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I was all prepared to be disinterested in the HBO series Rome, the first disc of which arrived last week from Netflix, but I had to give it a try because everyone who mattered said I did.

Of course the first episode was terrific and I was hooked, dammit. This brings to six the number of current or recent TV series that I must follow on DVD, the others being Prison Break, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, and the final season-and-a-half of The Sopranos, which I still haven’t seen (but have had spoiled). I also have yet to sample Dexter or Big Love, both of which sound like they also have the potential to hook me. Thank goodness I lost interest in Veronica Mars and Deadwood and never even liked Heroes.

Anyway, back to the first episode of Rome. As with many first-tier TV productions these days it had outstanding writing, performances, and production values, but when I think about the show, the one thing I keep coming back to is Polly Walker’s nipples.

In her introductory scene as Atia, scheming niece of Julius Caesar, she is astride her lover Timon, both of them oblivious to the slaves and attendants who surround them at a discreet distance as they hump their way to climax. Prominently on display in this scene are Atia’s (that is to say Polly Walker’s) erect and, I have to say, impressive nipples.

Now, I’ve been around a bit. I’ve seen my share of erect nipples, in person and in pictures. I’ve seen plenty of sex in film, both real and simulated. I would not have expected a detail like this could so captivate me this late in my sexual life.

Yet somehow I can’t escape the image. And I doubt I’m alone in this. My tastes are extremely conventional, after all; and as Howard Hughes says in The Aviator, “Who doesn’t like tits?”

That means there is a good chance that the success enjoyed to date by Rome, and by Polly Walker herself, may be attributable in large part to the shrewdly early viewer-hooking use of those tiny but strangely fascinating anatomical items.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that nipples have made a career…

Here are some of the top queries from various search engines that resulted in hits on my blog during the past year or so, reproduced verbatim from my server logs. (Last year’s results are here.) Each related family of queries is listed with a main variant in bold and selected other variants, plus the percentage of query-hits represented by that family.

I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

Move over, Romancing the Bone. Hasta la vista, The Sperminator. Seeya later, On Golden Blonde, Lawrence of a Labia, and Saving Ryan’s Privates. There’s a new champion in parody porn-title land: Free To Do Me And You. (via violet blue)

(Sorry, Marlo!)

A question for those who resist vaccinating young girls against human papillomavirus (HPV) — the sexually transmitted pathogen that causes cervical cancer — because they don’t want to be seen as encouraging those girls to be sexually active:

When you require teens to wear safety belts in a car, are you encouraging them to crash?

Herewith, a selection of search-engine queries that resulted in hits on this blog, according to my server logs.

watch neighbor undress; exploratorium; fizzies pulled; thailand’s greatest hits; what happened to fizzies tablets; what are the three kinds of mammals; violet incredible pez; watching neighbor undress; “new rabbi”; Rosh Hashanah; “the federation trading post”; persian candy floss recipes; “citric acid” science pop candy; supine lady; lesbian sex; ursula.sex; how to explain the theory of crystallization to third graders; evil cats; i feel like crying; Comcast Removes West Coast Feeds; boycott disney & abc path to 911; raiders-of-the-lost-ark Pirates-of-the-caribbean; “name the moon” greg; Reality an space-time; “francis heaney”; “smut shack”; squeamish cure; doggie style sex; webby awards; amy linker; cynthia nixon; quarks tangles; “mill valley pediatrics”; “dildo with suction”; proposition moveon endorsements; hypothermia kim; steve elliot bdsm; “instant soda”; trish gee wordpress; song meanings splashdown; “yours yours yours”; fligth to mars; “lesbian vampire fiction”; “needed a diaper”; disney fingerprints; fizzie drink discs; ben kenobi obgyn; linux backup s3; melissa kaplan sings; “adam stoller”; splashdown catalogue; “santa claus ain’t”; vote to boycott abc disney path to 911; joe costanzo; doggie style sex positions illustrated; Fizzies drink tablet recipe; “jack mccoy”; charteris; tune out, turn off; incremental jungledisk; “no fireflies” long island 2006; vampire lesbian; Thai Pilot; boisterous laugh audios; simpsons ulysses; sephardic pirates kritzler; backup osx hardlink incremental; karma slave karaoke; voyager pale blue dot send back the image; comcast digital artifacts; Con Edison; What year did the sitcom premiere I dream of jeannie; Recently got digital cable still receiving all premium channels; joseph costanzo, jr.; Superman reversing time; three kinds of meat; video koyaanisqatsi koyaanisqatsi; chabad palo alto; 9/11 personal; “Calculatrivia”; viscera at&t.

Today my friend Greg had his birthday party. Andrea and I were responsible for decorations, which took the form of helium balloons and a collection of six different cakes painstakingly hand-decorated by us to depict Greg’s life.

One of the cakes commemorated an episode from when Greg and I and a few other friends worked together at a technology startup some years ago. For some reason the subject of lesbian-vampire fiction had come up. We guys all endorsed the genre — what’s not to love? — but none so heartily as Greg, who was promptly branded the resident lesbian-vampire fancier.

On a separate occasion Greg evinced what we playfully regarded as an unwholesome interest in girl scouts. So during one discussion of the technology we were developing — which among other things permitted users to find the overlaps between separate searches of one’s e-mail — we imagined that one such search that Greg might perform would be to find the overlap between “girl scouts” and “lesbians” and “vampires.”

Not long after that some of us found Greg crashed out on the couch after an all-night programming session. He was smiling in his sleep, and the consensus was that he was dreaming about vampire lesbian girl scouts. Hence a cutout of this drawing by yours truly gracing one of his cakes.

Speaking of helium balloons: some time ago it occurred to me that (a) when helium escapes from a balloon or elsewhere, it must float straight up to the top of the atmosphere where it is effectively unretrievable, and (b) being a “noble” gas, new helium cannot be produced via chemical reactions, only nuclear ones, such as during hydrogen fusion, which is prohibitively expensive. Ergo there must be a limited supply of helium on earth and we are using it up. This deduction turned out to be exactly right, and in fact we may have no more than a couple of decades before helium becomes too scarce and costly for whimsical uses like party balloons or talking in a chipmunk voice, alas.

While we’re on the subject of sex, might as well mention my next-door neighbor. He moved in about a year ago. His license plate read, “I♥BDSM.” Sure enough, we noted an interesting variety of people coming and going from his house, a few wild-seeming parties, and the occasional vividly suggestive sound effect in the middle of the night. I got a glimpse through his window of the first movie he watched after setting up his big-screen TV: Secretary.

But in just the last few days we’ve noticed that his car no longer has the “I♥BDSM” license plate. Now it’s a normal non-vanity alphanumeric sequence. We’ve had fun speculating why this might be. Does he no longer ♥ BDSM? Did something horrible happen when someone forgot the safe word? Maybe he got a stern talking-to from some prudish supervisor at work? Or a new girlfriend or boyfriend laid down the law?

We don’t know the answer and we don’t know him well enough to say anything other than “hi” when we see him. But we do know that if you live in California and you ♥ BDSM, a new license-plate option has just opened up for you.

At my birthday party yesterday, my friend Ursula asked about this blog and was disappointed when I said that it has very little sexual content. So here, for Ursula, is something sex-oriented from my archives. (I can’t wait to see what this will do for my Google hits.) It’s an (illustrated!) e-mail message I wrote to a mailing list when my friend Don let everyone know he’d attended the 2003 San Francisco Masturbate-a-thon. One highlight, he wrote, was

the nice pretty lady who chose a spot right next to me, whose method of masturbation was to take a dildo with suction cups on the back end, attach it to the mirrored wall (<SLAM!> have I got everyone’s attention now?) and fuck it face-to-face and doggie-style for an hour.

I’m having some trouble picturing face-to-face mirror-dildo fucking. (Not for lack of trying!)

Doggie-style is obviously no problem…

[Aside: why "doggie style"? It's also "kitty style" and "horsey style" and "rodent style." Doggies have no more of a claim on the position than do the French on French kissing. I mean freedom kissing.]

…but face-to-face against a wall?

Fig. 1a

Fig. 1b

Normally the lady’s legs want to protrude beyond the plane where the phallus originates (see figures 1a, 1b). But there’s nowhere for her legs to go when that plane is real — viz., a wall — and not imaginary (figure 2).

Fig. 2

Furthermore, being pressed upright against a wall with nothing to hold onto — and wiggling around vigorously to boot — wouldn’t it be hard to keep from falling over backward?

Fig. 3

I can easily see how missionary style could work, with the lady supine and the dildo attached quite low to the floor (figure 3), but I wouldn’t exactly call that face-to-face.

Fig. 4

The best I can come up with is a kind of deep squat (figure 4), but that makes the task of balancing seem even more difficult and the whole venture more trouble than it’s worth. Unless the lady considers the visuals in the mirror to offset the difficulties…

[Reproduced from e-mail.]

I’m on a mailing list that saw much criticism of George Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In response to a comment about Bush remaining on vacation as the disaster unfolded, one die-hard Bush defender quipped,

All presidents have taken long vacations, but then again, they are “on-call” 24 hours per day [...]

With, of course, the notable exception of President Clinton, who preferred have his vacations under his desk.

So I wrote:

New rule: Any president who can keep Americans safe, preserve our liberties, keep joblessness and poverty down, keep the economy growing, keep the international situation stable, heed scientific consensus, avoid burdening our children with debt or depriving them of resources, refrain from unnecessary military adventures and fight the necessary ones effectively, govern on behalf of those who didn’t vote for him as well as those who did, appoint qualified experts to top posts and hold them accountable when they fuck up, admit and correct his own errors, honor the accomplishments of past generations, and exhibit a deep respect for the law is hereby free to gather the entire staff of the White House for a giant orgy in the Oval Office daily at 6pm. With sodomy.