Okay, I added the roofies part, but Morford really ought to watch his step around me at the Chron holiday party. This week’s column is all about local sexy exercise classes, including brulesque, pole dancing and stripping and (!) coed naked yoga. Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, Shake Your Fruitcake is worth a read just to see how I’m making Teh Chronic nervous about ever inviting me to a party…

A few years ago, San Francisco artist/art student/667 Shotwell member Liz Cohen started her art project, coverting a Trabbie into an El Camino, and now it looks like she’s a year from completion — but more importantly, sexy photos of her working on the lowrider/East German twostroke mashup are being sifted to the surface of the interwebs again. There seem to be a few new pics as well.

Webhistory: a Wired article from 2003, a Boing Boing post last year, and we blogged it on Fleshbot this time last year. Now she’s popped up on sexblo.gs after her recent photo show in France, with sexblo.gs liking to an extremely annoying Artnet article with pics, and I found this way, way better Phoenix New Times piece about Liz, her machine shop learning process and the nitty gritty about cramming two unrelated cars together. Also, another great gallery of pics here.

Why does the Artnet article irk me? As you all know, I’ve been working in a machine shop for the past ten years with a lot of other really amazing women, and a few of us are ultra-femmes. And particularly me — I’m a fetish model who enjoyes being feminine and sexualizing myself especially in relation to the machine/heavy industrial work I do. I don’t dumb myself down for it, and I’m not — as the Artnet article suggests for girls-in-the-shop-context — I’m not “crossing class lines in a kind of willed downward mobility, and conflating gender divisions, as she masters both male and female roles within a distinctly working class subculture.” What a pretentious bunch of dated bullshit! I’m not taking on a male role. I’m taking on *my* role. And I’m not afraid to go all the way with my machines; I can be honest and celebratory about my very female sexuality at the same time I work in the shop. While a sexy girl in the shop who *is capable and skilled* might blow the minds of some people, who then scramble to label her with with some higher-minded context — I’m here to tell ya, it needs no context, because there’s nothing wrong with thinking a girl is hot while respectfully asking her if she can show you how to drive the forklift.

Pushup bras and Carharts: I call myself a ‘tomboy femme’. Regressive trappings of sexuality, my ass. Literally.

* Note about the pic — you should never, ever weld in a bikini, unless you want some nasty arc-sunburn. Not that I would, uh, know…

Well, now… ever text some sugar to your squeeze, thinking you wanted to send them a little more? Looks like someone had the same idea and did something about it. I just got an email from someone doing work on The Toy, a blandly named but very intriguing-looking text/SMS activated vibrating bullet. I’d love to give it a run in the Tiny Nibbles Research Labs — the vibe responds only to tagged messages (a private 6-digit tag your lover includes in the message), buzzes when you choose to read the messages and they claim each letter has a different vibe effect, like buzz, pulse, etc. (26 letters with 3 different function profiles; each has 5 speeds, 3 time settings). They also claim it’s not discoverable in a Bluetooth search.

Anyone try this? It’s definitely not anal safe, but what about coverage!!??? I’d cry if I had to run back and forth between my kitchen and living room trying to get a quickie…

Last year I did a top ten sexiest geeks of 2005 list for Tiny Nibbles, which was followed a week later by Wired’s ten sexiest geeks (and they sweetly included me). As seen on Fleshbot and Kotaku this week, it looks like Wired has announced their call for nominations on their year-end sexy geek list earlier this year; definitely click on over and add to their comment-nom chaos — it’s fun, fascinating and exciting to see friends nominated (and a few noms for me — thank you!!!!). I’m still going to wait until closer to year-end to announce my sexy geek list (same time as last year), and you can bet that like last year, mine will be very different than theirs, for lots of reasons. In fact, people have been sending me tips and links for it all year, and I’ve amassed quite a file.

So now I turn into Miss Ranty McRant for a minute. I usually don’t pay any mind to comment trolls, but I was cruising the comments on Wired’s post and saw this:

“I’m sorry, but Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin are just fluff in the incestuous blogosphere. Just because they’re ’sex positive’ (Geez, who isn’t?) and girls doesn’t make them candidates for the ‘Sexiest Geek Girl’ title. I think that Morgan Webb & Kari Byron (who are actually geeks and actually DO STUFF) would be better candidates. They both do hands-on geek things instead of just writing about tele-dildos and C-list porn.”

I know not to feed the trolls, but I have to say this: Uh, SRL? Ten years of sitting around looking pretty and filing my nails — when not doing robotics, industrial metal fabrication, dreaming up and creating wild lethal props and machines, welding, driving a forklift, running production crews, electrical work, carpentry, wrenching on engines and operating bizarre lethal robots. I fluff with lathes, I motherfucking craft with flame throwers and shockwave cannons and web-tele-operated air launchers for *fun*. Yeah, I stand in front of cameras on Geek Entertainment Television (and I vlog), but I know what I’m talking about from solenoids to splogs because I *do stuff*. And there’s no rivalry with Mythbusters; Kari is a hottie, and they have invited me to participate in the show twice now. Also, I built this website myself in 2001 with nothing but a book on HTML and a ripped copy of Dreamweaver, and have grown it ever since (I have one sexy geek chick friend who now helps me with MT). I figured out how to podcast when there were only like a few dozen podcasts in existence. When Slate did a textcast this summer, I figured how how to do it, and did it just to see if I could (second podcaster to do it, and first female, yo). There’s more, but I don’t pose with PSP’s.

But Xeni? Now you’re in dangerous territory. Two things: this year she went to Tibet to do a story on hackers in the Himalayas — and you don’t do anything like this fluffily unless you want to end up in a Chinese prison. Right now she’s in Guatemala — you figure it out. *That* is hardcore.

Okay, now the trolls can go ahead and call Xeni and I fluff. Just don’t come crying to the sexy girl geek who heads the SRL security staff when my finely-tuned Running Machine accidentally runs over your troll foot.

/rant. I guess the way to make me see red is to say I don’t do anything! Image: I’m getting ready to pack for Roboexotica — I leave for the robot festival in Vienna this friday; I am an invited, featured guest, which makes me all excited and nervous. I will help run a drinkbot with Miss Suicide Bots and be on Austrian TV talking about robots and sex. Note about the Running Machine: it’s actually *our* machine, as in SRL. It’s one of the three main machines I’ve maintained and operated for shows for the last ten years — “senior” SRL operators like me tend to refer to machines we’ve worked on and fixed a lot in the first-person possessive — that is until the cops show up, at which point they all belong to Mark…:)

I’m calling it the first because I’m going to do several holiday shopping guides this year, and I’m seriously drooling on my keyboard right now over some of the goods to be found at Kiki de Montparnasse (eternal naughty thanks to David for the link).

Most of Kiki’s stock is out of my reach, but if I were a rich girl… for instance, I’d love to play with the (pictured) solid silver Tension Set Cock-Ring with 5MM Cubic Zirconia. Think Make would laser-etch “Hacker Boy” on it for me if I asked really nicely? (We watched one of my favorite movies last night, it was *fun*!)

More on my Kiki LUST list:
* Glass is smooth, retains body heat divinely, and feels incredible. Ultimate lust: the $1750 Hand Sculpted Obsidian Glass Diletto.
* Every girl needs a $450 titanium vibrator for her space station of love (aka my bed).
* You could play dirty Clue with this one: it was Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the $750 Rose Quartz Anal Plug.
* Also, to wear at the machine shop, while blogging, or lazily taking control of that little planet by the sun — why, the $150 Frame Bra with the $395 black Layered Baybydoll, of course. Don’t even get me started on which shoes I’d get…
* And because I have such a problem with my cupcake pink accessory fetish these days, I’d have to take really naughty pictures with the $425 frosting pink Panasonic Digital Camera. I think it’s really honest to buy gadgets at sex toys stores — I mean, there’s never any confusion in my mind that I have a fetish.

Kiki MUST list — if already shopping, I’d get these items too:
* Solid silver $15 X-Rated decision dice, includes ‘bondage’, yum.
* For the nipples, dear jeezus in a sparkly rubber thong, $15 Sauce L’Amour.
* Open a copy of my fellatio or cunnilingus books and road test my super-fun oral sex mint techniques with the $5 Before & After Mints.
* Massage candles are incredible — for massaging, teasing, tormenting, and giving out-of-control hand jobs. I’d love to try the $35 Kiki Massage Candle.

Le sigh! I could do a whole other list with Kiki’s even more outrageous UK twin, Coco de Mer (sound alert), where my dream riding crop lives…

* This story is fun for oh so many reasons, and not just because I already have *two* work uniforms if I needed a job in Arizona: Erotic eatery’s nurse uniforms criticized. Snip: “The Heart Attack Grill features flirtatious waitresses serving food in the skimpy uniforms, the Baltimore Sun reported. But the head of the nurses’ organization, Sandy Summers, said that the marketing technique reinforces the main unfortunate stereotype associated with the health profession.” To which I say — Dear Miss Nursing Association, by any chance, was your pet’s name Sandy and the first street you ever lived on was Summers Ave? And, don’t you think George Clooney (and now Grey’s Anatomy) are the truly deliciously slutty, medicine-administering problems for your “image”? Let’s just hope that Domino’s doesn’t get the same idea about the wholesome image of their delivery staff, or we’ll never see any porn with a “plot” again.

* I live in a Victorian that overlooks the dirty Uncanny Valley of the blogosphere — because I’m obsessed with sex dolls, humanoid robots and AI, my pal Thomas sent me this great article, Lifelike robots: Cool or creepy?

* I went to a party last night where I saw some really bad Shibari, complete with rude models (I called them the rope dude’s “grumpy little minions”). Too bad — Shibari is fun and can be really exciting, but there was this whole superiority attiutude, made more ridiculous by their use of badly dyed, unsafe-slippery rope. My companions and I laughed that they were coming off as experts “teaching” people about the history of fetish and had crappy rope — someone (not me!) even said “I can’t believe they’re not even using Monk’s rope, which is the best.” I was told I couldn’t take photos or write about it, while others shot photos freely, so rude. Anyway, here’s my antidote, found at lovely Viviane’s — French clothing company Arayal’s incredibly hot Shibari commercial (video), where you can’t even tell what they’re trying to sell you. Beautiful girl, graceful viral marketing.

* OMG — check out Monk’s HOWTO videos!!!!!

It seems to me that some people take christmas really seriously. Like, I know that the guys who dress as Santa for Macy’s grow their real beards out, and some even stay in character the whole time they’re in the getup, to the excitement of children and the uneasy dismay of adults. And in dressing, they leave no detail forgotten.

It also seems to me that if you sit on Santa’s lap for that sentimental keepsake holiday photo, you shouldn’t have to be worried that Santa’s tits will pop, or might need a bicycle tire patch kit in the near future, or wonder what their combined PSI might be. Just sayin’.

Then again, if a santa maid was at Macy’s, I’d *totally* go. Visit all of SlinkySkin’s free, jaw-dropping rubber and inflation galleries. (via deli.icio.us)

You knew I would. Who could resist?

* Image from Muki’s Kitchen, sadly untouched for a year. Still, cute and quite graphic/explicit thumbnail images in free galleries of girls (and boys) being transformed into delicious longpig.

* Back when I was editor of the Good Vibes Magazine (it ruled! I ruled!), I asked my pals Thomas Roche and Alison Tyler for Thanksgiving erotica and got: All The Trimmings by Thomas Roche and Giving Thanks by Alison Tyler.

* Deviant Desires on cannibal and ‘turkey man fetish’.

* This woman stuffs a turkey in her lingerie (video), and the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

This week’s Chronicle/Gate column is a quick interview with Nina Hartley; she was in town last weekend and I caught her for a few minutes to ask her about her porn history and feelings about San Francisco, her terrific new book, being a porn sex educator, and even what her favorite restaurants are here. Snip:

“VB: Any crazy anecdotes about doing porn in the Bay Area?

NH: I actually have too many to recount, as I made about 250 movies in the Bay Area between 1984 and 1988, when production moved to Los Angeles. The reason porn was being shot up here, when the majority of the crew and cast, as well as the production offices, were in Los Angeles, was to avoid the police harassment taking place on sets in the Southland. There, cops were busting naked people and scaring the bejeezus out of them with threats of prostitution charges, etc., if they didn’t ‘roll over’ on the producers. Here, it was more a case of ‘just don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’ Mayor Feinstein was pretty anti-adult entertainment, but she didn’t make much of a dent in it.” Link.

* Image of Nina and Randy Spears from the super-hot Nina Hartley’s Guide to Erotic Bondage; in this instance, Randy represents San Francisco.

I’ve been re-reading versions of this story all day long, I’m so fascinated by it, about people who can taste words. Synesthesia has always been dreamily romantic to me, but this form of it, “lexical-gustatory” synesthesia, seems particularly ripe for erotic fantasy (especially for a writer like me). Plus it’s perfect reading for food holiday nerdiness and table conversation. Um, you probably just can’t tell Uncle Ted where you found it… Here’s the MSNBC article Even unspoken words can have a ‘taste’: Synesthesia study sheds light on the inner workings of perception. Snip:

“…[But] for a few rare individuals, the demarcation between vision and hearing, or between taste and touch, are less solid, with one bleeding into the other.

These people have a condition called ’synesthesia,’ in which two or more of the senses are crossed. Some see colors when listening to music, while others associate tastes with shapes or words with colors. A very small number of synesthetes can ‘taste’ words.

A new study finds that individuals with this last form of synesthesia - called ‘lexical-gustatory’ synesthesia ‘ can taste a word before they ever speak it, and that the word’s meaning, not its sound or spelling, is what triggers this taste sensation. The finding, detailed in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, could help scientists unravel how perception works in the rest of us.” Link. Also, here’s a good Scientific American article on it, slightly marred by annoying ads, which my Firefox tells me taste like dried Astroglide. Okay, back to writing about coed nude yoga classes… (image from the cupcake incident)

Update: this is *so* cool — lovely Autumn emails me saying, “I read your post about synaesthesia, and thought I’d direct you to the synaesthesis livejournal community.”

Forwarded to me from HR Lori, The Tech Chronicles puts a bloggy fatwa on Cnet (UK) for their crappy, obnoxious, utterly developmentally disabled list Top Ten Girl Geeks: Your Essential Guide. Read the list, and it’s clear that Cnet has some *outstanding* drug connections. Snip:

“They are girl geeks? Hear the blogosphere roar. Cnet, in its infinite wisdom, came up with the Top 10 girl geeks. Great idea, questionable methodology, complain geeks posting on Slashdot. Some of the choices are right on the money (Ada Byron, Marie Curie), others incited furor (Daryl Hannah, Lisa Simpson, Paris Hilton). It’s incontrovertible that some of these women won’t be channeling Gottfried Leibniz or counting in binary numbers anytime in our lifetimes.

(…) ‘The list is an insult to women, and in particular geek women. Having filler like Lisa Simpson is bad enough, but Paris Hilton? If the list were of the top 10 men, would it include Dilbert and some-random-male-game-playing-celebrity?’

So, who did Cnet miss? Let the nominations roll…” Link.

And yes, there’s already a head-scratching “wtf?” going on over at She’s Such a Geek.

Let’s just say that Paris Hilton better take it easy when she walks down the sidewalk texting Nicole Richie about how fat she is on her Swarovski-encrusted, eminently hackable Sidekick, you know, ’cause them sidewalks get real slippery in December and SRL machines can be operated reeeal quiet like, if you know what I mean, and it’d be a shame if she happened to take a *little spill* between now and her next trip to the ladies’ room with her gold card to “play video games in the stall” before her next glassy-eyed PSP photo op….

This morning: a cracked and broken front tooth, laceration on tongue, and according to the vet, a bruised trachea. I have to monitor him for the next 24 hours. What happened to Alex? I want a kitty head-mounted, infra-red cat cam now more than ever.

He is SO on house arrest over the holiday weekend. Still, I’m off to buy him treats.

* Aids pandemic gains renewed strength — “The spread of the HIV/Aids pandemic continues unabated, with the number of people infected rising once more in some countries which had been thought to be beating the disease, according to the UN.” (Guardian Unlimited)

* Turning point for HIV infection rate in Africa — “Encouraging News On AIDS: Infections among young people in Africa may be starting to decline, according to trackers of the epidemic.” (SFGate/Chronicle)

I’ve just been writing all day and clicking back and forth to Google News, watching the 300+ articles on the depressing pandemic stats grow (based on the annual UNAIDS report, released ahead of World Aids Day on December 1), and now just saw the SFGate headline and was like, huh? Weird.

* Comic website Comic Book Resources has a scathing slap of a review for How to Make Money Like A Porn Star, the weird marketing spinoff graphic novel from ghostwriter #2 co-writer of Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star and master chick picker upper Neil Strauss (with artist Bernard Chang). The cover art looks great, but I think I’ll skip the Arabs with razorblade dicks and sibling rape, though it all sounds like the makings of a good pickup line to me…

* Yesterday, closing arguments began for the COPA trial. “The case, which pits a host of plaintiffs represented by the ACLU against the U.S. government, will determine the constitutionality of the 1998 law that - if enforced - mandates age verification for websites containing material considered ‘harmful to minors.’ The bench trial represents a last ditch effort on the part of the government to save the controversial law that imposes a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison for website operators who fail to comply with the law’s age verification requirements.”

* Tristan Taormino is going crazy with the porn directing these days. There’s a great interview with her at Eros Zine, where she talks about her transition from a famous anal sex writer to a porn auteur, and her porny new sex-ed video line.

* But what do their balls smell like? Found on Adrants: a site dripping with gender stereotypes that could actually mean you’re gay if they make you feel more like a man — Stuff4Dudes is selling videos of “Hot chicks in bikinis and underwear working out! They’re designed to look like real workout videos with one major difference: The cameras zoom in on the gorgeous models, completely ignoring the actual workout and instructor. Plus, the girls are in bikinis and underwear!” Oh. My. God. I am now deeply concerned for all dudes. For selected customers they are giving away the girls’ exercise balls, which in my hometown means something entirely different. And much more interesting.

This is fun! The Ooh has lots of photographers I love, apparently brought to us by the people at The Liberator (frighteningly useful sex position pillows I reviewed in The Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Sex Toys. “Welcome to TheOoh, an erotic e-adventure powered by Liberator. Browse art. Buy Prints. Be inspired. It’s eye candy and imagination cocktails in the form of fine art, photography and erotica. The galleries update frequently, so visit often, lover.” My philosophy, exactly! What a great free site: check it out (I found it trolling del.icio.us).

I can blog porn. That’s what I can do… Above: zebra girl as shot by Elena & Vitaly Vasilieva, via Fluffy Lychees. Take your time in the gallery, it’s wonderful. One includes a theme I particularly enjoy, girl on a table.

Wish you were getting more text? Me too. Juliana Beasley’s book Lapdancer is a few years old but the photos are still powerful (below). Get some text in The Modernist’s interview and see a few more pics in Fluffy’s photo-heavy post.

Many OSHA workplace standards include ventilation requirements, and when a girl has to do plumbing work in the shower, sometimes she has to come up with innovative cooling and circulation methods in order to meet compliance policies. Plugging up your work uniform’s only air hatch with your hand isn’t recommended, but it sure looks fun.

I just discovered the work of Peter W. Czernich, which I guess I’ve actually been seeing for years on the covers of many major fetish magazines (via my friend at 3XL). Enjoy!

Being out late saturday night did me no good and I’m on laptop bedrest, imposed by Hacker Boy, who delivered soup, Theraflu and tucked me in with the iBook before running off to hack something. Drifting on cold meds, I remembered a conversation I had with Sean a while back about our Terms Of Use at Metblogs, so I read it carefully — and it’s the best TOU in Blogistan, period. My favorite section:

“COOPERATION WITH LOCAL, STATE, AND FEDERAL AUTHORITIES
Unless you’re a total knob and Metroblogging.com feels you need to do some hard time in pound me in the ass prison, Metroblogging.com will not cooperate or provide any information to anyone, due in part to the fact that Metroblogging.com does not retain any information about it’s users. Due also in part to Metroblogging.com thinking that ‘the law’ going after someone for posting something on the internet is a hunk of crap. Metroblogging.com site administrators are also highly trained ninjas and martial artists who usually like to solve problems on their own.”

Why? Because they are dirtier than I thought.

Update: apparently that was too hot for Flickr. I offer this silly dirty substitute instead.

I’m still illin’. I am blogging from a cafe table sunday night; pigtails, sniffles, skinny legs and all. Last night I loaded up on Dayquil and went to the Laughing Squid party and had the best evening out in a very long time (I got to present Scott with the birthday cake baked specially by Safeway!) — this is my favorite pic from the night, this is the second, this is my self-portrait in a Castro bathroom before the party. Hopefully I’ll be back to my bloggy self tomorrow…

I have a headcold. Bleh!

I hope I don’t end up here. (goodiebag.tv, via Fleshbot)

Update: sites were down, now back up!

I’m enjoying being on the Hegre mailing list so much that I’m going to stay on it — the galleries aren’t always great, but when they’re hot they’re sizzling, like a few of this week’s selections. Plus, it’s fun to get these links at around midnight thursday, and send them off to friends so they have nice surprises in their inboxes friday morning — or, I get to see who’s still awake and feeling frisky. The ones I sent to Hacker Boy last night include the gorgeous Helena Karel (pictured), stunning Darine, and our agreed-upon favorite, Jana in the kitchen. The set with Yanna in pink panties is nice too, but she’s still a bit thin for my personal tastes. Ogle, enjoy, ignore the “join now” banners — it’s free nakedy girl goodness!

As of this post, you’ll notice a new right-hand sidebar featuring the ubiquitous Laughing Squid logo, my Metblogs posts, and a new column of text ads. My friends have been pushing me for a while now to sell ad space here, and I’ve been staunchly against it because I’m opposed to commodifying my message. But one argument won out: more and more, all I want to do is blog, rather than chase down freelance dollars — so I agreed to try out making a few bucks with AdBrite to see if it’s possible for me to do what I really want, which is write here, in this space. I mean, I blog for lots of others for little or no money and they are making cash off of ads, so in a way it seems silly not to try and do the same for myself.

I’m still considering this an experiment. I chose AdBrite because they give me complete control of whose ad is on my site; I’ve handpicked each of the advertisers after visiting their sites; it was funny to add CheapFlights to my ad list after having subscribed to their newsletter for years. Some I selected as new-media marketing curiosities/anomalies, like the “internet TV for men”. I have made the ads text-only, and they will always be that way. If you hate them, email me and I’ll remove the advertisers, or stop altogether. And if you’re running Firefox like I am, you won’t even see them. I also picked AdBrite because they are inclusive of over-18 sites, which to me, is a sensible, grown-up business model. More of my thoughts on that are in this article.

If you want to negotiate a wee piece of art like the Laughing Squid logo, email me.

So, Pelosi’s all set to become Speaker of the House. And conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich have tried to use “San Francisco values” as a derisive term. And lots of pundits are being all nice about what they think San Francisco values are, citing pot clubs and immigrants and the environment.

In this week’s Chronicle/SFGate column Open Source Sex: San Francisco Values, I cut into the conversation and tell you what they really mean when they use the term “San Francisco values” as dirty words: sex. Specifically, San Francisco sex. So, I explain exactly what that is, and detail what makes San Francisco so sexually different than the rest of the nation, from dildos to sex workers to HIV and assless chaps. Kudos to the Chronicle for having the purity of conviction to run the piece. Plus, I just love looking at SFGate’s front page and seeing my line, “We all know Bill O’Reilly is the reason ball gags were invented.” Snip:

“What’s different about sex in San Francisco is that we’re honest about it. We understand that accepting — even celebrating — sexual diversity goes hand in hand with keeping people healthy. It’s that simple. The first diagnosis of Kaposi’s sarcoma occurred on April 9, 1981, in San Francisco; in 1984 the San Francisco AIDS Foundation debuted the first-ever safer-sex poster and campaign. Thousands were dying, but in 1984 people with AIDS were still unable to find services outside San Francisco. Only in 1987 did then-President Ronald Reagan first mention the word AIDS (death toll: over 20,000 Americans), while San Franciscans were living through the horror of an entire population nearly eradicated by AIDS. You better bet we have different values here.

[My pal, Dr. Carol] Queen concurs: ‘Caring for people with AIDS is a San Francisco value that, at the height of the epidemic here, consumed almost the entire city. So while the Republicans have tried to off-load social services onto the private sector, I believe San Franciscans proved we could do it first and better. The only remotely comparable situation I can think of — Hurricane Katrina relief was done similarly in the face of great government neglect; by citizens, friends and lovers of a town everyone looks to as a refuge from the rest of the country’s values.’” Link.

I woke up to a flooded inbox, all about this piece — I rant about my email after the jump.

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Best Women’s Erotica 2007 is here!!!

I’m so excited to see this anthology hit the stores; the online stores anyway — it’s still so fresh out of the oven than the contributors and I don’t even have copies yet! I’m thrilled about this book — I culled over 300 submissions for the very best in never-before-published women’s erotica, and this book was the absolute best of the best. My Best Women’s Erotica 2006 won for best erotica book of the year, and I’m sure this one will pull the same accolades. BWE07 looks great, thanks to a gorgeous cover by erotic photographer Samantha Wolov.

Read the book’s introduction, which will give you a taste and summary of each story (and more) after the jump.

At the same time, I see that Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders book She’s Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff is finally available as well. I can’t wait to read it, as it promises to be chock full of exciting first-person essays by female geeks of all stripes and occupations. A much-needed and interesting book, for sure.

There’s already a She’s Such A Geek blog for the book, and full disclosure: I’m one of the lucky contributors. Yay!

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Is it wrong for me to lust after these USB Diamond Drives? I mean, I did bling my Shuffle.

On another, unrelated note: has anyone found a decent podcast-to-phone service? I’m wondering what podcasters and listeners think of these services. It seems like there’s a new on every day, and I’d like to find a good one, both as a podcaster *and* a listener. If anyone has a recommendation (or complaint), email me.

I am getting a lot of emails about this, and while some make my nose into a soy latte ejection port, it’s important to point out that once Scott breaks it, the news is like so five minutes ago. I’m excited to see Denton blogging; when a certain Fleshbot: Gay contrib went AWOL for a week or two and I was running the bot, Denton jumped in with like ten of the best posts I’d seen in that particular feed in a while. But still, it’s hard not to giggle when Gawker pokes him in a hilarious post like this. Definitely goes in the ‘how to blog’ files…

I’m sure this will be a popular topic of discussion at the upcoming Laughing Squid anniversary party. Many of us have wondered aloud about what a dream Valleywag would look, smell, and snark like. Here’s hoping that Denton’s secret island fortress of blogging doom has perfected blogger cloning with blog-topic gene alterations, as I’d *devour* that fucking blog if Valleywag got a writer/editor like Mark.

Is that an Asian version of Heinz? Found at coloribus, where there’s another great ad, via the discovery of these new, even crazier S/M themed athletic shoe ads on one of my new favorite blogs, Coolz0r: Marketing Thoughts.

This item caught my eye tonight in our Wet Spots over at Fleshbot, Feds’ Expert: 1 Percent of Web Is Porn. One is such a lonely number. I’m even more intrigued with the other numbers in the article, and what they mean for the US government’s approach on safeguarding against minors’ access to adult content, how little the legislators know or understand about online porn (and the internet in general, no surprise there), COPA, and filtering software. Basically, the government study effectively hands the government its own ass with the data. Snip:

“[Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley] also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.

About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.

But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found.

Stark also said that about half the sexually explicit Web sites found in the Google and MSN indexes are foreign, making them beyond the reach of U.S. law. But he agreed with government assertions that the most popular sites are domestic.

‘COPA - right out of the bat - doesn’t block the 50 percent (posted) overseas,’ [ACLU attorney Chris Hansen] said. “So COPA is substantially less than 50 percent effective.’” Link.

Don’t you wonder who they think the “most popular” sexually explicit domestic sites are? I sure do.

Casino Royale opens this friday and I actually want to see it. I liked the original David Niven Bond spoof, and I plan to be underwhelmed, but I have a headcold (broken thermostat, rain, landlord out of town) and am desperately seeking mindless entertainment. In keeping with the Bond theme I’m perusing Bond-esque fetish sites like Goldfinger’s Fetisch Bodypainting Homepage. It’s an HTML trainwreck, but worth a look, and hey — who can forget Shirley Eaton’s (Jill Masterson) sexy, gold-dipped fate?

I am on an AI (sex) doll tangent tonight:

* First, you have to watch the video of the new Actroid Robot in a shiny black latex fetish outfit speaking in English making her debut at Wired’s Nextfest 2006, NYC. (Image via cmurphy) Here is the Actroid site, with more images and videos; I see that rentals are now available.

* Now, watch range of motion in a sex doll — a “Honey Doll”. Here’s another, granier soundless sex doll flexibility video.

* At my other bloghome Fleshbot, Japanese Sex Dolls: Now More Womanly!

* Here’s the Alt Sex Fetish Robots video I (re)posted ages ago.

* Hardcore: Real Doll Sex, a paysite with juicy previews of a guy, some girls, and their RealDoll threeways. Hasn’t been updated in a while and is thin on previews, but has a few hot pics.

* Worth every minute of your time in a sweetly sexy silly retro way, the trailer for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), featuring dozens of busty, jiggly, bikini-clad sexy fembots, including one who fulfils the fantasy and goes all the way with the male protagonist.

* Yay, Buffybot sex with Spike!

* Then, of course, the Austin Powers Fembots. My race, blonde version.