Local time where you're at. ("Where you're at"?)

Not coincidentally, an actual Playboy Club is open or will open soon in each of the cities. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Playboy Club. At the lounges’ height of popularity there were more than 30 before they were shuttered in the 1980s.

But Playboy’s editorial director Jimmy Jellinek insisted the Super Bowl party isn’t all marketing hoopla. “That’s the Maxim party,” he said. “The world’s biggest sausage fest for beer-chugging dudes.” Maxim is having its big shindig Saturday in Fair Park.

The Playboy party is a flagship for the brand, he says by phone from the Admiral’s Club at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, en route to Dallas. “It’s the ultimate bacchanal,” said Jellinek, noting that “if you’re not at the party you’re a loser. The Playboy brand is about classiness and sexiness. This party is the equivalent of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.”

Ex-squeeze me?  Baking powder?  “if you’re not at the party you’re a loser”?!?!?!

And I scan down the page and this quote from Playmate Jamie Edmondson catches my eye:

Edmondson, Miss January 2010 and a resident in the official Bunny House across from the Playboy mansion, spun around, taking the scene of her first Super Bowl party. “Anything Playboy is a spectacle,” she said. “All of this reminds me of something at the mansion.”

Ah, yes.  The mansion.  The palatial residece of Playboy  founder Hugh “Hef” Hefner.  The be-all & end-all of all things Playboy.  The center  of the Playboy Universe.  Paradise.

And my mind is inexplicably  (*cough*) to this exposé about Hef’s little Garden of Eden

The portrait of Hefner painted by Izabella St James is deeply unappealing. A pretty blonde law graduate, she was 26 when she met him in a Hollywood nightclub in 2002. Soon, he invited her to move in with him and seven other official ‘girlfriends’.

For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined. ‘Each ­bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture,’ she recalls in her autobiography Bunny Tales. ‘It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room.

‘Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were ­disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too.

Oh, but that’s not the best part, Denizens:

‘Eventually I persuaded Hef to pay for a new mattress and bed linen — but I had to turn in every single receipt before I was reimbursed.

‘Hef also eventually permitted us to have the rooms painted and recarpeted. But for some reason he insisted on creamy, white-coloured carpets. He liked the girlfriends’ rooms to look very girly, all white carpet and pink walls.

‘It looked great at first, but with two dogs (most of the girlfriends had pets that lived in their rooms — I had two pugs), butlers delivering food, dirty shoes and occasional spillages, the carpet was grey and stained in a matter of months.’

She adds: ‘But then Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.

‘They weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess.

Actually – and I rather hate to admit this – Pup-Pup’s early life didn’t involve crate-training, so I know pretty much exactly  about all that.

Do  go read the rest of the exposé.  If you have the stomach for it, that is.

“Classiness”?  “Sexiness”?

Somehow I get the feeling that Playboy’s  Widdle Jimmy Jellyhead and Jamie Edmondson didn’t quiiiiiite  get around to reading the UK’s Daily Mail.  Y’think?

And I – and you, and you, and you ‘n you ‘n you – are all supposedly “losers” because we’re not – and don’t want to be – part of that.

Sounds like a badge of honor to me.