This week’s column is about going to a Tenderloin dive tranny bar with Hacker Boy, my adopted mother Theresa Sparks, and adopted aunt Cecilia Chung. It was sooo much fun! But as I expected, I got some really evil mail about this one — I’ve noticed that if there’s one thing that brings in the hate mail, it’s trannies. So first thing this am, I was getting mail that told me I wrote “trash” and that I was too ugly to write about sex. I also got some really nice emails saying that this column was a beautiful historical record, and that Divas is a favorite they were glad to see written up.

It was my Mother’s Day column, of course. And fittingly, today the San Francisco Police Commission elected Theresa Sparks its President (video), making history. I wasn’t expecting this! Yaaaayyyy!!!!!

Snip from my column:

The dank and sleepy downstairs juice joint was just the first floor. The girls led me upstairs to the next floor, where a decidedly younger, hipper crowd was congregating around another bar and a loud dance floor. I would never have known it was there from my cursory cruise downstairs. Finding it too loud, we continued to the third floor, with a much homier, almost hotel-bar atmosphere with a big-screen TV, a pool table and a warmly lit wooden bar with couches off to the side. Ripped couches, but still.

We ventured one more floor up, but, sadly, the karaoke room was closed. For a minute I wistfully imagined a rip-roaring, cosmo-soaked night with ultra-femme, big-boobed tranny girls singing karaoke. Mind you, my ideal of hot, fleshy females wasn’t downstairs, but it certainly materialized on the upper floors.

By the time we settled on the third-floor bar with its tall, skintight-catsuit-clad femme fatale barkeep and overly weathered couches, I couldn’t decide if I was underdressed or overdressed (read: too much clothing on), or if I should just shut up and drink. I chose the last one. Sitting with Sparks, Chung and a cute boy, there was no want of attention by some of the most beautiful, jaw-droppingly sexy, curvy, femmed-up girls I’d ever seen.

One of the Divas dancers who stopped by before her set, Christina, made a trip to Mitchell Bros. look like a trip to a … tranny bar. She smiled and grinned and teased her mom, Cecilia, while we all ogled her crazy-curvy rear cleavage — she was wearing a rhinestone thong. Cecilia admonished her: “You ride the bus like that? With your ass hanging out?” Christina smiled and sheepishly replied, “Yes.” Cecilia deadpanned, “Aren’t you worried about germs?”

We sent our male companion to the bar for drinks, as only he merited the heavy pours from the flirty brunette barkeep, whose entire look made Hefner’s stable look like, well, a stable. Then we made our way back downstairs to the bar with the most attitude — where the step-up stage and its glitter curtain promised us choreographed, costumed, lip-synched striptease shows performed by the girls of Divas.

Link.

Back when I was a budding porn nerd, I spent much of my time wishing I was a lesbian vampire in old Hammer Horror films — because they ate the good guys, fucked the bad guys and deflowered nubile, big-boobed villagers by the dozens (or bathed in their blood if they didn’t give any sugar on the first date). I’m actually kind of a walking encyclopedia of foreign lesbian vampire films from the 1960s and 70s. Way back in 1999, Gothic.net published my first article, “Cult of the Fallen Woman”, a piece about lesbian vampire porn.

And while I could wax poetic about Jean Rollin or Harry Kumel’s perfect Daughters of Darkness, I always returned to the comfort of a Hammer lesbian vampire film — like a reliable snack food, I could watch those and always emerged satisfied that evil triumphed over good most of the time, that girls were deadly, and I’d always have my fill of blood, boobs and huge fake hair. Vampirism was the most desirable social disease I could ever hope to have, resulting in the darkest decadence, even if alone with my TV and a beer was the closest I could get.

And Christopher Lee. My undead lust object.

So I’m intrigued to see that Hammer has risen from the grave. Snip from Guardian UK:

Unholy lusts, depraved, thrilling passions and unspeakable acts of violence and terror - all in glorious, gothic Technicolor. When the legendary Hammer House of Horror group set out to scare the wits out of people in the 50s, 60s and 70s, it did it in style, leaving one British censor musing: “The curse of this thing is the Technicolor blood: why need vampires be messier eaters than anyone else?”

For three decades, Hammer Film Productions has lain dormant, with fans having to rely on special late night showings at cinemas or the occasional reissue of one of the more popular classics from its prodigious 295-item back catalogue on DVD.

But now the brand that defined the great British film alongside Ealing comedies and James Bond is back in business and plans to make more movies to terrify a new generation of fans.

Responsible for the classic horror series of Dracula, Frankenstein and Quatermass, alongside such gems as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and the Sweet Scent of Death, the company will repackage some of these old favourites but also plans new productions, inspired by such modern horror movies as the just released 28 Weeks Later.

Link.

But I’m dismayed to see that the article left out the films I love Hammer for the most: The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula (pictured, which influenced Jess Franco and Jean Rollin), the awesome-cheesy lesbo-tastic girls’ school epic directed by Terence Fisher Brides of Dracula, Kiss of the Vampire, and Lust for a Vampire. Actually, all the Hammer vamp films from 1970-onward, especially with Ingrid Pitt, were boob-a-licious.

I love my new PowerShot TX1. Too much, maybe. Video on this show page, and after the jump.

* (Oh, and no, they didn’t give me one. I bought it.)

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Was actually having such a bad day I was about to begin openly weeping — when my dear friend Chriso sent me this:

I Gizoogled your blog.
“Violet Bizzy”. Bwahah!

My bio is great, but the sidebar just made me laugh out loud! “Best Bitches’ Erotica”! And down the page — “B-L-to-tha-izzipnDoggy Stylin’ Squid” It even did my Creative Commons license at the bottom. Yeah!

And, the first few shots from my new Canon TX1. I like this self portrait in our bathroom, too. I’ve started a set for the SRL event at Maker Faire here, also will be a photoblog of my work at the shop, etc; I’ll be at the shop every day until after the 20th, so it’ll be fairly active. Does anyone know where I can find/hack the RSS for individual Flickr sets? Nothing good for videos — yet, but just you wait :)

Which is currently up on Amazon right now — see the review/comment Mark just wrote signed in as Karen, where he makes it crystal clear that someone is selling a book falsely under his — our — name. I’ve been working my ass off pounding sheet metal at SRL all day, and this really sucks!

At the Cancun airport, they sell the morning-after pill near the gates in a drugstore amongst all the other shops. Also — I got home to see that the UPS stork brought me the early-shipped Canon PowerShot TX1, which I’ll be toting down to the SRL shop later this afternoon. Yay! It’s just a bit bigger than a deck of cards.

Just found it on Videosift while totally *not looking for videos on how to vacuum the cat*. It’s the cutest animated pro-condom video ever: My Boy Lollipop will totally leave you smiling. (One thing — don’t use whipped cream with condoms as depicted in one of the scenes, the oil will pop the latex!) Embedded after the jump.

Update: YouTube can SUCK MY BALLS! Except they can’t ever! Rrrargh — my pal at Poly Matchmaker just told me YT pulled this sweet cartoon, when the motherfuckers could have simply put it behind a mature content age check. I mean, hello — COPA’s been nuked and secondary content providers can no longer be subject to 2257. It’s *animated*. They’re just being the WalMarts of media, that’s all.

It was an AIDS awareness campaign video.

Here it is at DailyMotion. Here is is at ScaryIdeas. Here it is at VideoSift.

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Why am I sitting here in my hotel room watching Vlog Deathmatch videos when there’s a beachside bar beckoning? Because Slutsky just *brought it* that’s why. Bow down, Canadians. Bow down.

* Wow — Scott Beale, friend and family, makes this amazing Laughing Squid post about this conference and my context in it. Thank you, Scott! Laughing Squid is at the top of my RSS pile these days, so it’s a hyooge honor.

* Send well wishes to Hacker Boy, who, after a harrowing night with food poisoning (and an emergency visit from a doctor) is now chilling poolside next to me sipping mineral water and nibbling crackers. I have never cared for someone so sick, or had someone lose consciousness in my care — very scary. We are both very tired.

* Some very cool and thoughtful people read my blog — extra smooches to JR, for extracting the audio from the Forbes Web Disrupters panel video, allowing me to make this Forbes Web Disrupters audio MP3 available. Thank you!

* I shot a quick, 2-minute video of a marketer’s presentation of why/how ad execs and marketers will want to penetrate social networks. It is explicit, nonconsensual power point abuse, and it’s on this show page. View it only if you are strong.

* More video — I just now shot this video on the beach about my experiences with the men here, called “waiter, there’s a fag in my soup“.

* Also, before getting sick, my sweet Hacker Boy shot this short underwater video of a cranky crab. Cute!

* Got an email from Mark excited (ahem, where are you) to get me back in the shop next week to get ready for our presence at the Maker Faire.

* Oh, and hateful mail about who I am and what I do (even when they’re wrong), never stops. As a bit of blogging therapy, after the jump I’ve posted the email I got this morning (update: as it turns out, from a “famous” white supremacist). Next, to hopefully get solid food into my still-sexy-when-sick Hacker Boy, and to get ready for the “formal resort wear” Forbes dinner party tonight.

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Laying in bed with a sexy boy snoozing next to me; I’m sipping agua mineral. It’s a king-sized bed with a little veranda onto a manicured garden, beyond which is a lagoon. It’s bright and hot as hell out there, so we have the white lattice sliding doors shut, and we are atop a fluffy mess of white sheets and half a dozen white pillows, bathed in filtered afternoon Mexican-Caribbean sunlight. Above us, the ceiling is a tall, arched two stories high — curved and painted that classic, beautiful deep Mexican blue, with white textured walls making the arch more distinct.

I have the iBook on my hips, like my bikini.

Earlier, I was onstage in a cute brown Bebe outfit, disagreeing with Robert Scoble and telling a room full of high-level, personal-plane owning marketing and advertising senior execs that they needed to stop trying to cram traditional ads into 2.0, that community was king in these spaces, accountability is a value, that trying to buy their way into democratized communication spaces like Twitter would never, ever work, that they would be ridiculed. I explained why. I name-checked Blip and Laughing Squid. I live check to check, and I feel pretty damn good.

* Hacker Boy Cabana Boy shot this shaky video of the entire panel. The visual quality is low and it’s very long — 45 minutes, but if you’re interested in all this, it’s worth it. Set the page to load, press ‘play’ and then pause, then come back when it’s loaded and ready to listen to. It was too big to squeeze into iMovie HD to extract the sound (I wanted to just put up an MP3), but I’m glad I have a record of this, yay! For some reason, I instantly liked Greg Bartalos, and while Rich Jenkins and Paul Maidment seemed like some gruff Deadwood characters, they grew on me with their thoughtful remarks.

* I’m on a hot list on ABC now — sexy sex educator and author Ducky Doolittle was asked for her 10 multimedia sex ed sources and she listed me (along with beloved alum, Viviane). Thanks, Ducky!

* I’ve been LOL geeked! ZOMG!

* I want a wiki that’s like a blogger family tree so I can keep track of everyone and their associations/projects. I hope someday soon to write an article about same-sex mail order brides. Now, I am going to spackle with sunscreen and get in a body of water. Oh, weird — it’s Cinco de Mayo. More fun pictures to come!

We came. We swam. We went to the Forbes dinner. The schwag fairy came and we are scared. Your motherfucking dot com is melting.

Set is here, nice stuff.

Hacker Boy Cabana Boy is the perfect date for this weird, weird corporate event. The Forbes people are very friendly, but I am as out of place as I thought. Still, obviously, I am having lots of fun and have a lot to say on the “web disrupters” panel tomorrow — again, I’m on the panel with Rich Jenkins (Editor-in-Chief MSN Money), Greg Bartalos (Asst. Managing Editor Yahoo! Finance), Robert Scoble and moderated by Paul Maidment. The glossy says this forum is a “program featuring industry experts, thought leaders, and technology innovators.” I now understand that the people here for this — read: our panel discussion — are all senior marketing executives. For the hell of it, my talking points for marketing execs about 2.0 and the disruption of their channels (by people like me) are after the jump.

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We finally made it in at 2am last night; just shot the above photo and this video of my morning coffee experience (bleh!) Video is embedded after the jump also — now I have to go get in that green water! I still can’t believe this is happening. And with superb upload speeds, yaaaaayyyy!

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Ugh, Houston Airport is closed, our plane got low on fuel and now we’re sitting in beautiful Corpus Christi (airport). Thunderstorms, I love you when I’m on the ground.

I read a great piece about forensics in this week’s New Yorker, and started in on a terrific book, When Hollywood Had A King. I’m blogging from my Blackberry in my plane seat, and even though they opened the door for air, it’s humid as fuck. Or, I guess it’s humid as the armpit of Texas in a thunderstorm.

Okay, the pilot just said we’re here for another half hour but the weather is passing. It’s funny, whenever bad things happen to friends, or when a freind is in emotional pain, I say it’s like a storm, it rages through and then moves on. I’ve had some friends in rough spots lately so I’m exceptionally contemplative this week. Plus, it is really really weird going to go talk to all these influential businesspeople about new media, bloggers and MSM, and advertising. So I’m in my head a lot, thinking about how I got here.

Bla bla. Blogging on a plane.

This week’s column in the Chron is No (Lesbian) Sex In The Stacks, including a funny interview with Felice Newman. There is much mail on this, about christianity, lesbianism and sex books in public libraries — I’ve included all of it, positive and negative, after the jump. That said, I want to mention two things before you read it. One, parts of my column, and my writing, was changed without my permission before this was posted. I am furious. Two, I did have hesitation about taking such a general swipe at christians’ sex-positivity. It fit the piece, though I did know I’d upset my christian friends (and, yes, I do have christian friends). I’m of two minds — that tolerant christians need to become louder and more visible than their fundamentalist counterparts, and that from now on, I’m going to use the word “fundamentalist” more, heh, liberally.

For my sweeping generalization, I apologize. For calling Adams the twattiest kind of christian, I do not. And — my flight is delayed, so I’m posting this at SFO. Thunderstorms in Houston. Alright, snip:

It probably started out like any other serene, sunny, safely heterosexual day in the Bentonville Public Library. But the lives of some Bentonville, Ark., residents changed forever on that fateful day, after a wrong turn down the dark back alley of a card catalog led to a nefarious lesbian sex guide that would steal their innocence, stain them with the gay agenda and probably totally show them where the G-spot was. We can only begin to imagine the harrowing ordeal Earl Adams and his 14- and 16-year-old sons, Kyle and Ryan, went through after the boys discovered “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” — an ordeal fraught with anatomical drawings and lesbian relationship advice at the hands, nay, lubed fists, of local lesbian author Felice Newman. Unfortunately, it’s an ordeal that resulted in the book’s removal and a threatened lawsuit for obscenity.

Two weeks ago, “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” was removed from the Bentonville library shelves at the e-mail request of Earl Adams, after his sons allegedly had found the sex guide while browsing for “military academy” reading materials. It no doubt took the boys hours of page-turning trauma in the stacks to fully register their horror — and we can only guess that once they learned about female ejaculation, the damage was done.

Being a concerned father who would in no way want his adolescent sons exposed to any shred of accurate sex information outside of the abstinence curriculum in public schools, or examples of lesbianism that conflict with what his sons will later pay to see in strip clubs across town, Adams initially e-mailed a complaint to Library Director Cindy Suter. She responded by relocating the book to a less accessible spot, perhaps in the football-field-size NSFC (Not Safe for Christians) section.

But for Adams, the threat posed by the safer-sex sections in “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” evidently plagued him night and day. When he tucked his sons in at night, visions of happy lesbians with strap-ons danced in their heads, he was sure of it. Adams sent a deliciously retro letter and fax to Bentonville Mayor Bob McCaslin, threatening a lawsuit if the book were not removed, a book Adams said was “patently offensive and lacks any artistic, literary or scientific value” (neatly copying and pasting from the Wikipedia entry on the Miller test, minus the inconvenient “political value” part).

Link.

Readers’ response, so far, after the jump.

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I’m all set now, but earlier today I made a little video of myself packing (and procrastinating packing) for tomorrow’s flight to Mexico, where I’ll be speaking on the “Web Disrupters” panel for the Forbes Internet Leadership Forum. I talk a bit more about the panel, and what I’ll be expecting at this conference (which is actually an invite-only forum). Watch the video on my show page, or embedded after the jump.

(BTW, tonight I resolved that when I get back next week I’ll finally start getting to the backlog of podcast material I have. Phew.)

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That’s right — I’m working on Best Women’s Erotica 2008 (no link yet), and after 6-7 solid years with overlapping book contracts (I have been under contract for *something* since 2000), I do not have a book after this. I do have books coming out steadily through 2008, but after this, I’m free. I have been made five book offers, all which I have declined — and now, everything will go through my agency, yay!. This is the last Best Women’s I’m doing, and I don’t know who’s on board for the series next. It’s been a *really* fun, successful (the series’ first award was my debut as its editrix) run. After this, who knows?

I should be packing (I leave for Mexico tomorrow, Forbes Internet Leadership Forum, Web Disrupters) or working on that book. But I’m futzing with my Google Reader and seeing some cool stuff. Like:

* This great Gawker post: Book Folk Terrified Of Blogs On The Internets! “‘Every blogger wants to write a book,’ Dirda begins. Sure, who wouldn’t! That’s where the real money and glamor is! Oh, hilarious. No thanks!” Agreed.

* My pal 3XL’s awesome post, Rubber55 Spoofs “MTV Cribs”! It’s a hilare, giddly over the top video spoof with some hardcore rubber fetishists and their pimped-out cribs. Aw, yeah!

* This is really fucked up: in Iran, Porn Makers Can Get Death Penalty Under New Law. It goes to their parliament this week. Make “obscenity” and they will kill you.

* I am now a big fan of Literate Perversions‘ Perverted News Roundups.

* But still, don’t miss the drop-dead excellent (and quite long, titillating and positive) piece about Kink.com — A Disciplined Business — in last sunday’s New York Times magazine. It’s so worth it.

* Oooh, also: Death in space, but also what about sex in space? In CNN’s NASA rethinking death in mission to Mars they say,

One topic that is evidently too hot to handle: How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?

Sex is not mentioned in the document and has long been almost a taboo topic at NASA. Williams said the question of sex in space is not a matter of crew health but a behavioral issue that will have to be taken up by others at NASA.

The agency will have to address the matter sooner or later, said Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has advised NASA since 2001.

“There is a decision that is going to have to be made about mixed-sex crews, and there is going to be a lot of debate about it,” he said.

(thanks, Kevin!)

Image via; see also.

Jonno just served up the most perfect Fleshbotty response to the Digg user hoo-hah (which is sadly lacking in the hoo-hah department if you know what I mean) — and points out that Digg won’t let its users link to our site. I’ll shamelessy snip his glorious text (and art) from Hot Hexadecimal Porn:

We haven’t really been keeping up with the whole conflamma today regarding Digg’s alleged censorship of a certain hexadecimal code that can be used to break the copy protection on HD-DVD disks, mostly because (1) we tend to pretty much ignore sites that won’t let its users link to our content and (2) when we first saw headlines about it, we read “AACS key” as “ASS key” and were really disappointed when the story ended up being about a bunch of numbers instead of, you know, ass. Still, we’re as committed to free expression as anyone on teh interwebs, so below you’ll find a mini-gallery featuring our own contributions to the cause. (Got any more? Feel free to send ‘em our way.) We still have no idea what you’re supposed to actually do with all those numbers and letters, but hey … everyone can use a couple of hot dildo porn pics, right? Link.

* Hot Hexadecimal Dildo Action! (Fleshbot Gallery)

It’s a Flickr set taken at the International Hihokan Erotic Museum in Japan — sadly, it closed at the end of March. It looks like it was creepy-weird and cool. (via)

Gorgeous — right size, crazy-high price. ::sigh::

Another weekend wrapup with footage of the Extra Action Marching Band (and sexy flag team dancers), a summary of my oral sex lecture at SFSI and I conduct an *explosive* demonstration showing why you should never use Crisco as sexual lubricant. Video on my show page, and embedded after the jump. Enjoy!

* If you missed it, the previous weekend’s wrap is here.

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