WWW- TWENTY-SIX GUN SALUTE: To Al Goldstein and Bob Guccione, who both refused to get out of the pornographic magazine business years ago when X-rated videos started grabbing the market. The publisher of Screw and the publisher of Penthouse stubbornly kept losing money until they’d lost it all. Guccione worked out a deal where he’s allowed to live in a few rooms of the magnificent East 69th Street mansion sold by court order. Goldstein ended up in a homeless shelter before old pal Penn Jillette rented him an apartment in Staten Island. Maybe this shows they weren’t in it for the money. Maybe they published porn to fight for freedom of expression. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Gene sez: While it’s a pretty well known fact that Penn Jillette is a big fan of the adult industry, it’s questionable whether he falls into the collective “we” category like when Paul Fishbein appearing on the Howard Stern Show in early December was asked what the adult industry was doing to help Goldstein out.

“We are helping him,” was Fishbein’s reply. “He has a job and he has an apartment on Staten Island.” I guess we can take that to mean that Jillette has a porn video company or something like that.