JUST WONDERING: I realize that there are more important things for me to worry about, of course, but this has been nagging me for a while and I am going to take this opportunity to get it off my chest. There is just something, I don’t know what, about People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive feature that makes me wonder. My bone of contention is this: how can the sexiest man alive be different from one year to the next? If the honor bestowed was called the Sexiest Man of the Year I could understand the passing parade [notice how cleverly I worked that in] of celebrity hunks that grace People’s cover, but presumably the sexiest man alive remains that way until he is dead, whereupon he is replaced by some other person. The operative word in this honorific is alive, which keeps the competition to the quick and eliminates the chances of such historical studs as Casanova, Julius Caesar, and Jimmy Carter. But there can hardly be competition among the living for this title since whoever had it first, assuming he is still alive, is still the sexiest man alive, the title describing an absolute state in which the person involved is either experiencing the state in question or they are not experiencing the state in question, as one does when one goes to sleep while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. Just as there are no not pregnant women ready to give birth, there can be only one sexiest man alive; the rest are fakes, poseurs, and charlatans, when they are not actually Charlie Sheen. People subscribers, the innocent victims of this outrageous fraud, should demand their money back forthwith.