sex

I take back everything negative I’ve ever said about the Hotel Cremorne. I went exploring upstairs and found a cocktail bar called “Antlers”. Antlers and cocktails? Heaven!

On Wednesday my Twitter stream was dominated by the Politics & Technology Forum, and I’ll write more about that later. The other highlights this week:

1. MYOB continue to flood me with far too much promotional material, even when specifically requested not to. Losers.
2. People continue to install new software on the very day of its release, discover that it’s still buggy or insecure, and then complain. Do you never learn?
3. The Aurora Hotel in Surry Hills and the C Bar on the corner of Pitt and Campbell Streets in the Sydney CBD have free Wifi.
4. The comedians on stage at The Sly Fox Hotel on a Monday night are 300% more bitter & disturbed than I am.
5. There is no evidence that 17 Massachusetts schoolgirls became pregnant because of a “pregnancy pact”
6. There is not, but should be, continuous 3G or HSDPA phone coverage on the highway between Sydney and Canberra. In some places there isn’t even GSM!
7. “The 7 categorises of satedness: Food. Sexual pleasure. Alcohol. Music. Visual appeal. Amphetamines. Blue cheese. Agreed?”
8. The Concourse Bar at Wynyard Station has Coopers Ale for $4.70 a schooner and a choice of six cocktails for $7 each.
9. “Backpacking” has descended from “travel world for enrichment” to “global party by indulgent drunken arseholes”. Hence, “gas them”.
10. Automatic weapons really do solve so many everyday problems.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

One book on my to-buy list is the recently-released The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby. Until I get around to that, Danny Yee’s review has some juicy tidbits (ooherr).

[T]he common stereotypes are wrong: unsurprisingly, given that pornography users make up about a third of Australian adults, they are fairly representative of the broader population, with the major exception being that fewer than one in five of the respondents were women…

Detailed analysis of the most popular Australian DVD titles shows that, even with broad definitions, fewer than 2% of scenes have any kind of violence. The total ban on violence in the Australian X-rated category seems to have worked. Another finding was that “pornography does not really objectify women more than men… On some measures, men are the more active sexual subjects… on others, it’s the women.” The Internet is a lot more diverse, but despite extensive efforts the authors managed to find not a single site with actual rape photographs, and only a handful of sites with faked ones.

There is no evidence that pornography causes harm to its users: the studies that suggest this have involved pushing pornography on non-users in artificial laboratory experiments. In contrast, there has been almost no attempts to study the beneficial effects of pornography, even though consumers overwhelmingly report positive effects…

Part 2 of the book covers issues such as censorship, and notes:

“Protecting the children” has been a rallying call for censorship for a long time. It turns out that actual child pornography — the police prefer to call it “child abuse material” — is extremely hard to find. And evidence-based education has to be central to protecting children from harm, whether from cyberstalking or contact with material they will find disturbing.

Essential reading, I’d have thought, for anyone wanting to discuss censorship of the Internet, eh Senator Conroy?

This note, scribbled on a piece of tissue paper, was found lying in the gutter outside a house where someone had obviously just moved out.

The text reads: “I wish you a fan-fucking-tastic life! Fuck hard as if you were being filmed! Your friend, Marek.”

Now this little piece of Found Art has been sitting in my files for at least a couple of years, so I wonder whether Marek’s friend has indeed had a fan-fucking-tastic life?

I also wonder why being filmed would make you more likely to “fuck hard” — and I’m assuming here that fucking “hard” is considered to be an improvement over any other kind of fucking. Personally, I suspect I’d find the presence of the camera to interfere with my confident enjoyment of the process and lead to performance anxiety — but maybe that’s just me.

And now, the fear sets in: what sorts of comments am I going to get on this post?

It’s been a while since I posted the first Found Art object. I’ll try to choose one from the files more regularly.

Eavesdropping highlights from the last 24 hours:

1. “Somehow I suspect book lovers feel the same way about Harry Potter as music lovers feel about Jeff Buckley.” (Alastair Rankine)
2. Overheard while walking past a house where young boys were playing noisily: “I’m the birthday boy so I have to be team leader.”
3. “Someone in my office just said ‘cyberspace’. I hope I’m not paying them.” (abacab)
4. In response to my comment, “Stilgherrian is thinking about things that geeks think about”, someone who should probably remain nameless said: “Most geeks I know think about banging Natalie Portman in a blow-up-pool filled with custard…”
5. “Stilgherrian, one day in the future, your life will confuse historians.” (Nick Hodge)

Bored by pornography? You’re not the only one, according to The Onion.

Jaded by the sight of what it deemed “run-of-the-mill” orifices, the nation’s pornography-saturated populace released a statement Monday demanding a new bodily opening to leer at. “At this point, staring at an anus, vagina, or beckoning mouth has become so commonplace that it is no more titillating than ogling, say, the human elbow.”

Read the whole article to discover what the populace demands in its new orifice, so to speak. Hat-tip to Boing Boing.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an Australian of A Certain Age, but I find this sign in an African grocery shop on Enmore Road rather funny. The fact that it’s “organic” is even better.

This is the “best joke I’ve heard in a while”, says my friend Richard:

I went to see my doctor today. He told me I should stop masturbating.

I asked him why.

He said, “Because I’m trying to examine you.”

[Update: This joke was found at Crying all the way to the fish shop. Ta, Richard.]

As dusk fell on Perth last night, I noticed this billboard advertising Sexpo with the odd imperative: Ride the Sex Train Gerbil! Erm, OK.

Should I post this video? I mean, it’s called Glory Hole, but it’s not what you think.

Well, it is. But not quite.

Oh, bugger it. Decide for yourself.

Thanks to Alextremist for the pointer. I think. Now get back to your homework.

I was shocked. Early this morning every single agapanthus plant in our back yard was covered in snails. They’d climbed up onto the leaves — and they were having sex.

Hundreds and hundreds of snails engaged in a filthy hermaphroditic bisexual snail orgy!

I raced inside to get a camera. I couldn’t find The Good Camera quickly enough, so I grabbed my phone.

But the forecast is for a 34C maximum today — in October! The sun was rising, and so was the temperature. The snails were retreating.

I only had time to grab a quick, blurry image of this pair (pictured), going their separate ways after a morning of debauchery. Sluts.