Tongue in chic?

Let’s face it, if your tongue was as long as your tummy banana – 6” fully extended – you’d want a magazine devoted to it.

Debuting next week on American newsstands, Gene Simmons Tongue professes to being the missing link between Rolling Stone and Playboy, with all the plusses and minuses that entails. As frontman with Planet Rock’s biggest grossing live band, Kiss, Simmons knows all the hot babes and, sure enough, the cover of their Premiere Issue is adorned by no fewer than three of Hugh Hefner’s young lady friends.

“Sex, style & rock ‘n’ roll” screams the cover and, if the preview articles at www.genesimmonstongue are anything to go by, the glossy monthly is set to deliver big time. Sadly, there’s no truth in the rumours that hotpress is about to launch a sister publication called Sam Snort’s Pecker.

Ozzy Osbourne’s tongue may be disappointingly normal, but he makes up for it with other attributes. Like being completely, unutterably bonkers. You can determine just how dysfunctional he is on May 24th when MTV screen the first episode of The Osbournes, the heavy metal “docu-sitcom” which is second only to The Sopranos in the US cable ratings.

MTV dotted 40 cameras around Ozzy’s LA gaff, left them running for four months and watched delightedly as himself, the missus Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly out-weirded The Addams Family.

“I’m brutally honest to the kids,” Ozzy reflects. “I say to them, ‘If you have sex, wear protection’.”

His daughter’s reaction to such open-mindedness?

“Ugh! I do not need my dad telling me about sex whatsoever! It’s, like, not something that a 17-year-old girl wants to hear. It’s digusting! I was like, ‘Dad are you promoting your kids

having sex?’ It’s just like, ‘Shut up!’.”

For sure! You can find out more at www.mtv.com/onair/osbournes

Riveting in an entirely different way is www.jerusalem.indymedia. org, the online portal of the Palestine Independent Media Centre. The only unaligned news source still operating on the West Bank, they take reports from all-comers, check their validity and then post them unedited. Updated hourly, the site is receiving 600,000 hits a day and being quoted by the likes of CNN and Sky whose own correspondents have effectively been put out of business by the Israeli army.

Long may they run!

Finally, you can peruse Mariah Carey's rider demands (if the straws aren't bendy, she's outta here!) at www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/mariah2.html; what the Beeb's rocktastic new radio station are playing (The Streets, Pulp & Ryan Adams back to back!) at www.bbc.co.uk; and what Carlisle fans make of Roddy Collins' sacking (Michael Knighton, your days are

numbered) at carlisleunited.rivals.net