meet the bagelheads

I'm not making this up: in Japan, trendy fetishists are injected with saline to distort their body shapes.

While limbs, breasts, and buttocks are frequent spots for bizarre ballooning, pumping up the forehead with doughnut-shaped lumps is the most popular. Devotees call themselves bagelheads.

This isn't anything new, either. The trend has been around for at least ten years. The temporary swelling lasts about twenty-four hours. As the pictures demonstrate, gravity does take its toll.

I want to know how that kaiser helmet-style piercing stays on the one guy's head.

gangsta chic

He was arrested for robbery. Gee, I wonder how the witnesses ever identified him?

I think the moral of this story is, if you're planning on a life in crime, a facial tattoo that resembles a backgammon board probably isn't a good idea.

Aren't the little horn tatts a lovely addition to this charmer? Oh, we get it, you're a bad boy!

unintentional hnt

My husband took this several months ago. We were staying at a hotel with an indoor pool. We took a late-night dip and my suit bottom came off accidentally when I dove off the diving board. No matter how hard I try to stay dressed, my clothes just want to come off my body sometimes.

dating brian

Well male readers, if you're having problems dating, you're not trying hard enough.

Brian, a somewhat geeky Midwesterner living in Manhattan who looks like he's twelve, has decided to take his lovelife online and chronicle thirty consecutive nights of dates. He's on Twitter, he's on YouTube, he has a blog -- in short, he's everywhere.

He doesn't show all the girls he's dated -- and is only a few days into his experiment -- but some of the ladies are downright cute.

I do think Brian is being a bit nerdy about this, however. He's yammering in one video about how he's 10 percent through his dates. Dude, if you're thinking ratios and trivial mathematical statistics and complicated graphs after a date, you're not keeping the eye on the ball.

We want to know if you're getting laid, Brian. That's what we want to know. None of this gibberish about tempura cupcakes. We want to know if you laid pipe. Because, truly, that's why 99 percent or so of men bother with dates.

So guys, if Brian can get all this female attention, there's no excuse for you. Because quite honestly, Brian will never be confused with Daniel Craig. I know hobbit cute works with some girls, but it's not exactly a strategic advantage. And he's in Manhattan, where hot men with eight-pack abs and seven-figure salaries are not that hard to find, so he's paddling in a crowded shark pool.

annoying people

Shortly after my husband and I became a couple, we were in a store together where we encountered a particularly unpleasant saleswoman. He behaved, however, as if she wasn't the way she was, and soon she mellowed out significantly and helped us.

We talked about this later, and he said something like: "If you allow annoying people to annoy you, then you've allowed them to win."

James is almost always extremely mellow. I could count on one hand the times I've seen him exhibit any kind of temper. He steadfastly refuses to allow other people to push his buttons.

I believe I'm a very easygoing person, but my thinking about annoying people is different than his.

As the child of two shrinks, I expect I absorbed more psychology around the house than most people with normal, non-psychiatrist parents. As a result, I can often figure out some basics about why people do what they do.

We have a very annoying woman who lives on our street and who rubs most of the neighbors the wrong way. She's strident, opinionated, hyper-critical, unpleasant, whiny and more. She also never shuts up, butts into what you're saying, and repeats herself endlessly.

I was chatting with another neighbor recently about some things when we spied "Ms. Annoying" heading down the street. After she passed by in her own private thundercloud, my neighbor remarked with some amazement about how I could tolerate the woman. I explained how, as an armchair shrink, I had an idea why the woman was so annoying -- she's terribly neurotic, very narcissistic, and has a raving persecution complex. She might very well have borderline personality issues, too.

I think by understanding why she's so annoying, she no longer has the capability to bother me. The reason she's such a pain has nothing to do with me, so I have no reason to take her personally. She thrives on her misery, but I have no interest in sharing it with her.

do you have a tiny dick?

I was visiting PlanetSuzy the other day and noticed a banner ad with a casting call for men with less-than-average endowments to appear in porn films. You can read more about it here.

In all candor, I have to wonder how long that site will survive. No pun intended, they seem to be targeting an awfully small niche market. Porn is about freakishly large tits, massive dongs, and impossible sex scenarios, often involving sex-crazed women. It's a visualization of darker fantasies. How many fantasies involve men with dinky dicks?

women addicted to porn

Recently I somehow ended up on a webpage about young women who felt like they were addicted to porn. The site is religiously based, but I nonetheless found some of it quite interesting.

In a nutshell, these women liken themselves to sex addicts except they're addicted to porn. None seem to have had any sexual experience, although another article I found in The New York Times does mention one woman interviewed for a similar story is now married and still struggling with her porn attraction from her single days.

I've written here before about how, when I was in my early teens, I regularly watched porn with several other young friends. That soon led to the real thing. Once I was having sex, however, my interest in porn quickly faded.

Now it's not always a good idea to use ones own experiences in comparison to others, but I have to wonder if some of these young women addicted to porn wouldn't be so captivated by smut if they had an actual sex life. If you're ten and addicted to porn, then sex is not the answer. But if you're twenty and addicted to porn -- and a virgin -- perhaps the problem isn't porn. It's a lack of sex and maybe a fear about it, too.

I already knew about sex and was interested in it when I began looking at porn during my growing years. Seeing the smut only made my fascination more intense. Without the porn, however, I imagine I would have ended up having sex at a fairly early age. I don't think adult videos led me down the path to losing my virginity. Perhaps it gave me a little nudge, but nothing more than that.

As an adult woman, I've been a semi-regular consumer of porn. Almost without exception, however, I only watch it when sex is not immediately available. If the husband is gone for a long day, I often scamper around the Internet looking at smut. When he's at home and I need maintenance, I use him, not the porn.

So I'm not saying that sex is the answer to these women. I am, however, wondering if it wouldn't be such an issue for some of them if they had active sex lives. By denying themselves something basic and fundamental (and wonderful fun), they end up escaping into the substitute sex of porn. It's like "good girl" sex for them -- they can enjoy sexual experiences without losing their cherry nor have to deal with lusty males and their demands.

Therein ultimately lies some of the problem, I think. They see unmarried sex as "sinful," but their bodies are telling them they need it.

captain shame

Captain Shame is a great blog I visit regularly.

The idea behind the site is simple and fun: the author and his contributors post erotic stories, usually in the first person, to accompany amateur photos of girls, often engaging in sexual activity, that they've found on the internet.

The result is very well done with an almost Hemingway-like spareness at times. If you're not already familiar with the site, do check it out.

a flag or a rag?

One of my earliest memories as a little girl was helping my combat veteran granddad raise and lower the American flag outside his home, something he did every day it didn't rain. He taught me to respect the flag and handle it carefully because it represented both our cherished freedoms and honored the many brave sacrifices by those who fought for our country.

One of his other grandchildren, my first cousin whom I'm close to, presently is serving in the U.S. military in harm's way. My granddad is no longer alive, but I'm sure he would be very proud of his grandson.

Now that I'm living abroad, I don't see the American flag very often in person. When I do, I sometimes feel a little homesick and get that patriot lump in the throat. A movie we were watching recently featured a scene where the national anthem started to play, and I got all misty eyed. I'm proud to be an American and am old-fashioned that way. I guess my grandparents' small-town values rubbed off on me.

I've noticed quite a few models and sports figures who presumably were not taught the basics of flag etiquette and respect. I think that's very unfortunate, both for them and for their fellow Americans who treasure the symbol of our freedoms. While our country is not without flaws, we still are a great nation with many achievements unparalleled in world history.

Our flag is not a beach towel, a rag to drape yourself in, a prop, a shawl, something to drag like a stadium blanket, a cape, or anything of the kind. The flag represents the greatness of our nation and the potential of our people as well as the sacrifice of many. I wish more Americans showed it a little basic respect.

I'm not picking on the particular model below; it's just an example I happened to find. I've seen many more photos like this, which seem to be a popular trend in modeling. I hope that's a trend which soon peaks.

accidental hnt

The husband accidentally tripped the shutter while pointing directly at the light, while out of focused and not pointed toward anything in particular. Nonetheless, I liked the result very much.

young Marlon Brando

To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Marlon Brando’s movie debut, Life magazine recently opened their vaults and released two series of never-published photographs featuring the young actor made before his first film was released. The sets can be seen here and here. Some were shot by famed photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

Brando is one of those people who hit both spectacular highs and incredible lows during his life. He is blatantly erotic in some of these early shots, a sharp contrast to the bizarre figure he became late in life. He made some fantastic films and some true stinkers. From what I've read about him, he was an easy person both to love and to loathe, depending on the context in which you knew him.

parole violation

My two favorite things combined in one: a mugshot and a moronic tattoo. I don't know his name, but I do know he was busted for a parole violation.

Are there any women who would actually be enticed by this, who wouldn't burst our laughing and quickly slide into hysteria?

Does he have another tattoo on his neck, a fake imprint of a woman's lipsticked lips?

the cult of Anna

In light of my post the other day on the Russian spy scandal, I thought this story was amusing about how Anna Chapman has become a Facebook cult idol. Some of the reader comments are quite funny. Since the story was posted, however, it seems her Facebook page is no more, or at least the links in the story no longer work.

I expect we'll be seeing more of her. Given we live in a media saturation age, I can't imagine she'll disappear into obscurity. While her UK citizenship has been revoked and arguably she won't be able to secure a visa to the US anytime soon, I imagine she'd be welcomed in other countries. (She's suing her ex-husband for the release of the naughty photos, but I don't imagine she'll travel abroad to appear in court.) I'm sure enterprising media folks have tried to land an exclusive interview with her, but one wonders how they would ever find her.

My husband commented when I mentioned this to him: "well, she could always do Russian porn."

sliding

This was a promotional campaign for Volkswagen in Berlin. My first thought is this would never happen in the United States for fear of being sued. If it was, a squadron of lawyers would be standing at the bottom handing out business cards while trying to convince people they didn't have a good time but, instead, injured themselves.

spy scandal

Unless you were stranded on a remote desert island, you surely heard about the ten Russian spies recently arrested in the United States and deported a few days ago.

Much has been made in the media about how their secret mission in America seemed pointless and that the information they apparently sought could easily be found from public sources and the internet. The group was seen as inept because American law enforcement had been monitoring them in secret for some ten years.

In short, the group was chalked off in the press as being harmless and little more than titillating tabloid fodder, particularly the vivacious Anna Chapman.

Hmm, well, I wonder.

What if there was a whole hidden level to what was going on? What if the seeming pointlessness of their mission was simply a cover for something deeper that went undiscovered or, at least, unreported? The FBI and other authorities certainly will never tell what they know, particularly given the ten will now never stand trial.

If this might be the case, we'll almost certainly never hear about it. I love wondering about exciting stories never told in the press, the so-called stories behind the stories.

The lovely photograph below is by the Russian photographer Maxim Bogdanov from Novosibirsk.

I write like Vladimir Palahniuk

I recently discovered this fascinating online toy, which will analyze your writing style and tell you what famous author you resembled. I tried the test multiple times with different samples of things I had written, and the result sometimes said I wrote like Vladimir Nabokov and the other times said I wrote like Chuck Palahniuk. What a combination.

planting seeds hnt

Spring will be here soon, so the husband has been working hard planting his seeds. He has a handy tool which always plants the seeds at their required depth. Just to make sure the seeds are well planted, sometimes he sows a second time around for good measure. I'm always happy to help with his project.

kaboom

Not to turn this into a political blog suddenly or anything, but I don't understand why people and governments and countries are so addicted to debt. I can understand using it in dire emergencies, but unless it's a life-or-death crisis, you pay as you go.

I've had to support myself since I was sixteen, an age when no one would give me credit. My parents and I had parted ways, so I had no true money safety net. (I could have borrowed money from my brother, but I never did.) So I had to spend only what I made. Once I started to make good money -- only when I took off my clothes on the job, by the way -- I saved as much as I could for the proverbial rainy day.

I saw this chart somewhere and the magnitude of this ticking timebomb hit me. You might have to enlarge this to read it, but in simple English, it means these five countries have all borrowed from each other and are using that worthless debt as collateral to borrow more. It will be no surprise when this rather perilous little party comes to an unhappy end.

Of course, this is not the only debt bomb waiting to go boom. Many municipalities and all sorts of entities have all borrowed from each other and play the same trick of using debt as collateral to borrow instead of real things with value, like real estate or hard capital. That makes it all about as valuable as using Monopoly money for security.

My husband calls me "My Little Murdoch" because of things like my frugality and how I make a continual profit by constantly exchanging and re-exchanging Australian dollars for American ones. My U.S. bank is one day behind on foreign exchange rates and does not charge me a foreign ATM fee, so I capitalize on their stupidity on an almost daily basis. (The name Murdoch here has the same cachet as Rockefeller in the US -- a person handy with money.)

I wonder if I should consider a career in finance. Somebody needs to smack some sense into these people.

proxy smut

On a regular basis I receive email from readers who say they can't read my blog at work because of employers' content filters. The entire blogspot.com domain is blocked along with nearly all porn sites.

When I receive messages like this, I'm always surprised more people don't know about proxies. If you're one of them, this is how they work, in simple terms: you visit a proxy website which looks something like a search engine. You type the desired webpage address into the blank and hit return.

You will then be able to see the desired website, even with an internet block feature, because you're essentially looking through a window to a second window. So while you might be reading this blog or some porn site, your network filter monitor doesn't realize you're at a particular verboten site; it only sees that you're viewing innocuous pages at whatever proxy.com you're using. The proxy will also make it seem you're accessing a site from a completely different part of the world.

I don't have employer issues, but if I'm using a hardwired internet connection, I sometimes am blocked because the Australian government has shut down access to certain feeds. That's when proxies come in handy.

Ctunnel is a free proxy I personally found to be the best. Unlike many proxies, it doesn't use some coding that blocks certain technical aspects of sites you visit. It also seems faster than other proxy sites I've tried.

If you want to see how it works, click on the Ctunnel link I provided. Type the desired webpage address inside the long box toward the bottom of the page, just below "Enable SSL Encryption," and hit "Begin Browsing." You will then be taken to your desired site without pesky interference.

art or eyesore?

If you've lived in a large city like I have, chances are you loathe graffiti. It's everywhere, ugly, and hard to eradicate.

On rare occasion, however, you see some graffiti that really is pretty amazing. The example below is one of those instances (be sure to click on the picture to see it in a very large panorama version to get the full effect). Whoever did this needs to put down the spray can and get into a studio.

Curiously, this graffiti appeared in obsessively neat Singapore, where the penalties are quite stiff for public doodling if you're caught (you also can receive a jail sentence for chewing gum in public). When my husband and I were there, we saw a chain gang of sorts sans chains under armed guard compelled to scrub down surfaces in public. Apparently they had been sentenced to harsh manual service for some kind of doodling mischief.

marines chasing pussy

This post is not going where you think it is!

A relative alerted me to this group helping U. S. Marines serving in Afghanistan who rescue orphan kittens and send them home to America and new lives. They're part of a larger coalition of people serving there who are rescuing abandoned and injured pets. They are raising funds, so if you'd like to help, they have donation links on their webpage, plus lots more kitten pictures!

If you look closely in the group shot below, you can see one of the kittens sitting on a marine's shoulder in the middle of the bunch. (You might have to click to enlarge.)

the untold story

When I was uploading some photos to PimpAndHost the other day, I saw these on the front page. The photos are not linked to their posters, so I'll never know what the story was here. That doesn't stop me from wondering, however.

Now if it was one guy and two women, I'd guess two couples were involved in swapping and one of the men snapped the photo. But even if another male participant is the photographer, that still leaves the extra woman. Were they just a little buzzed and nothing happened other than some nude photos? Or were things pretty wild in that particular fenced backyard in their little corner of suburbia?

My husband speculated the guy originally uploaded these photos online. He felt the man was likely the one who could least resist the opportunity to share what happened, or at least some kind of evidence to partially corroborate the more fanciful story he was peddling. I agree.

you know you're a geek girl if...

You positively can't wait for this movie to open. Fortunately, it premieres here in Australia only about ten days after the US opening. I hope I'm not disappointed. Sometimes getting really excited about a film sets one up for impossible expectations and a bit letdown.

foxy hnt

If you're foxy, you'll know the secret about how to find the hidden Half-Nekkid Thursday picture, which is being phoned in this week due to a rush for time. It's rainy and in the low 50s here in Sydney, more like a December day in Southern California.

boo hoo

I have no pity for Lindsay Lohan. She had many chances to clean up her act and, instead, acted like a spoiled brat.

She won't serve anywhere near the full ninety days in jail, due to overcrowding. Hopefully she'll do at least more than four days a la Paris Hilton.

If I was the judge, I'd also sentence her to 2,000 hours of community service. If she has time to go to parties and premieres, she has time to clean the ladies rooms in public parks.

dealkiller tattoo?

If I was single and he had this on his head, he'd have to be pretty incredibly fantastic in bed, brilliant, an engaging conversationalist, and about 238 other terrific things for me to overlook this. Or at least I'd insist he wear a hat.

parenting epiphany

A reader wrote recently and asked how I would answer a hypothetical question that went something like this: what if I were a parent with a daughter who, like me, was determined at age thirteen to lose her virginity.

I have to admit at first this question freaked me out somewhat. My first thought was: only have sons, then this won't be a problem. My second thought was: I have no idea how to answer this, so I must be unfit parent material.

Then, only after a while, I realized I was missing the forest for the proverbial trees. I was thinking that my relationship with a daughter would be like mine was with my parents, and therein lay the nut.

I was the youngest child and have often thought I was a "whoops," given the amount of years between me and my siblings. Throughout much of my childhood, I was a latchkey kid. My parents were very involved in their careers, and often days would go by without me seeing them. When I did, it was only for a few minutes at a time, usually at breakfast, when they often were on the phone or talking to each other about some professional matter.

My parents always employed a housekeeper to make sure someone was at home during the day so I was well cared for in terms of things like clean clothes, good meals, and the like. As far as parental direction, however, I received close to none. Whatever housekeeper we had at the moment largely ignored me in favor of soap operas, talk shows, and the telephone. I was routinely encouraged to go to my room or to a neighbor child's house. My older sisters detested my presence anywhere near them, and my brother was off at college when I was still quite young.

I ended up being very sexually active during my teenage years, but that very easily could have been drugs or a food disorder or something else equally destructive. My parents only really registered I had a problem after I ended up in serious trouble.

So therein came my epiphany about parenting: I would not raise a child like I was raised. I ended up in bed with an older man at age thirteen because I had no parental direction. If I had some direction, that likely would not have happened.

As a parent, I would not treat my child like a dog who had wandered into the yard and was kept with little thought about the future. Hence, with appropriate direction, support, love, and more, my hypothetical thirteen-year-old daughter would be so invested in other avenues that the thought of sex would (hopefully) be entirely off her radar.

stripper tip

A first-day lesson I learned in my maiden exotic dancing gig is you can't wear any clothes several hours before you go onstage that would leave elastic or similar marks. Usually this means no underwear and a looser wrap-around skirt without a tight waistband. A bra with elastic and straps is a huge no-no, too.

The basic idea is you don't want to leave any kind of crease marks on your skin. I also used to sit on a towel in the car on my way into work so my clothing didn't leave any wrinkle indentations on my ass.

I was rummaging about the internet for pictures to feature on my Tumblr page and came across these. I immediately noticed lines from both her jeans and panties. The shadows on her face suggest these were shot by an inexperienced photographer who also didn't know how to instruct her to dress effectively before her shoot.

So for those readers out there planning a future in any kind of naked profession, I hope this little tip will be of some help. There is an art to taking off your clothes for money.

And for all my fellow Americans out there, Happy Independence Day!

why men shouldn't write advice columns

I showed this to my husband and he could not stop laughing. Hopefully it will bring a smile to your face, too.

which is more fake?

Kim Kardashian is one of those alleged celebrities who are famous for being famous. She has no real talent from which she derived her fame, except possibly appearing in a clumsily leaked sex tape with a munchkin musician. She first seeped into tabloid attention because of her notorious name; her father was famous as the bagman who helped tarnished celebrity O.J. Simpson walk free. Andy Warhol would have loved her.

I found it an interesting commentary that when she stood beside her new wax figure at Madame Tussaud's, neither one looked particularly real.

chilly scenes of winter hnt

July means hot summer weather for most readers, but Down Under, our temperatures have been dropping well into the single digits Celsius almost every night now. I saw a forecast on the weather that some of the western suburbs might go as low as 1 or 2 degrees overnight, which is equal to the mid-30s Fahrenheit. I still have to do the mental conversions for everything metric here.

So you might be wondering what the hell the tigers are doing in the snow instead of a half-nekkid Thursday picture. Well, if you know the secret, you'll know where to look.