Porn Valley- There’s a risk you run with taking a day off. For one thing, your e-mail box gets inundated with spam from Kazakhstan which looks something like this: ®öº©¸t½Ï°Ò¨¦ªF¨Ê¤j¨Á¨Ó¦^¾÷²¼¶Wµ«»ù¹w­q¥ý¨ì¥ý±o. And then there’s the usual dozen reassuring messages from “Rufe” stating, “I Didn’t forgot”.

Tempting as those e-mails were to open, I spent Sunday with Steve Volponi [pictured] and his lovely wife Apryl. I’m pretty sure Apryl spells her name with a “y”. Anyway, Steve, who heads up sales for Devil’s Film, www.devilsfilm.com just moved into this house, and we were watching the Eagles-Washington game on HDTV.

And I only mention this because Steve’s pointing out how realistic the rain in Philadelphia looks on HDTV as opposed to regular TV. I got to say, it was pretty impressive-looking condensation. You could see all the pock marks and everything, just like you see in porn HDTV. The living room’s all cozy and smelling of scented candles and Steve’s two dogs top the charts in the yipping department. One looks like the canine equivalent of Hillary Duff. The other’s the daughter of Luigi, a terrier who’s death ripped Steve’s heart out for the longest time.

Steve tells me that Luigi’s daughter was an only child which is kind of rare, and Steve laughingly chides Luigi for not getting the job done with a full litter. According to Steve, the mother resides with his ex.

Not surprisingly, Steve keeps a shrine to Luigi on the mantle of his fireplace which features statues of an angel and a small Luigi lookalike. What’s left of Luigi is entombed in the angel explains Steve. Later in the evening someone asks the indelicate question if Luigi was put in a zip lock bag first then shoved into the angel. It might have been Mike Barbella, who came over later in the afternoon, asking this.

Volponi is telling Barbella, have some meatballs which are cooking on the stove. Barbella’s telling him, quite frankly, there’s a lot of bread crumbs in these meatballs, meaning to say these meatballs taste slightly different from the usual variety you find with spaghetti. Volponi then fesses up that these meatballs are made from soybeans because Apryl’s a vegetarian.

Volponi and his wife are beautifully situated in this complex that reminds you of Mr. Miyagi’s shitzu garden. Mellow sunshine, lush, tropical greenery, a babbling brook. Peace. Serenity. Except for the time Volponi almost had a fist fight with a neighbor living across the way. But that’s another story.

“Fuck, you think you’re in Maui,” I tell Volponi while we’re sipping wine from the view off his front porch which he’s got looking like a tiki bar. Volponi laughs and points to a sign he’s got hanging on the porch wall. It says Hawaii. Which pretty much sums up his fortune to land where he’s landed.

Before Barbella comes over, Volponi’s telling me this story, how he and Barbella went to the Corruption party the night before, and Barbella, who drinks only cranberry juice nowadays, volunteered to be the designated driver. And you can sense right away where the story’s headed.

From the sounds of it, Barbella’s brokering cable deals, and Barbella laughs about how in the days when he was tweaking he’d be washing his neighbors’ cars at 4 am for no particular reason. Then Barbella gives his version of events at the Corruption party which basically has Barbella yelling out the window of his car to a video distributor named Steve who’s in town from San Diego.

“Yo, Steve!” Barbella’s going out the passenger window. Except Barbell takes his eye off the truck in front of him and rams into it. All of this is happening outside the front door of the club where the party’s being held. And Volponi says what makes it funnier is the fact that Barbella was trying to avoid the possibility of valet parking so as not to be seen getting out of his “piece of shit” Volvo. The party, from what’s being said, featured a put-on FBI bust of Bo Kenney, except Kenney’s giving it way by laughing.

But Volponi’s roaring more over the fact that Barbella drives “a $7,000 stereo” which is to say all the money’s been put into a sound system and satellite radio. Barbella busts back by calling Volponi a three-foot giant.

I say to Barbella that he tells a pretty funny story. Barbella replies that looks aren’t everything.

Also on Sunday, video distributor Steve’s telling Volponi he’ll be over at Yankee Doodles on Victory with Rob Black, and Barbella volunteers to drive over there later in the afternoon. Black’s got this blond with him who reminds you a little of Britney Spears, and the story is she’s going to be involved in some Spears gimmick because the prevailing feeling is that no one in the business has yet to come up with an authentic Spears lookalike.

But Black doesn’t want to say much more beyond this except to put on record that Zupko’s been on the wagon for 33 days. Black takes off after the Denver-Oakland game and someone is saying how Black’s got this intricate bet on the NY Giants game.

Back in his tweaking days, Barbella taught himself how to work on computers, and Volponi asks if he’d mind taking a look at his lap top which doesn’t seem to be cooperating. As he’s asking Volponi for a Phillips head screwdriver, Barbella’s telling another story about how he ordered a cell phone that got delivered to the wrong address and was billed for it, anyway. Then, when he complained to the phone company, a second phone was sent to another wrong address and Barbella was now being billed for two of them. A third phone arrived but never worked. The long and the short of it, Barbella says he wound up with T-Mobile and was pretty happy about that.

He’s going to have to take the laptop apart for closer examination, and Barbella’s telling Volponi something about the laptop’s motherboard and its intricacies.

“You got to understand, these are made by gooks with little fingers,” Barbella reminds Volponi.