The Museum of Sex opens next week at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street. The Catholic League is already upset.

Ad Age magazine is reporting that pop singer Lance Bass, booted from the Russian crew of an upcoming space station mission when his sponsors didn’t come up with the cash in time, is going after all. Corporate sponsors Radio Shack and, possibly, Pepsi have come into the deal.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s beyond great that Radio Shack is sponsoring this. Who better to sponsor a geek dream but geek heaven itself? The only thing better would have been Fry’s Electronics — except that a lot of the parts for the Russian spacecraft probably already come from Fry’s….

I could have told you this was coming. Gruner + Jahr, the publishing arm of the German media giant Bertelsman, repackaged the failing 127-year-old McCalls magazine around the actress and comedienne Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie — host of a popular daytime chat show — appeared to be pretty involved (or as involved as a daily talk show host can be) in setting the tone for a new-ish kind of women’s magazine.

About a year in, Rosie ditches the TV show, comes out of the closet and seemingly stops taking her meds. She and G+J had some very public arguments about the direction of the magazine and the hiring of a new editor.

Finally, today, Rosie quit. The magazine, apparently, will fold. G+J, which entrusted a century-old title to her, is fit to be tied, and the vigor of its memo goes well beyond the “shocked, shocked” tone that one might have expected given the slow-motion nature of this crash.

[Later: the NYPost, whose coverage of the magazine industry is excellent, has this story about the folding. Must have been some morning. Note also the comments of Martin Walker, a highly clueful consultant who rarely speaks publicly.]

Giving McCalls to Rosie was a desperate move, tied to the popularity of someone in an industry evanescent by its very nature. That the arrangement blew up should not be a surprise to anyone.

Now the lawyers will get richer.

From ABCNews’s excellent daily political briefing, The Note (registration may be required):

Roll Call ‘s Henry reported yesterday, “Exercising his civic duty in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for governor, [Sen. Bill] Kerry [D-MA] showed up at a Boston polling place at 7 a.m. ÷ only to find people milling about because the machines weren’t working. An aide tells HOH that Kerry slipped on his eyeglasses, spent the next 15 minutes reading the manual for the voting machines and fixed the problem. With order restored, the crowd started clapping.”

Kerry for President! Remember: 41 didn’t even know what a bar-code scanner was….

More from The Note. You may well know that Arnold Schwarzenegger has become active in California Republican politics, no doubt horrifying his in-laws. The Note points to an L.A. Weekly item to the effect that Ah-nuld is testing the waters for a write-in campaign in November’s gubernatorial election.

The Note debunks the report, but misses the obvious. A write-in? For S-c-h-w-a-r-z-e-n-e-g-g-e-r? Against candidates D-a-v-i-s and S-i-m-o-n? How accurate does the spelling need to be on a write-in ballot, anyway?

I’m hesitant to even touch this subject because I know it’s far more complex than I want to deal with. Suffice to say that everyone agrees (or at least gives lip service to the idea) that breast milk is the preferred food for infants. The reality is somewhat different.

There’s an interesting story in today’s NYTimes about the maker of Similac formula putting its logo on 300,000 copies of a book from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The book, which will be distributed free to new mothers, advocates breast-feeding.

“For those of us who wrote the book, this is thievery,” said Dr. Lawrence M. Gartner, the former chairman of the University of Chicago’s pediatrics department and chairman of the academy’s executive committee on breast-feeding. “The impression that people have when they see the book is that Ross is a supporter. This corrupts efforts to promote breast-feeding.”

It turns out that this sort of thing is not unusual. Drug companies routinely put their logos of stuff that they give away to interested parties; the practice even extends to medical textbooks.

The World Health Organization and the pediatrics academy both have a policy that discourages hospitals from giving free samples of formula as going-away gifts to new moms. The policy is almost universally ignored.

There are three big players in the world of baby formula:

• Ross, a division of Abbott Laboratores, makes Similac


• Mead Johnson, a division of Bristol-Meyers Squibb, makes Enfamil


• Nestle makes Carnation Good Start

Breast-feeding advocates aren’t wild about any of them, but Nestle — probably because of its global reach and strong presence in under-developed nations — appears to have attracted particular wrath, including a long-running boycott.

The trust that controls Hershey Foods has decided not to sell after all. (I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before, but Radio’s not great about providing an index of past posts.)

Most of the voting stock in Hershey is held by a charitable trust that runs an extremely well-funded school for orphans in the city of Hershey, PA. Hershey, besides being the corporate home, is also sort of a chocolate theme park. An eerie and amazing place, really.

A few months ago, the trust decided that it ought to be more diversified, and announced that it wanted to sell its stake in the company. A chocolate storm ensued (well, not chocolate, but you get the idea) with officials at the local, state, and national levels indicating that any sale — particularly to European interests such as Nestle and Cadbury Schwepps — would be examined most closely. It’s not just the company, you see. Everyone was afraid that the chocolate plant, and the economy of central Pennsylvania, would be closed. (Read the last few grafs to see how the 2002 election factored into the mix.)

Last last night, despite a $12.5 billion offer from Wrigley that it was about to accept, the trust decided to hell with it and took the company off the market.

If you want to know more about the super-secretive chocolate industry, I strongly recommend you seek out and read The Emperors of Chocolate.

Now that all this dot-com bubble is behind us, the Bear Stearns brokerage is ordering its employees out of chinos and back into suits. To help, the ever-helpful Brooks Brothers store across the street is staying open late and giving Bear Stearns’s employees a 20 percent discount.

A couple of observations:

1. Business must be bad indeed. If there was money sloshing around the joint, the company would be encouraging employees to shop at the much-higher-toned Paul Stuart store around the corner.
   
2. Gotta love the fact that Brooks Brothers’s business model isn’t entirely unlike Bear Stearns. Market goes up or market goes down, the brokerage gets paid on the trade. And whether the memo says casual or dress-up, Brooks gets paid whenever anyone shifts gears.

Bill and Melinda Gates announce the birth of their third child, Phoebe Adele Gates.

… and we all know that Microsoft doesn’t get it right until version 3.0, right?

Congratulations, and welcome to the world, Pheebs. How do you feel about older men — say, nine months older?

The American Prospect carries an informed piece about the perceived anti-war and anti-Bush tilt of the New York Times under new editor Howell Raines. The Prospect — a left-of-center magazine — makes the interesting point that the conservative pundits who roast what they see as the Times’s agenda haven’t actually spent much time working in the daily media, and therefore don’t understand how ad hoc coverage decisions really are.

The bug in the Prospect’s ointment is that a publication’s Editor doesn’t need to have a heavy hand on the spike to direct coverage. Quite the contrary; coverage can be steered in many less-visible ways — like hiring the “right” people.

But based on my own experience, the Prospect gets it right, and backs up its thesis with some actual quotes from some actual reporters on the Times. From the article:

To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that’s how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.

Fascinating but frustrating piece in Fortune about the business side of the multinational corporation popularly known as Rolling Stones. Fascinating because of the detail presented. Frustrating because of the juicy stuff they choose not to talk about — like who gets how much of what.

My favorite part was Keith Richards talking about international tax policy. Yes, really.

And the reported missed a good beat by not asking about the Net and piracy. While new and smaller bands can profitably use the Net as a promotional tool, a backlist-heavy band like the Stones makes a ton of money off performance rights, which makes them especially vulnerable to file sharing.