AdamSmith

What they get up to this time of year... The 50 best jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe (AdamSmith's outtakes) "Victoria Beckham? Does this tampon make me look fat?" – Joan Rivers, on celebrities "Politicians are like God. No one believes in them, they haven't done anything for ages, and they give jobs to their immediate family" – Andy Zaltzman "I'm dating now, because I ran out of hooker money" – Rick Shapiro "The Scots invented hypnosis, chloroform and the hypodermic syringe. Wouldn't it just be easier to talk to a woman?" – Stephen Brown "'What's a couple?' I asked my mum. She said, 'Two or three'. Which probably explains why her marriage collapsed" – Josie Long "I like David Beckham. Most of us have skeletons in our closet. But he takes his out in public" – Andrew Lawrence "My boyfriend likes role play. He likes to pretend we're married. He waits until I go to bed, then he looks at porn and has a wank" – Joanna Neary "I used to go out with Christopher Reeve, but I just had to keep standing him up" – Steve Hall "I once buggered a man unconscious. I'm lying, he was already unconscious when I found him" – Tom Deacon "I never know the right thing to say, especially during sex. After my first time, I said to the girl, 'That's it, I'm afraid'" – Tom Deacon Still more at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...nge-898042.html

Mike Gravel also. Kucinich and Gravel -- in the Logo TV debate/forum that also included Hillary, Barack and John Edwards -- were the only two to come out and, eloquently and straightforwardly, say gay marriage is a simple, self-evident matter of human and civil rights. It was Gravel's finest moment in the campaign that I saw.

Not to multiply entities needlessly, but the Hot Spots forum seems worth keeping on its own. Of course I just started using it for the first time, so not an impartial view here...

Knowledgeable analysts have agreed with you. Jimmy Carter for one declared that a Barack/Hillary ticket would be a disaster, because in his view it would sum their negatives but not their positives in terms of voter draw. I can't wait for Obama to come back from vacation and let us know his decision.

Gergen is plugged in. My guess is he wrote this after getting tipped that Obama may pull the Hillary surprise out of his hat. (Gergen teaches at the Kennedy School and, now with Galbraith gone, is easy to spot as one of the tallest people in Harvard Sq. The day after his editorial came out I ran across him and floated this theory, but he would only grin.)

Slackjawed in wonderment. I go away for a weekend and you guys get even farther ahead of me.

TY, bravissimo! As someone said. I will not try to top (bottom?) this one.

Yesterday I posted the following in the "Content and Reviews..." thread in the Buffet here. Apologies for repeating myself (double-posting an item -- an online no-no!) but the point seems important enough to merit its own topic. Sock puppetry - the use of fake online identities, often multiple identities registered by a single individual, "to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one's self, allies or ideas." http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/vie...BasicNetiquette A sock puppet, in Internet parlance, is a false Internet identity created for deceptive purposes... A pseudonymous identity is not the same as a false identity. In most online communities, creating multiple handles for deceptive purposes is a severe breach of 'netiquette,' resulting in banishment or disgrace. It's fine to post on a forum as, say, Princess Leia. But once you establish that identity, posting as BikerChick2006 to jeer Princess Leia's opponents is a no-no. http://www.reason.com/news/show/36947.html 'Sock puppet n. [usenet: from the act of placing a sock over your hand and talking to it and pretending it's talking back] In Usenet parlance, a pseudo through which the puppeteer posts follow-ups to their own original message to give the appearance that a number of people support the views held in the original message...' From The Internet Jargon Dictionary. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2888616

Plus Nocturnal Gratification! Still can't believe it came up with that one.

In my case, what's the difference?

S.A.M. H.I.L.L.: Synthetic Artificial Machine Hardwired for Infiltration and Logical Learning

TY suspects, and I believe, that the review was written by the escort. So much is told from the escort's viewpoint, rather than the client's.

Apropos of even less than usual, this site... http://cyborg.namedecoder.com/ ...informs me that my Cyborg name would be: A.D.A.M.S.M.I.T.H.: Artificial Digital Android Manufactured for Sabotage, Masterful Infiltration and Thorough Harm Isn't that useful? It also suggests... T.O.T.A.L.L.Y.O.Z.: Transforming Organism Trained for Accurate Learning, Logical Yelling and Online Zoology T.A.M.P.A.Y.A.N.K.E. (names can only be 10 letters long): Transforming Artificial Machine Programmed for Accurate Yelling, Adept Nullification and Kamikaze Exploration S.T.U.C.O.T.T.S.: Synthetic Transforming Unit Calibrated for Online Troubleshooting and Thorough Sabotage L.U.C.K.Y.: Lifelike Unit Calibrated for Killing and Yelling L.O.O.K.I.N.: Lifeform Optimized for Online Killing and Immediate Nullification ...it does seem to have sort of a one-track mind.

The admin note on today's KyleGibson review is on point, and appreciated. http://www.maleescortreview.com/index.php?...rt_id=208060006

Exactly. Being able to read a poster's entire history of committing his thoughts to public view, unadulterated as it were, is one of the few controls, other than basic self-respect, that pushes posters toward authenticity and responsible behavior in discussion boards such as these. Also related to the principle -- written explicitly in some message forums' rules, implicit always -- that Thou Shalt Not Post Under Multiple Identities.

Once same-sex marriage gained legal standing in one state, I had expected that the Constitution's full-faith-and-credit clause would be the mechanism by which legal recognition and then, with hope, public acceptance would eventually spread to other states. I still do have faith that DOMA will, sooner or later, be found unconstitutional on full-faith-and-credit grounds. But here's a second possible avenue, which I had not heard about before. The Case for a Right of Marriage Recognition: Why Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Should Protect Same-Sex Couples Who Change States By STEVE SANDERS Wednesday, Jul. 9, 2008 Imagine a world where your marital status changed when you moved to a new state. Imagine being denied insurance, medical decision-making authority, or even parental rights by bureaucrats who dismissed your marriage license as if it were some worthless foreign currency. Imagine a world where, with no due process, a state could effectively divorce you against your will. Absurd? Yes. Unimaginable? For most people it is, but not for gays and lesbians. Same-sex marriage is now legal in California and Massachusetts. But when married same-sex couples from these states pull up stakes and move someplace else, their new state gets to decide whether their marriage remains valid. More than 40 states purport to void such marriages. In this column, I will explain why our current marriage recognition doctrine does not deal sensibly with the new challenge of same-sex matrimony. I then contend that courts should recognize a right of marriage recognition, grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, which would protect same-sex couples from this kind of harmful and unwarranted discrimination. The Place-of-Celebration Rule Is Not Only Good Policy, It’s Also Part of Due Process To be sure, choice of law doctrine has long recognized that marriages should be kept intact whenever possible. That is why every state subscribes in some form to the place-of-celebration rule, which holds that when the validity of a marriage is in question, a court should look to the law of the state where it was performed. If the marriage is good under that state’s law, it should be good everywhere. The policies behind the place-of-celebration rule are unassailable. The rule promotes stability in legal relationships – a value that is especially important where property and children may be involved. It prevents the casual evasion of legal responsibilities. It allows unhindered travel. And it vindicates the unremarkable idea that when you get married, you should be able to make plans and decisions with the confidence that your marriage will not be taken away. It’s important to note that the place-of-celebration rule typically applies only when two people marry where they legally reside. Thus, my argument in this column is not about the same-sex couple from Atlanta who fly to L.A. for the weekend, get married, then return home and expect Georgia to recognize their new status. The law has always frowned on so-called “evasive marriages,†which pose a separate issue. My concern, rather, is with California and Massachusetts couples who marry in good faith, then move – as many inevitably will for job, education, or family reasons – somewhere else. (Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA law school, projects that each year, this group could eventually include more than 1,000 same-sex couples who had married in California. Surely the problem is already affecting many of the more than 10,000 gay couples who have married in Massachusetts since 2004.) Here is the problem with the place-of-celebration rule: it is merely a common law principle that a state may override by statute or state constitutional amendment. And so if a state wants to carve out an exception for same-sex couples, choice-of-law doctrine simply accepts that the state has the power to do so. Why It’s Wrong for States to Exclude Same-Sex Couples From Place-of-Celebration Rules Same-sex marriage is now a reality. And so our legal doctrines must adapt to recognize another reality: Allowing states to exclude gays and lesbians from the place-of-celebration rule is irrational, unprincipled, and dangerous. It is irrational because it defies the sensible, time-tested reasons why the law has long been biased in favor of keeping extant, good-faith marriages intact. It is unprincipled because laws refusing to recognize same-sex marriages have no serious instrumental rationale; they are based only on a desire to privilege heterosexuality and on vague appeals to “tradition.†It is dangerous because it makes a mockery of both marriage and divorce. Under current law, a same-sex spouse could seek to escape the legal obligations he undertook in marriage simply by moving to a state that would be all too willing to declare his marriage null and void. While it is one thing for a state to decline to createa same-sex marriage, it is something quite different for a state to insist on its power to break upan existing legal relationship. Even if same-sex couples in most places have no right to get married, by what logic does it inevitably follow that they should have no right to remain married? The response from most choice-of-law scholars is to shrug and say, essentially, “That’s the way it’s always been.†Since choice of law is a set of rules for resolving conflicts between sovereigns, it is toothless when it comes to policies, such as those recognizing the value of keeping marriages intact, that transcend the parochial interests of each state. Thus, a state may exclude certain marriages from the place-of-celebration rule no matter how objectively unwise or cruel that idea might be. All this is so even though there is no precedent for the current treatment of same-sex marriages. Comparisons to other “taboo†unions, such as underage or cousin marriages, are unhelpful because the numbers are far smaller – and because in modern practice, most states in fact have honored such marriages if they were legally procured elsewhere. Even with interracial marriages prior to Loving v. Virginia, as Andrew Koppelman documents in his book Same Sex, Different States, Southern states confronted with migratory couples “did not utterly disregard the interests of the parties to the forbidden marriages ... but weighed these against the countervailing interests of the forum.†Perhaps most surprisingly, Koppelman finds that even polygamous marriages (from foreign or Native American jurisdictions) have, with few exceptions, been recognized. I believe scholars, legislators, and judges accept the status quo for same-sex marriages because of a lingering, perhaps subconscious, belief that they are not quite “real†marriages. From such a belief, another belief follows: that the people who enter into such marriages have no legitimate expectation they will be treated with the deference the law accords to virtually all other marriages. But our law should not tolerate different classes of marriages, some more favored than others. In order to truly protect marriage, we must look to principles provided by the federal Constitution. A Constitutional Right to Recognition of a Marriage that Was Valid Where Celebrated I do not intend to argue that the Constitution gives same-sex couples a “right to marry.†Instead, my argument is that if a same-sex couple already lives in a state that’s willing to license their marriage, then they simply have a right to remain married if they subsequently move someplace else. In terms of constitutional doctrine, the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause gives the couple a liberty interest in the ongoing existence of their marriage. Such a right would be narrow and modest. In substance, it would provide nothing more than the place-of-celebration rule already does. But grounding the rule in the Constitution would prevent states from carving out ill-founded and discriminatory exceptions. In a highly mobile society where most marriages are universally recognized, a state should bear the burden – that is, it should be required to articulate some “compelling interest†– if it wants to carve out an exception to this rule. An enforceable, due-process-based place-of-celebration rule meets the test for a fundamental right the Supreme Court’s set forth in Washington v. Glucksberg: it is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition†– so deeply rooted, in fact, that every state observes it, and the vast majority of Americans have the luxury of taking it for granted. Readers may object that same-sex marriage is not deeply rooted in our history, but that rejoinder misses the point. It might be relevant if I were proposing a constitutional right to obtain a same-sex marriage, not a right to have such a marriage recognized if valid where performed. But sexual orientation is wholly irrelevant to the neutral principles behind the place-of-celebration rule. For these purposes – ensuring stability in legal relationships, preventing the casual evasion of legal responsibilities, and facilitating free travel – protecting a same-sex marriage is indistinguishable from protecting any other. Supreme Court Precedent on Family and Privacy Strongly Supports a Marriage Recognition Right A right of marriage recognition also flows naturally from the Supreme Court’s cases protecting privacy in family life. Although the Supreme Court first recognized a “right to marry†in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, cases dating back to the 1920s have recognized what the Court has called a “private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.†Two years before Loving found a “right to marry,†the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut rejected a state’s attempt to interfere in an existing marital relationship by prohibiting access to contraceptives. The same family privacy principles led the Court in 1977, in Moore v. City of East Cleveland, to strike down a city ordinance that prohibited certain blood relatives from living together. While our federal system allows states broad latitude to regulate domestic relations, states may not tamper lightly with the nuclear family. For example, there is no right to adopt a child (or, for the matter, to have the state’s assistance in conceiving one). However, once a legal parent-child relationship has been formed, the Court has recognized a “fundamental liberty interest†and set a high bar for a state to terminate the relationship. As the Court said in Santosky v. Kramer, “parents retain a vital interest in preventing the irretrievable destruction of their family life.†If that is so for parents, why should it be less so for spouses? If states may not arbitrarily void one type of legal family relationship, it is hard to see why they should be allowed to arbitrarily void another. A State Interest In Voiding Same-Sex Marriages Should Not Be Deemed Compelling Could a state overcome the right I describe by demonstrating some compelling interest in voiding same-sex marriages? I think it is unlikely. Under the Supreme Court’s decisions in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas, moral disapproval of homosexuals and their relationships, without more, is insufficient to justify discriminatory treatment. And because same-sex marriages cause no objective harm, arguments about “protecting traditional marriage†are more rhetoric than substance. As Justice Scalia acknowledged in his Lawrence dissent, “ ‘preserving the traditional institution of marriage’ is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of same-sex couples.†Although Lawrence, which struck down sodomy laws, did not give gay persons a right to marry, it undeniably did recognize that the Constitution requires some level of privacy and respect for same-sex relationships. The reason sodomy laws are unconstitutional, the Court said, is because they “seek to control†homosexual relationships and to “define [their] meaning.†This understanding casts further doubt that a state could establish some compelling interest in disadvantaging such relationships. Neither Polygamous, Incestuous, Nor Underage Marriages Will Follow Is the right of marriage recognition I propose a slippery slope toward giving constitutional status to things like polygamy, child marriage, and incest? Not at all. Unlike same-sex relationships in Lawrence, no court has found such relationships to entail any liberty interest whatsoever. Moreover, as a practical matter, recall that under the place-of-celebration rule, you need a valid marriage to begin with. No state licenses polygamy, and no state is about to start. To the extent states still disagree about the minimum age or degree of consanguinity for marriage, most people regard those differences as trivial, and they are rarely used to invalidate marriages today. Such red herrings should not distract us from the looming human tragedies that the status quo of our marriage doctrines will produce. Constitutional rights are not to be declared lightly. But when potentially thousands of couples face having their marriages destroyed for no good reason, it is time to recognize that law has failed to keep pace with social change. Steve Sanders is an attorney in the Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice group of Mayer Brown LLP, based in Chicago. He can be reached via his personal web site, www.stevesanders.net. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20...09_sanders.html

Final postscript... http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/07/2...l.ap/index.html

All praise, or blame, to the bath-scene dialog in 'Spartacus.'

Too kind. Reenacting being one, rather.

In fact the moderate sizes generally on display, in contrast to the foot-longs mandatory in (explicitly) gay porn, are one of the pleasures I find here. Along with some body hair. A nice change from the fully depilitated look, which, particularly when the model is oiled, puts me in mind of tinned snails.

P.S. Deeply regret missing this chance to make some orientation-inappropriate rejoinder about Le Boeuf sur le Toit!

As I keep losing my bookmark for this site, I'm posting it here so I can find it again. http://www.blackdogue.net/index2.html The shots from the '70s are real nostalgia pieces.

That is good to hear. If the only effect of the current strict policy were to lose reviews, however thin, that would lend strength to the arguments in favor of posting all and sundry. But if current policy is succeeding in getting thin reviews fleshed out and resubmitted, that seems a considerable achievement in its favor.

Intriguing viewpoint from a new column in The Nation... The Shadow of His Smile Carnal Knowledge by JOANN WYPIJEWSKI In politics as in pop, legions of little girls jumping out of their panties can't be wrong. That's the vital lesson so far of Election '08. I watched a throng of them in November 2006, teenagers in their short skirts and breathlessness, jumping and jittering, hands to cheeks, screaming for Barack Obama. White and black, they crowded to the front of a rally for Jim Webb in the onetime capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Jim who? One of the white girls awkwardly told me that she didn't really know anything about the beet-faced warrior for the white working class running for the Senate, and she wasn't really there to find out. Obama hadn't come there to say much about the candidate or Virginia or even that year's election, either. He glided across the stage like a crooner, one slender hand gracing the microphone, the other extending long fingers to trace the imagined horizon of his hopes and dreams. He must have talked for thirty minutes. It didn't matter what he said; he smiled a thousand watts, put a little Southern sugar in his voice and mentioned his mama. Webb steamed in the wings as the girls keened, and from somewhere in the crowd grown-ups started calling out, "Obama for President." He wasn't yet a candidate. He was Frank Sinatra, so cool he's hot, a centrifugal force commanding attention so ruthlessly that it appeared effortless, reducing everyone around him to a sidekick, and the girls in the front rows to jelly. Those girls represented what they always have in America, a cultural longing. By '07 even the boys were Obama Girls, and their parents were borne along on the energy, feeling young and hip and a little damp in the drawers themselves. "America is back!" Obama told crowds he would announce to the world if they elected him. Hillary and the others didn't have a chance. They had welded themselves to prosaic needs and familiar lies. Obama recognized a different need, requiring a different lie, a pretty lie, not just "change" but "change you can believe in." Tell me again. Yes, darling, you really are beautiful... Like someone ground down by years in a bad relationship, America needed a seduction and, then, like the starlet on the crooner's arm, the reflected shine. In an earlier era when America was losing a war and "All Systems Fail!" summed up a summer of multiple disasters, journalist Andrew Kopkind could look upon the smoldering cities, the black radicals, white dropouts, free-lovers and acid-trippers, and declare, "In lots of ways, America is swinging." It isn't swinging now. It's desperate and needy, outwardly brash but inwardly a mess and not sexy at all, like Tila Tequila, self-styled bisexual maverick, rejected on her own reality TV show by the contestant she chose for "a shot at love." In that long, hot summer of 1967 no one confused the whole culture with the white, tight, flailing power structure around LBJ; but today, with no major pole of countercultural revolt, it feels as if America itself is in the Uncool column with the tawdry crimes and embarrassing flubs of President Bush--"Airball!" Enter Barack Obama, loosening up on the basketball court between campaign stops--"Swish." If politically he now appears to be not substantively different from any other neoliberal, as a sex symbol he is the new man. New, most plainly, because in his mingled blood those born since 1980 or so can see their future lovers and children, if they don't already see themselves. For this generation, interracial sex is a normal experience, still complicated but nothing that 60 percent of them have not already entertained (polls use the word "dating"), nothing more risky than love. That Obama's parents are not alive as fleshy reminders that sex is part of a political and not just personal past means that the historically combustible idea of a black man and a white woman in bed together, and the larger reckoning with racism's long reach, can be avoided. And yet the past is newly potent in one sense. Suddenly, casually, it is hard to think of desegregation within the narrow limits set out by the schoolbooks, as a simple fight for a seat on a bus or in a public toilet rather than as a radical claim to express one's full humanity--through a kiss, a caress, a child, a life of one's own making, an unbroken line of free choices linking all those who have ever struggled for equality and sexual liberation. There is something old about the new man, as well, though, or, rather, something of a romantic update on an old model. Not JFK. Obama resembles him only in his projected nonchalance. JFK's libido was like the Strategic Air Command, on permanent alert, meaning he'd spot a woman out the window, in a park, on a street and take her against the wall, while Jackie took to the White House trampoline. Barack and Michelle Obama channel some of the style of the current early-'60s revival--sleeveless sheaths and chunky pearls, Ocean's 11 and Mad Men--without the alienation. America, they say, you can be cool and sexy again, "back!" and swinging, but secure this time. Those "excesses" of the '60s that Barack mentioned, those family fractures across the demographic board, they can all be resolved through hot married love. When he leaned into Michelle as she wrapped her arms around him from behind after the New Hampshire loss, when she cradles his face in her expressive hands while kissing him, with every dap and nuzzle and palpable vibe between them, "you see love onstage," said Harriette Cole of Ebony, the first in a long line of popular magazines to certify the two as a "hot couple." The right will no doubt try again to paint Michelle as a bomb-thrower and might mine the vein of white fear of unbridled black sexuality that Barack prospected disturbingly close to when he scolded black fathers. But it's hard to see smears trumping the desire of millions of people for the promise of the most conservative thing in the world, a happy marriage. For youth the image of hot married love stokes the fantasy that maybe one day... For marrieds, it raises the notion that maybe this is the best sex they'll get. For Christians eager to sell the marriage bed as pleasure dome, it affirms that this is the best sex there is. Even homosexuals have a place inside the magic circle now that Obama has come out against California's anti-gay marriage proposition. All in all, a wholesome package as Barack and Michelle make America cool and marriage cool by making both sexy, or at least ready for their close-up. It is still possible that voters will decide to hitch the national identity to the stiff, asexual, erratic McCain and his zombified former drug addict wife, instead. And if McCain were to choose the old bachelor and onetime merkin Charlie Crist of Florida as his running mate, there would at least be some frisson on the Republican side, as the governor's self-advertised old boyfriends marred the celebration of his hurry-up nuptials to a Halloween-costume heiress, and his old gay-hating religious-right allies had to choose whether to pull away or shout, "Hallelujah! He's been saved!" But right now, that all seems like too much reality for a nation hungry for a makeover. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/wypijewski

Coincidentally, we have Daddy to thank for an object lesson. MER just published this review of MuscleBoyWill/NYC: http://www.maleescortreview.com/index.php?...rt_id=208070001 From this, I can make a fair judgment whether I would enjoy seeing him. (I think I would!) Today Daddy published this review of the same gentleman: http://www.daddysreviews.com/newest.php?wh..._nyc&page=0 "I had a fantastic time throughout, and although I won`t go in details, I had a superb experience - was well horny throughout and enjoyed the whole experience." No doubt the reviewer had a good time. But no idea why, or whether I might.