this."

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My, how times have changed. She may have voted (absentee) in the past two state elections and kept her membership in a downtown Methodist church intact, but Hillary Clinton's days of singing "Arkansas, (You Run Deep in Me)" appear to be over for good.

These days, Clinton seldom visits the state at all. The last time she stopped by was almost a year ago, in October 1998, to speak at the 40th reunion of the Women's Emergency Committee, a group that worked to keep the public schools open following the Central High School segregation crisis in 1957. Her visit was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and she stayed in town just 24 hours.

When New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Arkansas in July for a media stunt and a low-key fund-raiser, Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee joked that Clinton's probable opponent in next year's Senate run had now visited the state more this year than had the first lady.

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Dolly Kyle Browning, another long-rumored Clinton paramour, has a very extensive Web enterprise that offers exclusive access to the inside story of her times with Bill.

Paula Jones may be lagging on the Web, but she's consulted a psychic hot line and gazed into crystal balls, and she's planning a singing career, so stayed tuned.

Monica Lewinsky is selling handbags and contemplating the launch of a line of cosmetics, including lipstick that stays on no matter what you do with your lips.

It's all about exploitation, baby. Launched in August, Flowers' site proudly presents the Presidente cigar, a blend of Cuban seed tobaccos grown in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Prices have yet to be announced. Flowers also peddles photos of herself in starlet poses -- $4.95 for black and white, $5.95 for color. Don't pass up the picture of her dressed only in a man's white dress shirt, pulling papers from a filing cabinet with a cardboard cutout of Clinton in the background for $12.95. Each photo is numbered and signed by Flowers.

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And she'll be the first to tell you she's not running for anything these days, but walking -- 10 miles a day -- with a very specific goal in mind. Granny D, as she is called, is walking across the country in order to make the point that big money has corrupted our political process, and it's time that we pushed through some reforms to set things right.

On her stops along the way, she uses the growing media interest in her quest to spread her message about campaign-finance reform far and wide, and it seems as if it may just be starting to catch on.

Ever since New Year's Day, nine months ago now, when she left Pasadena, Calif., and headed on foot toward Washington, Haddock has been attracting crowds wherever she goes.

The Reform Party, recognizing her appeal, convinced her to take a break from her itinerary a couple weeks ago and fly up to Michigan for its convention.

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Initially, the boys' deaths were said to be due to a marijuana-induced sleep. Later, a grand jury overturned that finding, and out-of-state pathologists determined that the deaths were in fact homicides.

At that point, controversial film producer Patrick Matrisciana entered the scene. Matrisciana, from Hemet, Calif., is best-known for his 1994 conspiratorial "documentary" "The Clinton Chronicles," a mail-order film that's an underground bestseller on the Clinton-hating extreme right.

Matrisciana's resulting 1996 film on the railroad mystery, "Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection," alleged that the teenagers were killed after they accidentally witnessed a clandestine drug deal in which top state officials were involved.

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With a throng of media following his every move, Giuliani raised money on Hillary Rodham Clinton's turf and cracked jokes about his potential opponent's carpetbagging. He pointed to his wristwatch with a New York Yankees insignia on its face.

"I've been a New York Yankee since birth," said Giuliani, in a jab at the first lady and her recent transformation from a Cubs to a Yankees fan.

The media circus showed the extent to which a Clinton-Giuliani matchup will be a national race, giving its partisans a chance to play out the ideological battles that came to a boil during the impeachment debacle last year.

Giuliani and his supporters aimed nonstop zingers at Hillary Clinton, who has been the target of carpetbagging charges since she announced her interest in the seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She has never lived in New York nor worked in the state.

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