In the early days of American history, the founding fathers were a little fuzzy about which day of the first week in July they wanted to celebrate American independence. In 1778, General George Washington, who became the first president of the United States in 1789, saw to it that his soldiers got double rations of rum for the event. In 1776, John Adams, who became the second president of the United States in 1797, and was recently commemorated in a decent HBO miniseries, said the occasion “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.” Over time, the holiday has been more or less formalized and somewhat regional. Parts of the American South refused to celebrate July 4th for some time because they were pissy about losing the Civil War. Well, in a way, everyone loses a civil war, but, in this instance, I mean lost in the battle-followed-by-formally-admitting-defeat way and not in the personal and societal loss way. It was actually not until 1941 that Independence Day was formalized as a paid federal holiday on the 4th of July and celebrated all through these 50 states.

Even when I worked on government gigs, back when I lived in the Washington, DC area, I was always a contractor and I don’t think I have ever gotten a paid holiday from any job I have ever held. Apparently, being my own boss is no improvement, as I’m making myself work today. At some point this evening, I’m going to go up on my roof with some family and friends though. During the day, I can see the Hollywood sign from my roof, but, on fireworks-oriented occasions, my roof is one of …

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Carny: We have a WINNER! Choose your prize.

Little Girl: I want the blue Elmo!

Carny: Here ya go! One blue Elmo for the young lady!

Jeff Schuetze: Blue Elmo? Did you hear that? Cookie Monster is not a blue Elmo!!!

Sean: We are totally old.

Jeff Schuetze: And he eats COOKIES!!!

Actor/comic strip guy Jeff Schuetze (pronounced “shoot-zee like a gun”) writes a web comic called JEFBOT. His strips are mostly about pop culture and his trials and tribulations as a SAG actor. Although he generally brings readers a new comic twice a week, he does something unusual but clever in the world of comics and lists his acting resume on there. I always wanted to see what Dogbert’s Scott Adams’ resume looked like alongside the Dilbert comics, moreso when he still had a day job. At any rate, Jeff Schuetze’s acting curriculum vitae includes a special skills and abilities list. Having looked over mountains of headshot submissions myself, I can confirm that it is fairly common for someone to list unusual talents on the back of a photo or on an attached piece of paper, the sorts of oddities which might make them a better candidate for a booking. Jeff Schuetze’s list includes biking, bowling, hydroslide, ju-jitsu (brown belt), ostrich jockey, programmer, soccer, surfing, tennis, ultimate frisbee, and videogames. While including the list is common, I’d have to say that is a unique and interesting list. I googled hydroslide and I can’t figure out how it differs from regular water-skiing. I’m dying to know what exactly that is and how the artist became an ostrich jockey and what that entails.

JEFBOT is fun in general, but it probably comes as no surprise that I especially loved the cookie …

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I did this interview with the wonderful Scott Owens from EroticBPM a while back for the esteemed Thomas S. Roche back when he was editing Eros Zine. Eros Zine was unfortunately not able to post it permanently before they lamentably stopped updating. As yesterday was EroticBPM’s nine year anniversary, I felt like now would be a good time to post it here.

Scott Owens is the founder of and mastermind behind EroticBPM. BPM stands for Beats Per Minute and is an electronica term for how fast the musical percussion is thumping to get your booty shaking. The site initially grew out of the rave culture which Scott was active in. Hence the moniker “Erotic Beats Per Minute.”

Partiers who have had a blast at raves will enjoy the site, but it also appeals to a more general taste in unique young women — and occasionally men. Those who like partying teens will find EroticBPM has a lot of hot stuff to fit that taste as well. And there is a special forum for photos of models and members showing off their elbows. MistyB, one of the star models on EroticBPM, posts, “Elbow fetish is the only fetish.” She might be joking. Then again, the site features a plethora of fine examples of elbow photography.

Scott Owens is creative and always pushing the envelope in terms of how erotic content can be presented online. Although blogging is less of a focus now, EroticBPM was one of the very first multigirl erotic membership sites to feature model journals and structured profiles and the very first in his niche. The site features a thriving community where members and models and Scott and company interact in a friendly and positive …

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The new issue of Marquis is hitting European newsstands now. This makes twenty-six or twenty-seven issues in a row of Marquis, the highest circulation glossy fetish magazine in the world, which have featured work by yours truly and Forrest Black. As you probably know, Forrest Black and I do the Big in America column. I write it and he and I shoot it.

For this issue, we featured Serena Toxicat, Nixon Sixx, Vampirabat, Eirik Aswang, and Antiseptic Fashion, and there are mentions of tons of cool pervy events and people including photographers, directors, painters, and designers. I first met author and pro-domme Serena Toxicat more than a decade ago when she slept in my living room, having come through my town as a new member of the gothic gypsy carnival which is the band Apocalypse Theatre. She has a book out now called Evangeline and the Drama Wheel, based largely on her travels and adventures with Apocalypse Theatre and partly on her personal passions and interests in sex magick. We’ve known the dangerously adventurous and itinerant Nixon Sixx since 2002 when she was living in New Orleans and Forrest Black and I were guest speakers at the ill-fated GothCon held there. We’ve had a lot of fun shooting in NOLA whatever events we came through for. Beautiful city which attracts beautiful people, but New Orleans is also a place I’m always glad to know I’ve got a plane ticket or car waiting to whisk me home. Forrest Black and I have only known Vampirabat since this past Fall, but I’m already thrilled with the images we’ve been able to create together. You can see a sneak peek in the NSFW comments on this article …

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Soon I Will Be Invincible is out this month in paperback from Random House’s Pantheon. The hardcover was my favorite fiction read of last year. Which is saying something because I go through an average of a couple hundred books a year. From some of the promo when the book was first released, I sort of assumed it was going to be a geek chic thing. If there was ever something I was into that I had thought nobody would pretend to like just to be cool, it was being into fandom and having a big brain. Which just goes to show that, no matter how smart you are, sometimes you’ll get it wrong. When I finally got around to picking up Soon I Will Be Invincible, I couldn’t put it down.

The story is an exploration of the issues of alienation and self-confidence which face someone who is exceptional. A person can be different from the other children without being technically lesser, yet there is still enormous alienation which comes with being different. In a very real way, a top scientist or a top athlete or a top musician is truly alien, in the dictionary sense that he or she is estranged and unlike those who should be his or her own. I have often observed among my friends and acquaintances, in real life, that those who are just a bit above average often seem to function best in society. A person with a 120 IQ succeeds in a general way more often than a person with a 180 IQ. Human beings are social animals and that is just the way the system works. Which is not to say that someone who is exceptional …

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Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to …

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The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to …

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(Thanks to our beloved advertiser Busted Tees for the photos in the graphic. Please do not blame them for the lewd linguistics lesson which follows.)

Will Judy: Coffee had better be the answer right now, because there’s nothing else going.

Considering initialized knuckle tattoos. Right hand: ROFL, Left hand: TLDR

Amelia G: I am not sure you are jovial enough for an ROFL knuckle set. What is TLDR?

Will Judy: “Too Long; Didn’t Read”

Shittiest, most smugly dismissive response to a post possible, worse than “Id hit it” or “tranny?”

Amelia G: It is probably good for the world that I didn’t know what that stood for and, perhaps solely as a result of this, had not noticed it before.

This conversation reminds me that I need to start a “Would you hit it?” thread somewhere.

As a linguistically informed individual, how would you deconstruct (deconstruct is my word of the week) the hit it expression. What is one hitting? Is the usage that one will smack one’s privates against another’s? Is it a more general colliding of human beings in a sexual context? Is hitting it something one does *with* someone else or *to* someone else? Is the usage supposed to apply only to men hitting women (e.g. tap that ass) or also to women hitting men (as it certainly is used in common parlance)?

Will Judy: Etymologically speaking: One of the many theories explaining the word “fuck” traces it back to the Olde Englishe verb “fokken”, “to strike”. Fokken in the sense “to strike” is still in use in German, although there is a separate word, fichen, for “to fuck”.

I think the current …

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Today, Blue Blood’s design czar Forrest Black and I rolled over to band manager Jason Fiber’s lovely Hollywood Hills home to do some press on the always-charming and fun Andy LaPlegua. Andy is touring in supporting of the forthcoming Frost EP from Combichrist. So, uhm, naturally, we drank beer and Jason brought up that there was a new sex tape potentially coming out starring Verne Troyer.

I confessed that I already knew this as I’d started my day reading the adult industry trades mags, who were all abuzz with the info that SugarDVD had started the bidding on the Mini-Me sex tape. SugarDVD CEO Jax stated publicly that he would only be into distributing the celebrity sex tape, if it were possible to get proper performer releases from both the actor Verne Troyer and his naked co-star.

I gave my opinion that a Verne Troyer sex tape would be very marketable, but the one I really want to see is where the drug dealer club kid (or whatever he was) allegedly tied up Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame and made him confess his love of receiving anal on video, and then left him in the trunk of a car. Upon reflection, I don’t really want to see a naked Joe Francis being abused, but the karmic justice of it appeals to me.

In the unlikely event that you do not know who Verne Troyer is, he is best known for his role as Mini-Me, the bad guy’s smaller doppelganger protege from Mike Myers’ Austin Powers. He has also appeared in everything from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to rap videos and Apple commercials. …

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I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.

A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. …

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