Daze Reader

Weblog Archive: January 18, 2004 to Jan 24, 2004

Saturday, January 24, 2004

http://www.dazereader.com/24000007.htm More weird sex science from Nature. An equation for attraction. "According to a Hong Kong study, the best way to judge a woman's attractiveness is to take her volume in cubic metres and divide it by the square of her height. . . . But this doesn't mean that those with a roving eye are churning through tortuous sums in their heads to assess attractiveness. People probably make an instinctive assessment of shape that tallies with more accurate measures of size." Yeah, probably.


http://www.dazereader.com/24000006.htm Brain size matters for sex. "According to David Reutens at the University of Melbourne, Australia, a person's sex drive may be proportional to the size of their amygdala, a small 'emotion' centre nestled at the base of the brain. The almond-sized nugget has been implicated in sex drive before; it is tickled by erotic movies and is vital for mating behaviour in many animals. But the effect of its size was unclear." (Link snagged from Amygdala, where else.)


http://www.dazereader.com/24000005.htm Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday magazine has a cover story about sex slavery and international trafficking, particularly teenage girls smuggled into and enslaved in the US. A sad and powerful article. Regardless whether you believe (as I do) that prostitution should be legal, there's no question that trafficking and slavery are sheer evil.


Friday, January 23, 2004

http://www.dazereader.com/24000004.htm Helmut Newton died in a car crash on Friday. Obituaries in Reuters, the New York Times and Washington Post.

More by and about Helmut Newton:


http://www.dazereader.com/24000003.htm Mireya Navarro at the New York Times attends an annual convention for sex toys saleswomen.

Passion Parties, which is holding its annual convention here, represents a subset of the sex industry that uses Tupperware-style marketing and underscores how mainstream sex toys have become. What may have once been purchased from burly guys behind the counter in seedy porn shops is now for sale in the living rooms of teachers, grandmothers and housewives who say their business is more educational than titillating.

So it came as a shock to this sales cadre when one of their own was recently arrested by two undercover police officers in Burleson, Texas, and now faces a misdemeanor obscenity charge that could send her to jail for up to one year.

No one is more surprised than the woman herself, Joanne Webb, 43, a Passion Parties representative whose business had even joined the local Chamber of Commerce before law enforcement officials received an anonymous call about her in October.

Webb also appeared on Good Morning America earlier this week with her husband.

Webb's husband of 20 years, Chris, says his wife's arrest is an outrage.

"I'm proud of Joanne beyond belief," he says. "I just see her as a national hero … standing up for other women in her business, standing up for women and couples around the country, even around the world to express themselves and love one another."

Damn right.


http://www.dazereader.com/24000002.htm Eurotrash analyses the shagging possibilities of Lord of the Rings characters.

Legolas. Now, first off, he's a fucking elf, so he doesn't fucking exist so he is not going to give you sexual or emotional satisfaction. Secondly, he's got appalling hair. But the real killer is you just know that poncy little arsewipe is going to be rubbish in bed.

Oh yes. We've all slept with a Legolas, haven't we girls? He doesn't really like sex much as it distracts him from his higher calling of sticking his narcissistic head up his over-appreciative arse. He's the kind of boyfriend you initially admire for being intelleskshual, like, until you realise the fact that he *claims* to have read Stephen Hawking doesn't of it itself turn him into a Ph.D.

Brilliant and hilarious. The Gimli and Sam entries had me laughing out loud. (Link snagged from Cup of Chicha, who wonders how Eurotrash could "leave out my favorite LOTR guy, Wormtongue?" She is odd, that one.)


Thursday, January 22, 2004

http://www.dazereader.com/24000001.htm Daze Reader is back from the technical difficulties (and, truth be told, a long weekend vacation which poked along into mid-week). My sources inform me that many people continued having sex during the recent unpleasantness, so there should be lots of good material to catch up on.

For those of you who enjoy the techy chitchat, here's what happened. My old hosting company got bought out around New Year's, and the new hosting company flew my servers to Atlanta. So far so good. Eleven days ago, the new company had to reinstall new versions of Perl and Berkeley DB on my server, which promptly rendered nineteen months worth of my Movable Type content inaccessible. The pages all stayed up, but I couldn't update anything. The heroic tech support guys eventually salvaged the MT entries but not the comments. Berkeley DB is apparently notorious for this sort of compatibility problem. So if you're running a Movable Type blog with Berkeley, I highly recommend that you back everything up (using the export feature, not just downloading the DB files by FTP) and switch to MySQL.

OK, back to the sex blog. I've decided to start fresh. The old design was getting stale. This minimalist design is temporary while I try to whip up something suitably outrageous yet tasteful.