National Geographic

When did Topher Grace get so hawt? By the way, the original Don't You Want Me came out thirty freakin' years ago. Now help Paw-Paw to his rocker.

Yup, same song.

Their first record in 24 years. Like time stood still.

In an phone interview on Larry Flick's SiriusOutQ show today, Boy George announced a Culture Club reunion tour for later this year.

"Oh absolutely, it is happening, we have planned it. We are having our big launch to announce it in October. We’re going to do a big thing in London and then we are going to come on tour next year, and hopefully at that point I will get my visa back for America. I am really hoping on that. We have people working on that right now and when I come to America I guarantee you...[at]...the first gig I’ll probably burst into tears. It is going to be a very emotional experience.

"We’re going to do a huge worldwide tour and we are going to do a record. I am not sure what kind of record it is going to be right now, but we are talking to Phil Ramone about recording a record with him. And also maybe Mark Ronson writing with us—whatever, there are lots of things...being discussed at the moment. Yeah, that is definitely happening. It is our 30-year anniversary and it would be a kind of shame not to mark that occasion.

In 2008 Boy George was denied a U.S. visa due to his legal problems either here or in London, that wasn't made clear, but apparently the ban remains. I noticed that fabulous Culture Club backup singer Helen Terry tweeted hints of the reunion over the weekend, but so far she hasn't said if she'll be part of the tour. Let's hope.

RELATED: The one time I saw Culture Club in concert was for their 1983 appearance at the Lakeland Civic Center near Orlando, where the opening act was local heavy metal band Four In Legion. Get it? Foreign! Legion! The 10,000 painted queens in the arena were not shaking their dreadlocks when the band launched into their big hit, Party In My Pants. That was the second-worst concert bill I've ever seen, topped only by the 1982 Orlando stadium concert in which the B-52s fled the stage under a hail of beer bottles and boos as the opening act for The Who. Poor Joan Jett preceded the B-52s and departed after two or three numbers and a hearty "Fuck YOU, Orlando!" aimed at 60,000 Who fans.

Here's a touching account of the early years of AIDS and the Reagan administration as told by the son of a then-budding lesbian activist.

Today Alex Pareene notes at Salon that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about the potential of aliens attacking from outer space than he was about the AIDS pandemic, which he completely ignored. Reagan frequently spoke on the threat from little green men, an issue he brought up at the United Nations and one that he even discussed with Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

If Ronald Reagan was a genuine UFO nutter or simply in thrall to a simplistic sci-fi plot makes no difference to me. But the fact remains that he spent a lot of time talking about spacemen. Spacemen killed, according to my estimates, no Americans, at all, during Reagan's presidency. Reagan never mentioned AIDS until he was directly questioned about it in his second term, and he never gave a public statement on the epidemic until 1987, when 20,000-30,000 people had already died from it. When it came up in press briefings, it was, at first, a subject of humorous cajoling. Later, the president was advised not to say that children couldn't catch AIDS from casual contact. Members of the Reagan inner circle attacked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop for encouraging sex education and condom use. The Centers for Disease Control was underfunded and there was never a comprehensive plan for dealing with the epidemic.

How many of the people in the below clip might be alive today, had Ronald Reagan and his administration acted decisively in the early years of AIDS?