Attention Brad Pitt fans: You can stop sending your get-well cards, stuffed animals, and lacy underthings to Cedars Sinai (see, we told you so), as Pitt has already left the hospital and returned home. Our hysterical diagnosis of the dreaded African Mystery Flu, perhaps obtained by eating some bad hummus procured from an Ethiopian street vendor, proved incorrect. According to Pitt publicist Cindy Guagenti (initial flack diagnosis: "I think he has the flu"), the actor has been temporarily felled by viral meningitis, the mild-mannered cousin of the sometimes deadly bacterial meningitis. We'd love to accept this explanation at face value and move on, but experience tells us that publicist-endorsed statements about hospital stays nearly always mask some other unpleasant reality. Therefore, we're forced to conclude that Pitt has actually contracted some extremely rare social disease previously identified only in seventeenth century French kings, and has returned home to live out the rest of days wracked with madness. The lush robes and powdered wigs, however, should lend an air of the exotic to his and Angelina Jolie's lovemaking, which lately had failed to reach the villager-terrifying heights of their infamous sexual safari.
