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Weblog Archive: October 14, 2007 to Oct 20, 2007 Friday, October 19, 2007
Officials said that the newspaper's advertising executives also helped escort services design ads that would cloak them from the eyes of law-enforcement officers. Agents said the arrests culminated a two-year investigation dubbed "Operation Weekly Shame." As part of Operation Weekly Shame, two female agents went undercover and presented themselves as prostitutes to three of the Weekly's account executives, Lutz said. They made it clear that their ads were for promoting their prostitution businesses, he said. This Orlando Sentinel article notes the obvious First Amendment issues involved, and suggests there might be a revenge motive behind the daring undercover operation with the cutesy moniker. In the past, the Orlando Weekly has criticized MBI's tactics. "The MBI [Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation] has a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness when it comes to driving adult businesses out of Central Florida," a 2003 Weekly news story stated. "Its agents and prosecutors have harassed and intimidated witnesses, lied about investigations, trumped up charges against old ladies and spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to coax a handful of people into committing petty crimes." The Orlando Weekly's own blog has collected the paper's past stories about MBI's war on adult businesses. How can you not love a headline like "MBI busts handjob ring, proud of self"? And Orlando police might not be finished. The sudden and unusual round of arrests raises questions whether MBI will take on internationally known Craigslist networking site. MBI recently wrote a letter to the CEO of Craigslist requesting the Internet site remove all of its prostitution ads dealing with Orlando. Representatives at Craigslist have not answered law-enforcement official's letters. Freedom of speech issues aside, local law enforcement should tacitly welcome newspaper and internet advertising for sex services. It discourages street prostitution and tacky outdoor advertising for sex shops. It promotes entrepreneurship by sex workers and cuts down on exploitation by pimps. It makes the whole process safer and more pleasant for whores and johns alike. Stupid, wasteful campaigns like Operation Weekly Shame and Operation Craig Shame (or is that name already taken?) promote violent crime in order to stop harmless, private, consensual transactions.
The Arizona Republic recalls the beginnings of Schmidt's infamous career. He described a day in the early 1990s when he was buying groceries and saw a Star magazine that featured Gennifer Flowers, a TV news reporter, discussing her affair with Bill Clinton. Schmidt had a brainstorm. He figured he could start a bidding war between the leading men's magazines for nude photos of Flowers. According to his biography, he tracked Flowers down at a Dallas hotel and signed her to a deal. Other clients quickly followed, including Paula Jones, another Clinton scandal figure; Divine Brown, the prostitute who said she was hired by actor Hugh Grant; and Suzen Johnson, a flight attendant whose hotel-room liaisons with football analyst Frank Gifford were captured on tape. Schmidt also brokered deals for celebrities who weren't caught in scandals but just wanted to show some flesh. Those included Olympian Katarina Witt and actress Shari Belafonte. Schmidt also obtained and brokered embarrassing material on non-client celebrities. The Los Angeles Times lists some highlights: * Explicit photographs he said were found in the Dumpster at Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx's Las Vegas home. * [Paris] Hilton's sex diaries, which along with other personal items had been discovered in a Los Angeles-area storage locker. (A Hilton spokesman said at the time that the items were illegally obtained.) * A homemade sex tape starring Colin Farrell and former Playboy playmate Nicole Narain. * A sex tape involving Fred Durst, lead singer of Limp Bizkit. * Nude pictures of Amber Frey, the key prosecution witness in the Scott Peterson double-murder trial. * Nude photos of rescued U.S. Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch. (The photos were offered up to Larry Flynt for publication in his Hustler magazine, but he ultimately declined to publish them.) Then there was last year's bidding war over the Screech sex tape. And Schmidt's personal website, still online at Hans News, currently promotes an O.J. Simpson sex tape, which supposedly "involves Mr. Simpson snorting cocaine in a hotel room and engaging in sexual intercourse with one prostitute and his x girl-friend Ms. Christine Prody." His twin brother says that Schmidt suffered from "lifelong depression behind that air of bravado". That sounds familiar. Rest in peace, dude. Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation." Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC's regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast the words "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "asshole", and the phrases "cock sucker", "mother fucker", and "ass hole", compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms). The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles--linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political. The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose's grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking. If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet "adverb" is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking. That dialogue might occur at my house (and probably will soon), but point taken. (Link snagged from Amygdala.)
Redundant note to the lawyers: there is no Elisha Cuthbert sex tape, please don't sue me!
There's a story going around South Lake Union, but a spokeswoman for Vulcan, Paul Allen's development company, says it's just an urban legend. That aside, the story that the neighborhood's streetcar line now under construction was called the South Lake Union Trolley until the powers that be realized the unfortunate acronym -- SLUT -- seems here to stay. Officially, it's now the South Lake Union Streetcar. But the trolley name already has caught on, and in the old Cascade neighborhood in South Lake Union, they're waiting for the SLUT. At the Kapow! Coffee house on Harrison Street, they're selling T-shirts that read "Ride the SLUT." Who cares if it's true? History is written by those who print the t-shirts. (Link snagged from Marty Beckerman's Lair of Sodomy.) Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The alleged Meg White sex tape started circulating in late September, soon after the White Stripes cancelled their fall tour due to Meg White's "acute anxiety". Watch the pixelly 150-second clip here if you haven't seen it. The woman in the clip does look a lot like Meg White, both face and body type, but it's almost certainly not her. Fleshbot thinks the unidentified woman looks like pornstar Natasha Nice, though it's probably not her either. The clip is definitely a homemade amateur production (poor quality lighting, single camera on a tripod), not a professional porn shoot. Fleshbot commenter Bratmix traced the clip's origins to link site postyourgirls.com, where it was posted as a generic amateur video on September 12 (the link is no longer there). So how did the "Meg White sex tape!" rumor get started? Daily Swarm tracked down the rumor source to a nonsense message board thread. On Monday, September 17, at 6:17 AM, a long-time member of the Hipinion forum community started a thread entitled MEG WHITE SEX TAPE with a simple link to a homemade porn video featuring a female sex partner who bore more than a passing resemblance to a certain rock and roll drummer. A brief 8-hour, 40-post debate ensued over the authenticity of its subject – with many of the same jokes that were soon to be made all over the world – before the thread slipped into the archives. Until yesterday. You know what happened next. What did “Itsmecraig” have to say about it after the story broke wide open? Here it is straight from the horse’s mouth: oh shit dudes, i found this video through random wank mining efforts and put it up here cause i figured you guys would have a laugh. it had nothing to do with meg white when i found it. That pretty much cinches it: the woman in the Meg White sex tape is not Meg White.
Rumors have circulated about Daze Reader's long dry spell. Daze was in prison. Daze got hooked on heroin. Daze got hooked on World of Warcraft. Daze is on a top secret mission in Iran, real deep cover shit. Daze got a real job. I can neither confirm nor deny these speculations (except the last one, that's just preposterous). But this I can reveal: Daze is back. |
