My Life and Times

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May 29, 2005
More Sex, Less 'Joy'
By RUTH LA FERLA

AT the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan, just a few steps across the aisle from Self-Improvement and Relationships, the bookshelves groan with that venerable publishing genre, the sex manual. But to pull a recent example from its perch is to enter a world of steamy provocation that readers of a previous generation could not have imagined. There is, for instance, "The Lowdown on Going Down," with a sharp-focus photograph of a naked woman on the cover, thighs raised suggestively. Between the covers are 144 pages of explicit instructions for oral gymnastics.

"Lowdown" is a title from Broadway Books, a subsidiary of the publishing giant Random House. The book, by Marcy Michaels and Marie DeSalle, is one of dozens of new entries published in the last year in the growing and increasingly racy genre of how-to sex books, which employ provocative titles and slang - sometimes vulgar - to capture new readers. Vying for space on the same shelves are "Hot Monogamy," "The Wild Guide to Sex" and "Mind-Blowing Sex."

At least since 1972, when "The Joy of Sex" by Dr. Alex Comfort was published, with its self-consciously literary tone and section headings like "Mouth Music" and "Playtime," sex books - or marriage manuals, as they were once euphemistically called - have spiced up their contents to keep pace with the times.

Now the old textbookish tomes like "Joy of Sex," which invited readers to expand their horizons beyond the face-to face missionary position have been replaced by shiny paperbacks extolling the excitement that could come from oral sex, anal sex, fetishism and S&M. Couples who were formerly portrayed in a modest embrace are now shown to reveal full penetration. Careful, scholarly, sometimes clinical language has been replaced by chatty girlfriend-speak that might have been ghostwritten by Samantha Jones, the outspoken and sexually ravenous publicist of "Sex and the City."

Those in the business of publishing such books say the evolution has accelerated, fueled by the need to seem relevant in an increasingly sexualized culture. "The generation we're publishing for today is much more open about terminology and much more forthright," said Bryce Willett, the sales marketing manager of Ulysses Press in Berkley, Calif., which publishes "The Little Bit Naughty Book of Sex Positions" and the "Wild Guide to Sex and Loving."

"They're used to hearing 'Sex and the City' dialogue and aren't scared or squeamish about language and topics that in an earlier era would have caused them to drop their voices or switch to a really careful tone," Mr. Willett said.

Even "The Joy of Sex," an indisputable franchise, which spent years on the New York Times best-seller list after it was published and was so racy for its time that it was banned in libraries in some cities, has had to adapt. While the current edition, fully revised in 2002 by Crown Publishers, still retains the allusions to Darwin and Freud originally written by Dr. Comfort (a trained biologist), some references to the female anatomy are now rendered as slang. In addition the charcoal drawings of intertwined couples are more erotically charged.

"People are a lot more accepting of a broader range of sexual vernacular now," said Steve Ross, the publisher of Crown, about the updated version, which he said was edited to be more colloquial and direct than the original.

The revival and boomlet of sex guides owes a debt in part to Judith Regan of ReganBooks, the publisher of "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and "She Comes First" (2004), a sprightly treatise on cunnilingus, which has been successful enough to spawn a sequel, "He Comes Next," due out in February.

"She's gone out and found edgy people and had them write more mainstream stuff," said Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor of Publishers Weekly. "She opened the door to a more explicit kind of sex book." Ms. Regan, describing an earlier generation of sex manuals as "tame and antiseptic," decided to do better. The latest books, while still providing much the same information as their forebears, she said, are "more outrageous and candid and at the same time more fun and friendly, like Las Vegas."

Thanks to the anonymous nature of Internet shopping, publishers say, the latest sex how-to books have found an expanding readership. "Sex guides are the subject of perennial and reliable interest," Mr. Ross noted "But now that consumers can buy them without the traditional embarrassment, their growth has been explosive." He said that "203 Ways to Drive a Man Wild in Bed," for instance, has sold 325,000 copies.

Women are the primary consumers of the new manuals, which, like "She Comes First," emphasize their enjoyment. "A lot of these books are about evening the score," Ms. Regan said. "They're saying, 'Hey guys, we need pleasure too.' " Publishers say there is no specific target demographic for the books, although feedback suggests that readers range from their 20's to their 60's.

And though the books are written by both men and women, the women who write them tend to see a cause in what they are doing. Debra McLeod, co-author with her husband, Don, of "The French Maid: And 21 More Naughty Sex Fantasies to Surprise and Arouse Your Man" (Broadway), a collection of erotic fantasies published this year, said she wrote it mainly for women "because sex is now the domain of women," adding, "It is a woman's role to ensure a couple's sex life remains satisfying."

Despite contents that seem to be ever pushing taboos - even including bestiality, in some volumes - publishers maintain that these are service books at heart, maybe even beneficial. "We're not publishing to shock," said Kristine Poupolo, a senior editor at Doubleday Broadway, whose current hits include "The Many Joys of Sex Toys" by Anne Semans. "I like to think we're improving peoples' lives."

Some experts are skeptical. "You can promise the greatest sex in the history of the world, but that is not what most people want," said Dr. Marty Klein, a marriage and family counselor and a sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif. Most couples, Dr. Klein continued, would happily settle for the simpler pleasures of closeness and affection. "A book called 'How to Get Your Wife to Hug You a Little Bit More' or 'How to Get Your Husband to Slow Down and Caress Your Hair and Love Doing It,' now those are books that would change people's lives."

But the new sex manuals give relatively short shrift to intimacy and lasting connection. While "The Joy of Sex" includes an introduction asserting that it is above all about love, and also has a section on tenderness, its descendants stress experimentation and proficiency. "Try going through each others' wardrobes; why not see what you'd look like in each other's clothes," suggests Paul Scott, the author of "Mind-Blowing Sex." Then there are certain calisthenics for the mouth that seem to require as much practice as learning to play the oboe.

One manual from Ulysses Press, whose title itself is vulgar, inducts readers into the arcana of sadomasochistic games, complete with props like paddles, handcuffs and video cameras. "If you want to make a Victorian porn film, simply turn the dial to sepia," the author, Flic Everett, suggests.

Little is known about whether the new sex books have altered attitudes and approaches to human sexuality. "With the earlier manuals there was some research," said Dr. Julia Heiman, the director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. "We had some evidence at least that they effected changes in sexual functioning." Dr. Heiman added that no similar studies have recently appeared. "But that's what deserves to happen if we are to figure out whether these things have a positive impact on sexual health." she said.

To some readers sexual health may be beside the point. Mr. Willett of Ulysses Press said that titles like "The Wild Guide to Sex and Loving" sold better in the Bible Belt than in markets like New York. The books are "explicit but not pornographic," he said. "In areas where people have a limited access to pornography these books satisfy a need."

As the sex books become ever more steamy, some publishers, even the more venturesome, are already thinking of backing away. "There are still places you can go with these books," Ms. Regan suggested, "but I don't want to go there."

"Social regulation, courtship, flowers, romance, those are things that seem newer right now," she added, "Maybe the only place to go is to get prudish again."

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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

W. Mark Felt with his daughter, Joan, and grandson, Nick Jones, in Santa Rosa, Calif

June 1, 2005
'Deep Throat' Unmasks Himself as Ex-No. 2 Official at F.B.I.
By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, May 31 - Deep Throat, the mystery man who reigned as Washington's best-kept secret source for more than 30 years, was not just any shadowy, cigarette-smoking tipster in a raincoat. He was the No. 2 official of the F.B.I., W. Mark Felt, who helped The Washington Post unravel the Watergate scandal and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, a feat that he lived to see disclosed on Tuesday, frail but smiling at 91.

In a final plot twist worthy of the saga that Mr. Felt helped to spawn, Vanity Fair magazine released an article from its July issue reporting that Mr. Felt, long a prime suspect to Nixon himself, had in recent years confided to his family and friends, "I'm the guy they used to call 'Deep Throat.' "

Within hours - after Mr. Felt himself, in failing health since suffering a stroke in 2001, appeared in the doorway of his daughter's home in Santa Rosa, Calif. - The Post confirmed his role. He was the official who encouraged its reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to follow the trail from the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington to the highest levels of the Nixon administration.

Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein initially declined to confirm the Vanity Fair article, believing they had promised Mr. Felt unconditional confidentiality till his death. Meanwhile, The Post, which had guarded the secret as closely as the formula for Coca-Cola, suddenly found itself scrambling to deal with a monthly magazine's scoop of the final footnote to the biggest story in its history.

"It's been The Post's story forever," said Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor of the paper, "and you never like to see those things go to somebody else."

Mr. Felt spent more than 30 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a prot?g? of its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, and was bitterly disappointed after Hoover's death in May 1972 - a month before the Watergate break-in - that Nixon went outside the agency for a new chief. In the past, he repeatedly denied being Deep Throat, and his family said he had been torn about whether to reveal his role and about whether his actions were appropriate for a law enforcement officer.

Indeed, some old Nixon hands like Patrick J. Buchanan, the onetime presidential speechwriter, and G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted Watergate conspirator, reacted to the disclosure of his identity with derision that a top government official would pass word of possible crimes to Mr. Woodward rather than to a prosecutor.

The Post's articles eventually led to Congressional investigations, a special criminal prosecutor, an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives and Nixon's resignation in the face of probable conviction by the Senate.

Mr. Felt's grandson Nick Jones, a 23-year-old law student, read a statement on his family's behalf on Tuesday, explaining, "As he recently told my mother, 'I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he's a hero.' " Mr. Jones added that his grandfather believed that "the men and women of the F.B.I. who have put their lives at risk for more than 50 years to keep this country safe deserve more recognition than he."

Mr. Felt later appeared and spoke briefly to reporters, saying: "Hey, look at that. We appreciate you coming out like this."

Deep Throat began life as someone Mr. Woodward described only as "my friend," but he was rechristened by a Post editor in honor of the pornographic film of that name that was then a national sensation. Over the years, the list of possible real-life counterparts for the shadowy figure Hal Holbrook played in the film of Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein's best-selling book, "All The President's Men," has ranged widely - and often improbably - including Henry Kissinger and the first President George Bush, who was then ambassador to the United Nations.

But much of the most serious and informed speculation has long centered on the F.B.I., and on Mr. Felt, who was convicted in 1980 on unrelated charges of authorizing government agents to break into homes secretly, without warrants, in a search for anti-Vietnam War bombing suspects from the radical Weather Underground in 1972 and 1973. Five months later, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him on the grounds that he had "acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation."

In 1992, on the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the journalist James Mann cited Mr. Felt as a suspect in an article for The Atlantic Monthly, in which he theorized that Deep Throat's motive was to defend the nation from another kind of threat: to the institutional power, prerogatives and integrity of the F.B.I., which under Hoover had spent decades telling presidents what to do. Suddenly, veterans like Mr. Felt were being told what to do by the Nixon White House, and did not like it.

Mr. Woodward, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, confirmed as much in comments to The Post's Web site on Tuesday. He said he had decided to confirm his source's identity, despite his concerns that Mr. Felt might not be competent enough to release him from his 33-year-old pledge of confidentiality.

"There's a principle involved," Mr. Bernstein said in a telephone interview from New York, before The Post's confirmation. "Reporters may be going to jail today for upholding that principle, and we don't and won't belittle it now."

The reality may be a bit more complex. The Vanity Fair article, written by a Felt family friend and lawyer, John D. O'Connor, portrays a polite but persistent dialogue between the Felt family and Mr. Woodward in recent years over who should control the rights (and benefits) to such a sensational story.

In encouraging her father to tell his own story, Mr. Felt's daughter, Joan, spoke of the money it might make to help pay tuition bills for her children. For his part, the article says, Mr. Woodward, who has built a lucrative career as a best-selling author, had expressed repeated concerns about whether Mr. Felt, his memory fading and faculties diminished, was really in a position to understand what he was doing.

Told by Mr. Felt's daughter that her father seemed to have unusually clear memories of him, Mr. Woodward, the Vanity Fair article says, simply responded: "He has good reason to remember me."

The Watergate tapes disclosed that Nixon himself had singled out Mr. Felt for special suspicion, once asking his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, "Is he a Catholic?" Mr. Haldeman replied that Mr. Felt, who is of Irish descent, was Jewish, and Nixon, who often liked to see Jews at the root of his troubles, replied: "It could be the Jewish thing. I don't know. It's always a possibility."

William D. Ruckelshaus, who resigned as Nixon's deputy attorney general rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in 1973, said Tuesday that he had often wondered whether Deep Throat was a composite, simply because of the sheer amount of information he seemed to know about the extent of the Watergate conspiracy.

But Mr. Ruckelshaus noted that Mr. Felt had access to the voluminous F.B.I. interview files, some 1,500 in all, in the agency's investigation into the Watergate affair. "He would see all the agent interviews - they would come through his office - so he would have been privy to an awful lot of information," he said.

Indeed, more than 30 years ago, well before he and Mr. Bernstein had become household names and Deep Throat a legend, Mr. Woodward tantalizingly told the writer Timothy Crouse, in his 1972 campaign book, "The Boys on the Bus," that they had "got somebody at the Justice Department to say, 'Yeah, this whole damn thing is a Haldeman operation,' " directed from the White House, but that the source had said, "We'll never get him and you'll never get him."

In "All The President's Men," Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein paint Deep Throat as a colorful character, steeped in the Washington of an earlier time, "an incurable gossip, careful to label rumor for what it was, but fascinated by it." They added: "He could be rowdy, drink too much, overreach. He was not good at concealing his feelings, hardly ideal for a man in his position. Of late, he had expressed fear for the future of the executive branch, which he was in a unique position to observe."

In the current climate of public skepticism about the use of anonymous sources in journalism, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein went out of their way in their statement yesterday to note that "many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

But Mr. Bernstein, in a second telephone interview after their confirmation, said: "This is a case history and a case lesson of why it is so important that we have confidential sources. If you were to look back at the original stories, I think hardly any of them had named sources. There's no way this reporting could have been done, nor is there any way that good reporting at a lot of places can be done, without anonymous sources."

At least one prominent Washingtonian expressed a slight nostalgia that the mystery had been solved.

"I mean, I always suspected it, but I never asked," said Sally Quinn, whose husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Post, was until Tuesday one of only four people publicly known to know the truth. "First of all, I didn't want to be rejected, and I knew he wouldn't tell me. And I knew that if somebody else blabbed, I would get blamed.

Mr. Bradlee himself told The Post that while he had known Deep Throat was a senior F.B.I. official during the investigation, he learned his name only after Nixon resigned.

Ms. Quinn added: "There's been a certain mystique about the story that will not be there any more. Everybody loves a secret that can be kept. Deep Throat has become this living legend, like Camelot. And now it isn't anymore."

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Untitled
Screenprint on paper
14x19cm

Alice Peillon

A sip from the poisoned chalice
(Filed: 29/05/2005)

P D James reviews The Elements of Murder by John Emsley.

Of all murderers, the secret poisoner has always been regarded with particular abhorrence. Poisoning, especially with arsenic, causes agonising pain which is often prolonged; the murderer does not have to risk confronting his victim physically; and the secret poisoner usually lives intimately with his victim and has easy access to his food and drink. Treachery and cruelty are thus lethally combined.



Before scientific advances in forensic analysis made possible the identification of specific poisons, an added temptation to a prospective killer was the difficulty of detection, since a poisonous element could produce symptoms commonly present in naturally occurring illnesses. Because murder by poison in past centuries was comparatively easy, few poisoners have been content with one victim. Some indeed, seem to have been compulsive murderers, continuing to kill even when there was no apparent financial gain.

John Emsley, a chemist and a prize-winning writer of popular science, is well qualified to explore this gruesome business and provides a fascinating anecdotal history of killing by five elements - mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead and thalium. But he does not confine himself to man's inhumanity to man. He deals with the growing understanding of chemistry, the effects on the human body of poisonous elements in different doses, and with accidental as well as with intentional poisoning.

Most victims down the centuries have been killed accidentally through public ignorance, greed for profit or lack of care, not from malice aforethought. In the 19th century hatters were at risk of madness because of mercury poisoning, women working in factories which manufactured wallpaper were poisoned by arsenic-based green pigments used in floral designs, and thousands suffered from lead poisoning before the dangers of this element were realised. Even in the modern age accidental industrial poisoning has been responsible for the deaths of millions, and the killing continues.

In this book a large cast of the good, the wicked, and the unfortunate move out of the shadows of history. The victims of poisoning have ranged from a pope (Clement II), emperors, kings and tyrants, to men and women whose humbler lives stood in the way of a secret enemy.

John Emsley examines two notorious cases at some length: the murder by mercury of the 17th-century poet Sir Thomas Overbury, and the intriguing case of Florence Maybrick who, on August 7, 1889, was found guilty of murdering her husband, James, with arsenic. She was condemned to death but reprieved two weeks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She died in 1941, a neglected recluse, her only companions a colony of cats.

There have always been those who believe Florence to have been innocent but the evidence, plainly recounted by John Emsley, leaves no reasonable case for doubt. Florence Maybrick, like many other poisoners, had no difficulty in obtaining arsenic, which was readily supplied by a Liverpool pharmacist when Florence explained that she needed it to poison cats. But her second source of the poison was in the highly toxic flypapers readily and cheaply available.

Victorian murderesses con-tinue to intrigue us perhaps because of the contrast between those respectable and cluttered drawing-rooms and the turbulent emotions which could give rise to such a drastic and dangerous expedient as murder. But when divorce, both expensive and difficult for a woman to obtain, meant social disgrace as well as almost certain penury, perhaps it is not surprising that some women tied to a cruel or otherwise obnoxious husband, and with a second more acceptable mate in mind, were tempted to begin soaking the flypapers.

Apart from the details of the individual crimes, the most notorious Victorian murderesses provide fascinating insights into the social and sexual mores and the legal niceties of the times. An unfaithful woman on trial for the murder of her husband was always at risk of being hanged for adultery rather than murder. Florence Maybrick had taken a lover and as John Emsley points out, the jury in her trial, consisting mainly of skilled Lancashire men, clearly knew a wicked woman when they saw one.

There can be no doubt that today the case would have been won on appeal based on the incompetence and prejudice of the presiding judge. Judge Stevens's words in his summing up to the jury probably represented the popular view as well as his own: "For a person to go on deliberately administering poison to a poor, helpless, sick man upon whom she had already inflicted a dreadful injury - an injury fatal to married life - the person who could do such a thing as that must indeed be destitute of the least trace of human feeling."

The variety of people who make an appearance in this closely-packed book include Isaac Newton, Mozart, George III and the Earl of Leicester. We also meet the alchemists, those indefatigable searchers after the unattainable whose activities can be traced back to about 200 BC. Their aim was to convert base metals to gold, to discover the elixir of life which could confer longevity on all who drank it, and to devise a universal solvent in which all matter could be dissolved.

The risks to their health were considerable, particularly as they dealt mainly with mercury which they saw as the most important metal. And although many of these men were fraudsters exploiting a ready supply of gullible patrons, others were motivated by genuine scientific inquiry and did, indeed, make a number of important discoveries. The search for the modern equivalent of the elixir of life, the deferment of the ravages of ageing, is one of the main preoccupations of the cosmetic chemists of today and is probably equally lucrative.

John Emsley's publishers have not done well by their author; the copy-editor - if there was one - among other oversights seems not to have understood the use of the apostrophe. But The Elements of Murder will be read for content, not style. With something of interest on almost every page, it combines the satisfactions of a detective story, intriguing snippets of history, popular science, unsolved mysteries and murder. A powerful brew.


P. D. James's latest novel is 'The Murder Room' (Penguin)

 

On the Web site PostSecret, some of the "confessions" that participants have mailed in on one side of a requisite 4-by-6-inch postcard.

May 31, 2005
Bless Me, Blog, for I've Sinned
By SARAH BOXER

Online confessors are like flashers. They exhibit themselves anonymously and publicly, with little consideration for you, the audience. Browse some of the confessionals on the Web: grouphug.us (a simple log), notproud.com (organized by deadly sin) or dailyconfession.com (where you can barely find the confessions for all the promotional stuff). You can see for yourself.

One online confessional, though, breaks the mold. At PostSecret, found at postsecret.blogspot.com, the confessions are consistently engaging, original and well told. How come? The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

For PostSecret, you write, type or paste your secret on a postcard, and then, if you want, decorate the card with drawings or photographs. Next the stamp and then the mailbox. Yes, it's work to confess. And it should be, if only for the sake of the person who might be listening.

One message says: "I lied" under the word "oath." Another says, "I deleted the pope's funeral unwatched off my TiVO to make room for an episode of 'Survivor.' " The postcard picture - a split image, top half funeral, bottom half 'Survivor' - captures the moment of sin.

Some secrets cannot be separated from the cards they're on. One sad little postcard has a lineup of seven 3-cent stamps, each with a picture of a Conestoga wagon on it, plus one 2-cent stamp of a locomotive: "I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone."

The following typed message was pasted onto a card made out of a $50 parking ticket: "I got a parking citation and so did the car next to me. I replaced the ticket on the car next to me with mine. My ticket got paid. And the one I took? I mailed it to PostSecret." It isn't so much a confession as a live performance of sin.

PostSecret is simple to navigate. You scroll down to read one postcard after another. There's little else on the site. O.K., you will occasionally run into little self-congratulatory landmarks: announcements that PostSecret will be onstage in Melbourne, Australia, newspaper clippings from all over the world, scores of compliments from readers. But basically it's all secrets.

And the secrets are regularly refreshed. Each Sunday, Frank, the keeper of the secrets, posts a new batch straight from his mailbox in Germantown, Md., and removes some old ones from the site. One virtue of the resulting chronological lineup is that you can look for patterns emerging, certain kinds of confessions clumping together. And clump they do.

For instance, the most recent confessions tend to be the most graphically and ethically hip. They look like the work of Barbara Kruger, Damien Hirst or Sophie Calle. "I want to be anorexic," says one card with a photo of a skeletal woman, "but I can't stop eating."

And for some reason many of the secrets posted on May 8 follow a certain form, a confession followed by a coda with a dash more guilt: "I don't care about recycling. (But I pretend I do.)" "I had sex with strangers for money. And I liked it." "I hate loving families... Because I don't have one."

One odd thing about PostSecret is that there's a real disconnection between what the confessions are and what the readers think they are. One reader from Texas wrote, "Thank you so much for building a window into so many souls, even if it only shines light on the darkest part." A reader in Australia wrote: "Each is a silent prayer of hope, love, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, guilt, happiness, hatred, confidence, strength, weakness and a million other things that we all share as human beings... there is no fakeness here."

No fakeness? Oh, but there is. And it is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking at. The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.

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FORMULA - The International Autosport Magazine

"A little possessed with it all!"
5/26/2005 5:39:06 PM



With just time to empty and refill a suitcase since Monaco, the F1 teams are all set up in the Nurburgring paddock for this weekend?s seventh round of the world championship. Michael Schumacher?s first job was dealing with questions from the media in the FIA press conference and the journalists seemed to be hoping for a war of words between the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver and his brother Ralf, after the world champion tried a daring overtaking move on the Toyota man, as they approached the chequered flag in Monaco.

The press was to be disappointed, as the two brothers seem to have agreed to put the matter behind them. ?We are both highly competitive racing drivers,? said Michael. ?On the track, every driver fights for himself and his team and the fact we are brothers does not count. But, after the race, you remember you are still brothers, you are still blood relations. If you knew the two of us, you would know all the stories about this in the press are rubbish.?
The Ferrari man also revealed that he spoke to his team-mate Rubens Barrichello, whom he passed in a daring move at the chicane on the last Monaco lap. ?I rang him on the Monday after the race, as it was his birthday and all was fine.?

On to more serious matters, the German was asked for his opinion on the new qualifying format that comes into effect at this race ? only one qualifying session, with race fuel load on board, taking place on Saturday afternoon. ?Qualifying, as everyone knows has been our weak point this season,? he commented. ?So from the aspect that there is a single session, I can say that at the very least, it means we will only face this problem once, not twice!? In general terms, Schumacher was confident about this weekend. ?We have been competitive at a lot of races this year, even though we have struggled in qualifying. But I think that here we will handle the situation better.?
Knowing his love of football, Michael was also asked if Liverpool?s comeback to win the European Champions League yesterday after being 3-0 down to AC Milan, encouraged the Ferrari man in his own attempt to fight back this season. ?Do you want me to upset the Italian press?? he joked. ?It certainly proves that you have to continue to fight right to the very last moment,? he said.?