Art of the Odd

I just noticed that my undies are pink.

So is my shirt.

And my bra.

The highlights in my hair are pink.

And the stripes on my shorts.

My water bottle’s pink, too.

I just put it in the kitchen.

I had to draw the line somewhere.

I started to tell this story over on LA Metblogs, in response to a post by The Eight Track Kid (a.k.a. Be the Boy) called “The Best Deal in Porno History,” but as it got longer, I decided it made more sense just to post it over here.

I worked at a book/video/hobby store in my home town (which was sadly driven under when a mega-chain came to town - though that might not have happened had the woman who owned it not been quite such a dragon) that had an excellent selection of porn mags (this is where I first saw both “Barely Legal” and “Perfect Ten”), an oddly dated selection of porn flicks (I think the owner stopped buying them around 1985), and, at one time, a very broad selection of porn novels (they were gone by the time I worked there, but one of my friend’s mothers had a trunkful of them).

Anyway, it was a small town, and occasionally, something would happen that would make the owners twitchy about the porn selection. (Actually, the old lady never mentioned the porn. The old man was in charge of the porn. They were both Mormon. I’m not sure if that’s relevant here.) Years before I worked there, for instance, someone smashed the front window and stole all the porn mags as a protest against pornography. (Seriously!) The police recovered them, but of course they had to hold them as “evidence,” and they never made their way back to the store. During the subsequent media flap (as much as you can flap a single newspaper that rarely ran more than 30 pages, including the Classifieds), everything but “Penthouse” and “Playboy” came off the shelf.

The old man told me this story while he was clearing the shelves again. This time, a major local kerfuffle had erupted over a local bar’s decision to bring some (*gasp*) strippers up from Denver. (Yes, we had to import strippers.) Some stick-ass who’d walked past the bar during the show claimed he’d seen them grinding their naked naughty bits and insisted that something had to be done. (Never mind that the windows of this particular bar were covered in blackout paper even when there weren’t any strippers inside. Either he was lying about seeing them, or he was lying about seeing them from outside.) The city council heeded the call of their outraged constituency, and drafted an anti-obscenity statute which was justly ridiculed for outlawing not only those filthy out-of-state strippers, but also artistic nudes, theatrical nudity (I’m sure the university’s theatre department was thumbing its nose at them when they mounted “Equus” a few years later) and teenaged boys’ boners. (It quite specifically stated that no man could appear in public, clothed or unclothed, in a “discernibly turgid” state. Of course someone immediately printed up t-shirts that said “Discernibly Turgid.” The bear at the Fireside wore one for years.)

The measure was eventually defeated, but meanwhile, the old man took most of the more “interesting” magazines off the shelves and moved the entire stock of porn flicks to the back room. A few customers asked where they’d gone, and we’d explain they were just hiding out until the city council decided whether nudity was to be allowed in the Gem City of the Plains. Most of our customers, though, were far too shy to even mention their absence. Not Our Very Best Porn Customer, though. Our Very Best Porn Customer came in almost every day to get his fix. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were two-for-one (and oh, how I did love tormenting those blushing college boys who could barely bring themselves to rent a porno from a girl, by telling them they could get another for the same price), and so every Tuesday and Wednesday, without fail, he’d rent two and sometimes four porn tapes. Now, as I’ve said, the owner hadn’t bought anything new in quite some time - and you mustn’t think he’d bought a lot when he was still buying. I don’t think we had more than 100 pornos in the whole store. One of my coworkers figured it up once and realized that Our Very Best Porn Customer had seen every porn tape we had at least four times, and he’d seen his favorites much more often. During the great porn drought, he still came in almost every day, asking if the porn was back, and consoling himself with R-rated movies that might at least give him a bit of boob.

After a few months of this, the old man finally made his decision. All of the magazines went back on the shelf, but the porn tapes - the porn tapes had to go. Our Very Best Porn Customer was first in line. He nearly staggered under the weight of his purchases. Star 85. The Italian Stallion. (So well-loved that its original cover was long gone - it lived in a plain plastic box with a xeroxed picture of Sly Stallone stuck to the front.) All of his favorites, many of his stand-bys, and a few he said he’d never even watched. (So much for my colleague’s math skills.)

And that is my two-for-one porn story. What’s yours?

I like browsing the spam comments in my Akismet filter before I delete them - partly because I want to be sure no legit comments have gotten trapped in there (I haven’t had any trouble with that, but I know other people have), and partly because some of them amuse me. There are plenty of the type filled with random characters, hiding links to sites I have no desire to see, but the ones I like are the ones that attempt (usually in mangled English) to form some kind of personal connection.

“This post I like very much. You come my site. Much love. Ebbeca.”

I got a new one today, though. Some SpamBot thinks I’m behind the times.

“I saw similar post three month ago. Topicality of this post sucks. Dude, you have to keep up to date.”

This, from Dotty - or “femaleapants at (free email service not named here, lest Dotty be hijacking a legitimate email address)” - whose web address promises me “onkel-man-best-gay-video.”

As if I’m going to fall for that. Dotty, dude - you have to keep up to date.

NovySan got the invite for his high school reunion yesterday. It’s at the Hilton, in a town near the one he grew up.

The invitation included a brief description of the event. There’ll be an open bar - four hours worth of an open bar. This is a good thing. And dancing, yes. We like dancing. And a buffet. That’s alright. Nothing wrong with a buffet. But what’s on the buffet, that’s the question. Well, it appears to be… Heavy hors d’oeuvres.

Heavy. Hors d’oeurves.

Heavy. Hors. D’oeurves.

Nope. Still can’t wrap my head around that.

I’ll plan to take a camera. And maybe a scale.

Logged in to check my email on this account this morning, and the webmail interface looked funny. No matter. I remember Dreamhost said awhile back they were testing a new webmail system. So I put in my username and password, and… Why can’t I log in? I go check the status blog. And the discussion forum. No one’s saying anything about webmail problems. Odd. So I try the webmail for another domain. Yep, it’s fine… Weird. I wonder if I can log in to Wordpress? “This domain is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com”? Huh?

Turns out, www.artoftheodd.com expires today. And I didn’t get the renewal notice why? Oh, because I’m a dork, and when I transferred my hosting to Dreamhost, I didn’t set up an account for the email address I had attached to my Whois record. Fine, I’ll transfer the registration to Dreamhost, since I have to renew anyway. What do you mean it’s going to take a week? Do I have to look at that “parked” page for a week?

(For the record - no, I didn’t. The transfer was complete in less than an hour.)

Moral of the story - know when your domain names expire, and make sure your registrar can actually get a hold of you to let you know that’s happening.