You’d think they’d know better after three months ago, a 22-year-old woman and her mother sued Best Buy and its “Geek Squad” computer repair team for dispatching a technician who filmed the daughter taking a shower (using his cell phone). But then, last week a sting caught a Geek Squad tech red handed, on video, stealing porn from a customer’s computer. Like, it’s SO HARD to find free porn on teh innerwebs. But now this is pure evil, at Consumerist: Geek Squad Hatched Plot To Harvest Porn From Pornstar Jasmine Grey’s Hard Drive, Days Before She Died In Car Crash. It wasn’t an isolated employee here, but an entire fucking team who then passed her pictures around. Repulsive, especially because they so obviously felt that because she was a sex worker they were totally justified to violate her privacy, sexual and otherwise. It’s disgusting that it took the event of her death for these men to feel regret. Snip:

I left for the day and came back the next day to find that one of our fellow employees had copied all of the files to a few dvd’s and shared them with management, as well as most of the other techs.

Her webcam was still locking up her machine when she took her computer home that night, so she returned again in the morning. She still wouldn’t provide us with her site (not that we needed it anyway at that point), but she did want to look into purchasing a new machine. At this point I handed her off to a PCHO rep who proceeded to convince her that instead of buying a new machine…she should just have an Agent come out to fix it at her house (that way she “could rest easy that her privacy would be assured”). The manager on duty at the time was involved in the scam, so he offered to send an Agent out for free to “go the extra mile and insure she only shop at Best Buy in the future” Of course, the Agent that came out to her house was none other than the same person who copied all her files to DVD. He fixed the webcam in a few minutes then spent the entire remainder of the appointment scouring her network for more porn, which he saved to a portable hard drive. Those files were then shared across the store.

Link.

For this week’s Chronicle/SF Gate column, I developed my drive-by post about the Bill O’Reilly lesbian gangs segment into a full-on exploration of the piece — discovering some extremely interesting, underreported items along the way. In the same way as driving by a car crash and slowing down, peering into the stories Fox News exploited for their piece revealed at least one very serious issue and a whole mess of pathological propaganda. I’m especially proud of the column this week, and I think you’ll enjoy several aspects of the article. My favorite line: “Hey, I know that Fox News, like porn, is just entertainment, and should never be taken seriously. But I worry about the women and children that are being exploited to fund this billion-dollar-a-year industry.” The mail I’ve gotten is hilarious and overwhelmingly positive; I’ll update this post with emails in a bit. Snip:

I was chillin’ in the hood, kickin’ it under the rainbow flag with my homegirls, sippin’ a 40 and working up to find some schoolkids to indoctrinate and go teach some straight people a few lessons, when it hit me. That square do-gooder O’Reilly had blown our cover. His recent Lesbian Gangs segment on Fox News, where he exposed a national network of lesbian and gay gangs, had the world’s eyes spun in our direction like a chamber packed with one bullet, and all I could do now was spill a little Smirnoff Ice on the corner of Market and Castro for my fallen homos.

Actually, the segment was the funniest thing I’d watched all week, and I wondered how Fox News had managed to borrow the Daily Show’s writers for some good ‘ol news-as-fake-news comedy. In the Lesbian Gangs segment Bill O’Reilly reported on the epidemic of lesbian and gay gangs he assured us is sweeping the nation. Beginning with Dwayne Buckle (”attacked by a lesbian gang here in New York City last August.”), then careening into a “lesbian gang” in Tennessee “called GTO: Gays Take Over” who are “raping young girls” and then to Philly, where ” a gang called DTO “‘Dykes Take Over’” are allegedly terrorizing people as well.” This was lurid, exciting — this was Weekly World News on airplane glue and Anal Eze.

But really, who will protect the straight people’s children from lesbian rape? There’s a new detective on that beat, and it’s O’Reilly (finally proving there’s a reason detectives wear trench coats). O’Reilly anchored his entire segment on the Dwayne Buckle / Lesbian Seven case, lest it be forgotten in the history of homosexual lawlessness. Left out of the Lesbian Gangs segment were the case’s details: Buckle harassed seven women on the street in the East Village last August. According to written statements by a community organization (FIERCE) that has made a call to action to defend the four women, as well as verbal accounts from court observers and evidence from a surveillance camera, Buckle spat on them, followed them, flicked a lit cigarette at them, accosted one of the women and pulled out her hair and told them he’d “f– them straight.”.

It was all captured on video, video that, ironically, played in the background during O’Reilly’s piece. (…)

Link.

Update: Rod Wheeler has an apology on the front page of his website — saying he’s sorry to Pink Pistols and for the exaggerated gang numbers, though not for anything else, like all the creepy sexual indoctrination stuff about gays (which we now see was *clearly* false). And O’Reilly ate a little crow, with an extremely weak apology to GLAAD’s Rashad Robinson, who he had on his show in a moment of true O’Reilly teeth-gritting. It really looked to me like O’Reilly was under pressure to have to allow the guy to finish his sentences, and still, O’Reilly couldn’t resist talking shit saying, “I’m not in fear of the lesbians beating me up.” I’ll bet he’s not.

I have a lot of issues with porn reviewers. Why? Because most of them lie. They lie like dogs, like a rug on Burt Reynolds, like the lyingist liars that ever tried to come up with another word for “female performer” and thought that “cumslut” was appealing (or even a word). They lie to keep their crappy jobs at AVN, to sell product for VCA, they even lie to try and get laid by porn stars. I am a porn reviewer, and sometimes get in trouble for not lying. I have lots of friends who review porn, and not all of them have work I consistently enjoy — except for my pal Thomas. And whether it’s the GHB I injected into his Anal Eze or the weather, for some reason he’s decided to be one tough motherfucker this week with his porn reviews. If you want to see him smack around some bad porn, check out Tattooed & Tight, How Far Will You Go?, and the best one, Strip for Pain.

We’re having a great day — image from my Ocean.

If you work for a state program in Nebraska, you can’t use the word “sex” or “sexual” in any of your public media. The state government of Nebraska hasn’t outright stated that they’re “doing it for the children” but what they’re doing right now is certainly destroying the children (and poor) by withholding sex information. Their pro-life Gov. Dave Heineman decided (and his staff agreed) that all Department of Human Health Services programs (and those that get funding) should “avoid controversy” — specifically sexual language — in all media. That means brochures about diabetes with a list of possible symptoms relating to sex, removed. The word “sexual” was censored off the HIV prevention program website and they were not allowed to announce National Condom Week. You know, I’ll just let the Nebraska Planned Parenthood worker in my inbox tonight tell you how it is. Snip from her email:

My job as an sex educator is solely prevention and information. EVERY SINGLE DAY I talk to teens who are hurt physically and emotionally by the withholding of vital sexual health information. I have kids cry in my office because their parents, teachers, or other caregivers NEVER talked to them honestly about sex or healthy relationships. By the time one student made it to my office, she had two pregnancies, one of which was terminated because her much older boyfriend threw her down the stairs at 7 months pregnant. The other, a miscarriage at the age of 13…too afraid to tell anyone she bled profusely by herself. The mentor who brought her into my office later reported to me that she actually jumped up and down because she finally, FINALLY, had the sex talk with someone. This information served a good purpose, but how would her life been different if it had occurred years earlier????

Here’s a link to the Journal Star story detailing their censorship of the word sex, and policies to eliminate gay and lesbian programs, such as, “HHSS Director Chris Peterson explained the department’s decision this way: Diversity teams must limit topics to the protected classes under federal law. Homosexuals are not a protected class.”

Would someone, please, think of the children? (Thanks, Matt!)

Sounds like a romance title, but maybe for a cupcake and panty romance. She’ll be at my house in an hour; while I wait and print author contracts for Best Women’s Erotica 2008 (nice cover, Cleis), dig the Vixen’s recent interview on Bookslut:

“Alt porn” is hot right now. Violet Blue just gave her adult video recommendations to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine and chances are your frat-jock neighbor has a Suicide Girls subscription. The silicon-breasted San Fernando Valley gold standard seems stuck in the past — even if she is “barely legal.” But those Suicide Girls aren’t quitting their day jobs and most “indie” porn producers are barely breaking even. As Audacia Ray explains in her new book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Sexploration, alt porn is no “cash cow,” but it further individualizes our sexual exploration. With clever chapter titles like “Girls Gone Wired” and “Our Bodies, Our Broadbands,” Ray examines how online activity impacts our sexuality. Web cams, Craig’s List Casual Encounters, and “teledildonics” offer entirely new ways to get off, but anonymity can never be taken for granted.

Audacia Ray is the Merlin Mann of the sex bloggers. She’s the executive editor of $pread magazine, written for and by sex workers, and contributes to Fleshbot, as well as maintaining her personal website, Waking Vixen. Plus, she just graduated with a MA in American Studies from Columbia University and, earlier this year, released the video “Bi Apple,” which she wrote and directed.

Over Japanese food, before her reading in Boston, I asked her some questions about the book.

You just got back from Amsterdam. Can you tell me a little about that?

I went for a conference called C’Lick Me. It was supposed to be a non-academic conference [but] it ended up more academic than I hoped it would be. There were a lot of presentations that were like, “I wrote a paper and now I’m going to read it.” My presentation was a slideshow that included naked pictures of myself.

So you have the opposite of that public speaking chestnut. You can imagine everyone’s seen you naked.

Right. And they do! The first slide I showed was a picture from my boyfriend who went with me. We wrote the name of the conference — “C’Lick Me” — across my knuckles. We were up on the roof deck of the hotel I stayed at. I stripped down, held up my boobs, and he took the picture. That was the first picture in the slideshow. It was like, “Hi, I’m Audacia Ray. These are my boobs. Anyway!”

Link.

Come join Dacia and I chatting about sex and the internets here in SF tomorrow night.

Update: the event has been moved to At CSC, 290 Division Suite 405, cross 10th and Brannan. $5-$20 sliding scale. Someone good gets the money, I don’t know who :) Starts at 7:30!

Reader nightbird emails me saying, “Saw this while reading a Reuters article on Griefers. Thought you might be interested…”

It’s too bad I can’t embed their player, but do visit ‘Love dolls’ woo Japanese men to watch the video (beware: autoplay). There’s no new news in it, but instead a short look at a *serious* personal collector and a visit to a Japanese sex doll factory — the good, silicone kind, with 35 joints and creepy shiny eyes.

In sawyer_shu’s Tokyo set on Flickr, you can see the whole Reuters image set — it’s excellent, though boo on the pixelated nipples. And unlike the video, here we find out that, “A worker bags sex doll torsos at Orient Industry’s factory in Tokyo May 23, 2007. Orient Industry makes sex dolls to order with a variety of bodies, faces and hairstyles that cost from 140,000 yen (US$1,150) for a basic model to 650,000 yen (US$5,400) for models with realistic latex skin and internal metal skeletons. REUTERS/Michael Caronna (JAPAN)”

My dear friend Thomas has some really interesting thoughts about the 10 Zen Monkeys sex panic interview I posted a day ago, and talks about being a porn writer while dating and living in the very sex-negative, anti-porn feminist climate of circa-1980 Santa Cruz, CA (home of UC Santa Cruz). Image from the truly terrible porn flick Club Satan: The Witches Sabbath, via Evil Now. Snip from Thomas’ Panic for Satan: How I Learned to Freak Out and Wrote Lots of Porn Anyway:

The interview is about the broader schema of sex panics and kiddie porn, but I find the Satanic angle really mind-boggling because I remember it so vividly from the ’80s. I remember being told by a fundamentalist friend that by purchasing Dungeons & Dragons books, even if I wasn’t worshipping Satan, I was giving my money to people who did. I remember listening to the famed back-masking radio program of Jacob Aranza, who played “Stairway to Heaven” backwards (”There’s no escapin’ it… it’s my sweet Satan”) and claimed that the “Hotel California” was the Church of Satan in California Street in San Francisco (on which street I later lived). Most vividly, I remember Ms. Magazine, in January 1993, running a cover that asked me to “Believe It: Child Ritual Abuse Exists” — AFTER I had already read, in numerous sources, the (almost inarguable) debunking of many of the 1980s Satanic ritual abuse claims… many, not all, sure but once you’ve proven that the world has gone stark raving mad, how much slack do you give its claim that the Belgazarans from Theta Omicron Eleventyseven are trying to get through its tinfoil hat?

This Beta Panic occurred after I had met numerous women who were sexually abused as children, most of them by family members and none of them in a ritual setting. (The women weren’t the only ones abused, but I guess guys didn’t talk about that shit in the ’80s. Since then I have met plenty of guys who were abused, physically and/or sexually, as children, some by family members and some by non-family members, none of them in a ritual setting). Several of these women, and many other self-identified feminists I met from 1986-1990, believed not only that Satanic ritual abuse existed, but that it was a feminist’s duty to vigorously pursue its exposure. More importantly, some of them believed that to question the claims of Satanic abuse’s purported victims was concretely the same as questioning all abuse victims, participating in a culture of silence that had kept women down for thousands of years.

I also remember my affair, circa 1988, with one of those women, with whom I was madly in love for reasons I remember only after half a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Red or Black works, but Blue Label’s way too classy. She told me that by writing porn novels with titles like All the Way in the Hay and Hot Wife in Heat, I was directly contributing to and causing — her words, not mine — the rape of little girls. Her words, exactly, not mine.

Link.

Image via this free gallery.

I recently discovered a nice nest of CFNM blogs (clothed female, naked male) via my Australian, female pro-porn pal Ms. Naughty’s superlative CFNM resource guide. They’re all connected somehow, and link to affiliate paysites, but the pics and video samples are all free and a whole hell of a lot of fun. This weekend I’ve been peeping the basic Original CFNM Blog, Yehu’s CFNM Blog and my new fave, CFNM Blog (which often links to galleries at paysite Pure CFNM). Oh, the fun to be had passing a naked guy around with the girls — all the smiles and playful amateur antics (as in, not porn stars) look like a lot of fun to me :)

Monogamy is its own kind of fetish. To wit: the heteronormative, yet consumable in a disposable, bag-o-chips kind of way article in the Guardian UK today, Is anyone faithful any more? I love these articles for all the sweeping assumptions and generalizations they make, like reading Star Magazine, but for the perceived “cheating is an adulterous sin” status quo. (And the percentages they admit are based on conjecture.) Snip:

Pamela Druckerman doesn’t look like the world’s leading authority on infidelity. She looks like the primary- school teacher all the dads fancy; or one of those second-generation yummy mummies, the kind who sets up a stall in a farmers’ market selling fashionable cupcakes. She sits in the window of a patisserie in North London; a super-pretty, soft, smiley blonde, with a latte and a laptop. She’s involuntarily fixating on passing Bugaboos. ‘My husband said he might walk by with our daughter,’ she says. She’s American, and even though her husband is British, and they have spent the past four years living in Paris, her accent endures. ‘I can’t help checking out all the prams. It’s a reflex.’ She smiles.

I expected something a lot less wholesome from someone who’s spent the past three years immersed in the world of international adultery. Pamela Druckerman has written the definitive guide on it. Lust In Translation: The Rules Of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee is the result of a long study of the world’s philanderers. Druckerman has crunched numbers, collated evidence, and acquainted herself with the lexicon of adultery in two dozen cities in 10 different countries across the world. She has interviewed adulterers (one-off; serial; recovering; flagrant; and tortured) and cuckolds (or ‘men who wear green hats’ according to the Chinese) in Moscow, Kazakhstan, London, New York, Paris, Indonesia, South America and beyond… She discovered that the Japanese don’t count it as infidelity if they’ve paid for it, and that the best thing that can happen to them in one of their famous sex clubs is ‘oral sex without showering first’. She discovered that 40 per cent of Russians surveyed think affairs are ‘not at all wrong’ or ‘not always wrong’, and that upper-class Muscovites think affairs conducted at beach clubs do not compromise wedding vows one iota. She discovered that Indonesian women in extremely traditional Islamic marriages ‘have affairs, and the reasons they give for them are exactly the same as the reasons my girlfriends in New York City gave: my husband doesn’t listen to me, I need someone who’ll make me feel smart and pretty again; my husband doesn’t do that, but my boyfriend does …’ She discovered that on average the British cheat more than the Americans - and the French.

Link.

Is here.

I’ve been mulling over a few articles I want to write lately about sex-related things done “for the children”, like sex offender registries, obscenity legislation and adult porn censorship. These thought patterns have me currently re-reading Judith Levine’s terrific book Harmful to Minors (which has prompted spontaneous, between-the-sheets readings from the book to Hacker Boy whenever I get all worked up about a point). So when Praemedia sent me this excellent interview today, Sex Panic! - An Interview With Debbie Nathan, I read it with a special interest. The interviewer is the notorious Susie Bright, so it’s a firecracker of a read from start to finish, and you may or may not agree with the sentiments expressed. Extra kudos to my pals at 10 Zen Monkeys for publishing this extremely controversial piece, which will likely have a huge backlash. Snip:

Editor’s note: We experienced some hesitation at publishing this piece and having Google searches by society’s biggest perverts lead to our site. But given the players, including the New York Times, the Justice Department, the Internet, and Free Speech itself, we feel confident that it will start an important debate on a number of issues that are usually dominated by hysterical, reactionary voices. (…)

Debbie Nathan is the expert on sex panics and is perhaps best known for her book, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, about some of the widely covered sex panic cases that rocked the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, such as the McMartin preschool case in California. Susie and Debbie share a deep distrust about former New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald’s much talked about articles on Internet child pornography.

SUSIE BRIGHT: First of all, you uncovered the bizarre, so-called “satanic abuse scandals” that were happening in Southern California in the 1980s, and I remember thinking, “How could people re-create the Salem witch trials in this day and age?” And the next time you popped up in my life, I was reading these sensational stories in the New York Times by a reporter who said that he had sat around just looking at tons of child pornography, which he described in amazing, titillating detail - and of course he was on a campaign to stop it.

Nevertheless, I put down the newspaper I was reading, and I said, “How does this guy get to look at anything that is remotely like ‘child pornography,’ when the whole genre is utterly and completely illegal in the United States? What is the deal… Did he do a deal with the Justice Department? And what are THEY showing him?” And, “How come he doesn’t talk about any of this?” The very next day, there’s an article in Salon - by you, Debbie Nathan. And it had this provocative title, Why I Need To See Child Porn.

DN: And then the next day, it was gone.

Link.

Please help. My Wikipedia page does me no justice whatsoever. My press and publicity page has more info — and that’s not much. All I want for christmas is a Wikipedia page that looks like everyone else’s, rather than just a dry list of my books (and not even including the ones I’ve contributed to). I will be happy to answer any and all questions to accomplish this goal. I just have no clue how to go about it.

love,
me

One of my favorite, and more personal, columns is today’s Day Shift Strippers: Lazy Saturday in North Beach. Here, I describe what Hacker Boy and I got up to last weekend, snip:

This story, like all good San Francisco stories, begins at the tail end of a chilly-and-sunburned Gay Pride Sunday afternoon, and winds up on a heartbreaker of a Saturday night in North Beach under a writhing, tattooed stripper named “Johnny.” Everything was unpredictable, from meeting Hayes Valley ex-punks who run a high-end furniture store, to when the day-shift pole dancer at Hustler’s put her head through the ceiling tile. It could happen to anyone. This is how it happened to me.

By the end of the Pride Parade I’d had my fill of butt cheeks and bullhorns, sun and freezing Civic Center scented gale force winds, and split City Hall before the VIP party ran out of free booze. Never mind the ghosts of homophobic murderers and gay brides mingling under the dome, and the speech by Mikayla Connell I was about to (regretfully) miss; my feet were through with the festivities. Hacker Boy and I wandered off toward Hayes Valley in search of that mythical beast all San Franciscans think they can charm: no, not a unicorn — a taxi on Pride weekend.

Weary from the walk, we ducked into an open door: a modern furniture store had to have a Chicago chair that needed testing. It was in Inside, and at the exact moment we darkened the doorway, the black-clad proprietors popped open a bottle of champagne. After an hour with Inside’s old-school San Francisco ex-punk owners Emmett and Deanna, I’d discovered a fellow San Francisco native, been regaled with tales of Mabuhay Gardens, and bonded over what it’s like explaining to old friends that you never OD’d and are still alive (”I just moved to Canada! It wasn’t that bad!”), and more.

Link.

And if you want to read what happened after the end of the column, when you’re done click the post Johnny, are you queer?

Image via, via. Alt pole dancer photo here.

My G-spot, location according to Google Maps. Was in a room of friends yesterday who were giddily reading parts of The Smart Girl’s Guide to the G-Spot aloud (over cocktails) and Hacker Boy said, “Hold on, I’ll find it!”

Scooter was commuted. Obscenity prosecutions are willfully heading toward Comstock-era proportions. Bill O’Reilly is “news”. Gitmo, Gitmo, Gitmo. Nice place we got here, eh?

Actually, it’s pretty nice, despite our government’s best efforts of late. Exercise your San Francisco values today and enjoy a little porn that flaunts your rights as an adult. Namely, check out Kink.com’s newest site launched this week, The Training Of O. Mind you, this is not for the faint of heart; it’s some very intense kink, BDSM, bondage and all kinds of hardcore (and very creative) sexual extremes — that’s the point. The basis of the site is focusing on a model who honestly explains her sexual/physical limits, and how she’d like those limits pushed. I was at Kink when they started filming the series and got to talk to one of the models, and the guys in the shop making devices based on her desires to have her limits and fears pushed. At the time I was writing about Behind Kink, who was doing this segment about Training of O.

I’m not a big BDSM person in my private life, and the only dungeon I’ve really been to is Kink’s set during happy hour on fridays; though I do try things sometimes — and I’ll admit that trying kinky things are often way hotter for me than watching them in porn. But the intersection of kink and porn, I think, is going to be one of the final frontiers and proving grounds for our rights as American citizens, and sexuality being seen as normal and healthy, individuated and self-defined. And a place like Kink.com, thanks to Peter Acworth (and not thanks to BDSM’s marginalization in mainstream porn), is actively putting out there that kinkiness among us adults, is normal. In context, the whole thing makes me think of this closing paragraph for my Madame and Mr. S column, when they put me in an isolation booth:

Once seated on a metal chair in the black leather-padded booth, smiley PR/Affiliate Manager Leah Perry waved good-bye to me as Paige shut the door. Suddenly I was in total darkness, with no sound except for the gentle, piped-in New Age music. In the utter pitch black, I thought about how, with the Folsom Street Fair, Kink.com and all the other powerhouses of sex-positive kinkiness, San Francisco really is the center of the world for all of this. It’s the calm, safe voice of reason about what adults do behind closed doors with paddles and handcuffs at a time in America when our hysterically sex-phobic government and media would rather have us think that anything off the prescribed sexual road map is abuse, degradation or worse — much like 1950s thinking that homosexuality is a disorder or illness. Here at Mr. S, we find that the same video clips of leathermen in chaps that the right wing will run as anti-gay or anti-San Francisco propaganda are suddenly a lot less threatening or harmful. In all of leather’s perceived extremes, it’s really just kind of normal. Um, and hot.

Link.

Here’s the sample page — and yes, I wish they had higher-res images to entice us with. Here’s the page with a sample video (and yes, they should be making this play inline, on the page, not a downloadable file). On the page you’ll see a girl who’s been on this blog a few hardcore times before, Lorelei Lee — my favorite geeky pornstar (MySpace) blogger*.

* As a side note, I had a weird dream about Justine Joli last night, or rather the hype about her. She’s sweet and pretty, but I guess in the dream I was trying to work out my frustration about her selling herself as a podcaster (among other things). Can anyone find her podcast, or anything proving all that geek cred her site designer stuck in the title bar of the blog that sells her site memberships? I mean, c’mon — some of us cut our teeth in the iTunes porn battles of 2005; if you talk the talk, you better walk the walk.

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This is fascinating — a virtual sex product company within (local) online real-time virtual world Second Life is suing a virtual citizen for copyright infringement. Second Life may be subpoena’d for the true identity of the alleged copyright infringer, which is unknown at this time. Amusingly, the defendant has issued a statement about his identity saying that he is “not some kind of n00b.” (Thanks, Jason!) Snip from the Reuters (Second Life News Center) piece:

SECOND LIFE, July 3 (Reuters) - Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Tuesday against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo, and Alderman’s lawyer said he plans to subpoena Linden Lab to force it to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity.

Alderman (Second Life name: Stroker Serpentine) runs the adult-content company Eros LLC. One of the company’s most popular products is the SexGen bed, virtual furniture that contains more than 150 sex animations and retails for L$12,000 (US$45.11).

In “Eros LLC vs John Doe,” filed in the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Alderman accuses Catteneo of illicitly copying and selling the SexGen bed for as little as L$4,000, sharply cutting into Eros’ sales.

Filing a copyright infringement case against “John Doe” is an established practice in Internet cases where the defendant’s identity is not initially apparent, said Alderman’s lawyer, Francis Taney of Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney. For example, the music industry has filed thousands of “John Doe” lawsuits against people it alleges have illicitly shared music online.

Taney said he will seek Catteneo’s identity, chat histories, and financial records from Linden Lab and PayPal.

“Despite reasonable efforts, Eros does not presently know Defendant’s true identity or address but intends to obtain this information by way of subpoenas directed to one or more internet service providers that are likely to have obtained said information from Defendant,” the lawsuit states.

Link.

For reals! Snip (thanks, Cyrus!):

It’s only about a week old, but a new pizza place in Winnipeg has already aroused attention - not for its pizza pie, but for the racy extra that comes with it.

Patrons must be 18 years and older to order from Porno Pizza, which delivers pornographic material inserted under every pizza. (…)

Wildeman said the idea of including pornographic photos with pizza is a marketing gimmick designed to sell more pies. And the gimmick is legal: customers even have to show identification to the delivery person at the door, proving they are 18 or older.

Link.

And according to The Australian, it’s just images that are revealed as you eat the pizza (not, as I imagined, a DVD — hey I’ve got donations!). Interestingly the owner is franchising, and noted that unexpectedly, more than 75% of his customers have turned out to be women.

No, really — I’m sitting here so bemusedly, offendedly stunned after watching Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News segment about lesbian/homosexual/dyke criminal gangs “indoctrinating” members and sexually initiating them and committing crimes (like beating up men and threatening them with pink 9mm Glocks) that I’m just… speechless. Bill has just delivered unto us a big pantload of steaming rainbow propaganda. I really hope he does a report on reefer madness next. I hear it’s the Devil’s weed with roots in Hell.

The criminal expert — how did he not crack up during the taping? And the B-roll of chicks beating each other up, sans context, is priceless. My favorite part (of many bizarre favorite parts) — “They call themselves ‘Pink Pistols’”. (Um, Bill — you mean these PInk Pistols?)

Oh, Mary! I mean, Bill. The video is after the jump. (thanks Shalako!)

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My pal L. writes from Copenhagen today, “EU has launched a sexed-up youtube clip to advertise the commissions program MEDIA, which provides subsidies to filmmakers in the EU. The ad has a title worthy of any (American) porn flick: It’s called ‘Coming together to celebrate European films’ (duh!). What are the odds that the US federal government would ever put out a ad campaign like that? Also, I saw the EAMB a week ago! Man, are they great.”

It’s also relevant to me because yesterday I was discussing with friends what I’d like to see in a collection of my favorite/hottest mainstream movie scenes — I’d definitely have to add this to the kitty. The video is embedded after the jump. Yum!

Update: Uh-oh, Fox News found out about it: Sex Scenes in European Commission YouTube Clip Cause Controversy, snip:

“Cheap, tawdry and tacky,” was the reaction of Godfrey Bloom of Britain’s euro-skeptic U.K. Independence Party, who described the clip as “soft porn” and a potential waste of taxpayers’ money.

The Commission’s foray onto the popular video-sharing Web site, he said, “was like watching an elderly relative trying to be cool: very embarrassing.”

And EU lawmaker Maciej Giertych of Poland, from the conservative League of Polish Families, has accused the commission of using “immoral methods” of promotion, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the shots in the clip - drawn from award-winning films such as “Amelie” and “Bad Education” - highlighted Europe’s tradition of rich cinema.

Selmayr said Tuesday that he had not received any complaints about the video, which was presented at the Berlin Film Festival in February as part of a four-clip media campaign. The other three highlight joy, sadness and friendship.

Link.

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