Yusuf = Larry Birkhead

I hesitate to pass this along, as at this point we may as well just rename this blog Sexual Hijinks of A Zealous African Man (SHAZAM!), but there have been startling, if by startling you mean utterly predictable, developments in the relationship between Yusuf and the mysterious African-Norwegian woman known only as dioubate2005.

When I first heard of dioubate2005, I assumed she was merely the latest, and certainly not the last, in a long line of pseudo-mistresses (conveniently for both parties, they're separated by an ocean). All I knew about dioubate2005 was that she lives in Norway and she really wanted him to send her some pictures of himself and his family. This didn't seem like a big deal to me because I had previously seen Yusuf keep in close contact on the phone with a number of women he had met in the hotel. But as we pieced together her email address over the past four weeks (Yusuf isn't terribly familiar with the internet, which probably explains his vitality), the tale of dioubate2005 grew much more intriguing.

Dioubate2005 has never stayed at the Hotel Idiotica. She has never met Yusuf. She has never seen a picture of Yusuf. Dioubate2005 is a friend of the wife of one of Yusuf's "20" brothers. Dioubate2005 has fallen in love with Yusuf, based solely on his sister-in-law's descriptions of him. Such is the power of Yu's mojo. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised; I suspect a few of you have fallen for the Brack Panther in spite of my caricaturing him. But let me ask you, have you fallen hard enough to send him checks for several hundred dollars every month?

Yes, apparently dioubate2005 has access to quite a bit of money. From what I can tell, she was a live-in nurse for a very old, very rich man, a widower perhaps, who has since fallen madly in love with her. He's opened the spigot, and the cheese is flowing pretty smooth, but, well, he "canno jugujugu," and so part of the flow is being directed my buddy's way, because, I mean, well Yusuf sounds pretty awesome.

"Have you send her my peeture?" Yusuf would always ask, and then we'd go through the photos on the computer. He'd always say we should just send one or two and then inevitably end up selecting nineteen or twenty, mostly of him lying on his elbow across some flat surface or delivering a jubilant high-kick, or close-ups of his face in some artificial fram, like teacher's bulletin board or a lavender, lacy heart shape. There were several shots of his kids and, sweetly counterproductively, one of his wife. he nixed the ones of him with other girls, GWNTSLACD, a pretty laundry woman named Tina. These finals would never go through, so finally I spent one night that Yusuf wasn't there painstakingly sending the pictures one at a time to dioubate2005.

The next time I saw him, I asked him how she liked the photos. His eyes got really wide, and he exclaimed, "Ohhhh, Sparkleeman! [he's started to call me Sparklyman occasionally. I have no idea why] She love it, Sparklyman, when she see my peeture, she scream [here Yusuf really does scream], 'Yuuuusuf, Ohmigod, you are so handsome, I see the peeture, I almost die!' [He tells me that now they are talking on the phone almost every night. I ask him what they talk about, and he indicates, rather unsubtly, that its more than just the weather.] Pretty soon I send her anudda peeture,"he says, miming a snapshot of his disk.

"You are a whore," says GWNTSLACD flatly.

I ask Yusuf what he likes about dioubate2005. "She's a very nice girl," he says emphatically. "Very nice. Also [this is from my notes], big everywhere, I like the big girls. [He jiggles his mouth and waves his hands rapidly back and forth] Bwwwwww, breasts. [he turns his hands up and jiggles them again] Buttocks, bwwwww. Bottom-big!"

So who does that make me? Bobby Trendy?