AdamSmith

The cadence of your reply put me in mind of something, but I just could not recall exactly what. Finally it came to me: one of the Wizard of Id's incantations to his demon in the vat... Frannis in the jim-jam! Frippin on a filtz! Frappis in the frannin With a frim-fram jiltz!

In the troposphere.

I don't think I have heard it put better than that. When Yeats decides to say what's really on his mind, not much to do but duck and cover. ...For love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; And nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. Well, that is the whole thing about Stevens. Do you think I ever have any idea what he is really talking about? I think you about nailed it in your reply to my posting of Stevens's 'The Owl in the Sarcophagus': '...Wall-eyed, reach for nips!' Imagine what it's like reading him while ingesting even stronger substances.

That is the point. First couple times I bottomed, it hurt like hell. Then an escort introduced me to poppers, and the substance helped me learn how to relax while bottoming, and thus to enjoy it. Now, although I am still fairly tight at the start of a session, by the end an F-150 could drive through.

That is to say: Mistah Glutes - you bad!

First pic looks nice Photoshop work, based on transition between foreground guy and background image. ('Mirror, mirror on the wall, / You hardly see the join at all.' -- Mr Humphries in 'Are You Being Served', complimenting himself on his toupee.) As for second pic -- you took the shortcut, but then didn't take the pervert? What a waste.

Mistah Kurtz - you bad!

ROFL My worst day at the nude beach (this is true!) was spotting Alan Dershowitz au naturel.

Bravo! But lord have mercy. Did your selection have to be quite so apt? Eek.

Also, entirely irrelevantly (but if one cannot highjack one's own post, what to do?):

Stevens's 'The Snow Man', read by James Merrill:

A.S. Byatt is a fucking genius. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2010/aug/25/as-byatt-facebook

Of course. But it's an inescapable reality that the federal courts often do look over their shoulder out of concern not to get too radically far ahead of public opinion, the fear being the weakening of perceived judicial authority. Whether or not that is as it should be.

My imagination has atrophied of late. Now I just go out and pick up whatever I see that appeals. I admit I sometimes fantasize about DrBeaverBoy. I will have to see about that in person sometime.

The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk Excerpted from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch ...Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk... http://realitystudio.org/texts/naked-lunch/talking-asshole/

Of course, the OP did not say there was NOT similar leakage from the other end as well.

Then wear a butt plug. If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

Another intriguing, and hope-giving, piece from the NYT: Over Time, a Gay Marriage Groundswell By ANDREW GELMAN, JEFFREY LAX and JUSTIN PHILLIPS Published: August 21, 2010 Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts. But perhaps the public has reached a turning point. A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided). That’s a big change from 1996, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. At that time, only 25 percent of Americans said that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry, according to an average of national polls. The more important turning points in public opinion, however, may be occurring at the state level, especially if states continue to control who can get married. According to our research, as recently as 2004, same-sex marriage did not have majority support in any state. By 2008, three states had crossed the 50 percent line. * Today, 17 states are over that line (more if you consider the CNN estimate correct that just over 50 percent of the country supports gay marriage). In 2008, the year Proposition 8 was approved, just under half of Californians supported same-sex marriage,. Today, according to polls, more than half do. A similar shift has occurred in Maine, where same-sex marriage legislation was repealed by ballot measure in 2009. In both New York and New Jersey, where state legislatures in the past have defeated proposals to allow same-sex marriage, a majority now support it. And support for same-sex marriage has increased in all states, even in relatively conservative places like Wyoming and Kentucky. Only Utah is still below where national support stood in 1996. Among the five states that currently allow same-sex marriage, Iowa is the outlier. It is the only one of those states where support falls below half, at 44 percent. This trend will continue. Nationally, a majority of people under age 30 support same-sex marriage. And this is not because of overwhelming majorities found in more liberal states that skew the national picture: our research shows that a majority of young people in almost every state support it. As new voters come of age, and as their older counterparts exit the voting pool, it’s likely that support will increase, pushing more states over the halfway mark. State figures are based on a statistical technique has been used to generate state estimates from national polls. Public opinion is estimated in small demographic categories within each state, and then these are averaged using census information to get state-level summaries. Estimates in 2010 are projected from 2008 state-level estimates using an aggregate national estimate of 45 percent (or 50 percent) support for gay marriage. The authors are professors of political science at Columbia University. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/weekinreview/22gay.html?hp

Thanks for the pointer. Masterful is the word. Tom Friedman has a decent and complementary piece today, about political leaders who do -- or don't -- rise above circumstance to do the right thing. Heart of it: "...I tried to recall the last time a leader of importance surprised me on the upside by doing something positive, courageous and against the popular will of his country or party. I can think of a few: Yitzhak Rabin in signing onto the Oslo peace process. Anwar Sadat in going to Jerusalem. And, of course, Mandela in the way he led South Africa. "But these are such exceptions. Look at Iraq today. Five months after its first truly open, broad-based election, in which all the major communities voted, the political elite there cannot rise above Shiite or Sunni identities and reach out to the other side so as to produce a national unity government that could carry Iraq into the future. True, democracy takes a long time to grow, especially in a soil bloodied by a murderous dictator for 30 years. Nevertheless, up to now, Iraq’s new leaders have surprised us only on the downside. "Will they ever surprise us the other way? Should we care now that we’re leaving? Yes, because the roots of 9/11 are an intra-Muslim fight, which America, as an ally of one faction, got pulled into. There are at least three different intra-Muslim wars raging today. One is between the Sunni far right and the Sunni far-far right in Saudi Arabia. This was the war between Osama bin Laden (the far-far right) and the Saudi ruling family (the far right). It is a war between those who think women shouldn’t drive and those who think they shouldn’t even leave the house. Bin Laden attacked us because we prop up his Saudi rivals — which we do to get their oil. "In Iraq, you have the pure Sunni- versus-Shiite struggle. And in Pakistan, you have the fundamentalist Sunnis versus everyone else: Shiites, Ahmadis and Sufis. You will notice that in each of these civil wars, barely a week goes by without one Muslim faction blowing up another faction’s mosque or gathering of innocents — like Tuesday’s bombing in Baghdad, at the opening of Ramadan, which killed 61 people. "In short: the key struggle with Islam is not inter-communal, and certainly not between Americans and Muslims. It is intra-communal and going on across the Muslim world. The reason the Iraq war was, is and will remain important is that it created the first chance for Arab Sunnis and Shiites to do something they have never done in modern history: surprise us and freely write their own social contract for how to live together and share power and resources. If they could do that, in the heart of the Arab world, and actually begin to ease the intra-communal struggle within Islam, it would be a huge example for others. It would mean that any Arab country could be a democracy and not have to be held together by an iron fist from above..." Whole thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22friedman.html?hp

LOL Touching, or touched? Tetched, as MsGuy and I would say it.

They say: "...We do all the work. We book your entertainment provider and arrange everything for him. We accept the payment. Thus all you and the escort need to concentrate on is yourselves. As you and the escort are not exchanging any money between each other, your time together is what you make of it." I.e., prepayment. This stinks to high heaven.

Tocqueville was eloquent in expressing his surprise at how well informed about civic matters people were throughout the early republic, with newspapers common even in the remotest backwoods. And at how important an informed populace is for a republic to thrive over the long haul. Viz., glancing sidewise, Franklin's remark, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

With you 1000%. After Mythologies, a steady drift downward, far as I could ever follow him. OK, 'Death of the Author' blah blah, but still.

Splendid! ...Semiotics never looked so good.

This is one site that seems to have no problem with adult images, unlike the prigs at Photobucket: http://www.miamihost.net/