ONE HAND JERKING During the trial of fertilizer salesman Scott ...

KING During the trial of fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson, the prosecutor presented evidence that, two weeks after Peterson's wife Laci disappeared, he added some hardcore porn channels to the programming on his satellite dish. Defense attorney Mark Geragos called this "as great a form of character assassination as I don't know what." His client was on trial for the murder of his pregnant wife. The jury convicted him-though not for porn.

At least Peterson jerked off in the privacy of his own living room. In Creek County, OK, 57-year-old Judge Donald Thompson was accused of frequently masturbating under his robes while his court was in session, using a special device for enhancing erections. Thompson admitted to using a penis pump under the bench during a murder trial, claiming that it was a gag gift from a friend for his 50th birthday.

Several witnesses-including jurors in his court and police officers who testified in trials-said that they had heard the "swooshing" sound of a penis pump during trials and that they had seen the judge slumped in his chair, with his elbows on his knees, working the device. They said that the pump sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up.

"But even the president of the United States," sang Bob Dylan, "sometimes must have to stand naked." Dylan didn't mention anything about masturbating but, according to Monica Lewinsky in the Starr Report, Bill Clinton jerked off into a sink after she performed incomplete fellatio. Clinton had previously asked Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to resign for suggesting that we give our children sex education that include information about masturbation. The joke about Clinton was that at Oxford he jerked off, but didn't come.

Finally, a decade ago, I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him in order to borrow some pornography. The someone was the late Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his 1953 seminal (yes, I said seminal) discovery with James Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA. Crick was so elated the day of that discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered "the secret of life."

Of course, despite the fact that I have waited until after Crick's death to write about this, the image of a Nobel Prize winner masturbating to porn in no way diminishes his accomplishments. An obituary in the Los Angeles Times stated: "An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells is parasitic junk." Ironic then, that DNA has become a euphemistic synonym for semen.