…in the Seattle Times today. This one’s about Strange Angel. It’s the biography of John Parsons, a sci-fi fandom pioneer, a sex-cult leader, and one of the inventors of modern rocket science.

Kerrick Mainrender responds to a recent link item on this site:

“Out of curiosity I linked to that Morgan Hawke article, and while romances may indeed not be mindless, I found some misconceptions that are anything but helpful.The author seems to think that all women have the exact same development and needs–not true. Not all follow the same ‘character arc’ [or zigzag, or whatever]. Neither do men–this ‘mythic past’ stuff always seemed simplistic and overgeneralized–stereotyped, in fact.

Some children had secrets from Daddy right from the start [from Mommy too–where’s Mom in all those fairy tales anyway?] Sometimes a horse symbolizes something other than ‘masculine sexuality’–mobility, speed, endurance, for starters. Sometimes Beauty meets a female Beast. And so on.

Finally, first sex is NOT always painful. I don’t see why it should ever have to be, and if the young were educated right maybe it wouldn’t. That myth has got to go.

Ms Hawke can write about whatever fictive universe, with whatever rules, she wants to–we all have our favorites I am sure–but it isn’t a good idea to get ’em mixed up with the world you and I live in every day.

My sympathy for the loss of your father, and hopes that these difficult times can be surmounted, for you and all of us.”

Thanks. As I always say, women aren’t just different from men, they’re different from other women.

Mainrender also sends along a recommendation for the sexuality-info site Teenwire.

…Morgan Hawke offers “A Heroine’s Mythic Journey – A Character Arc of Female Sexuality.”

…harps that self-proclaimed “born again Christians” today are often just as non-monogamous, money-obsessed, and otherwise un-pious as everybody else.

What this guy sees as a scandal, I see as a sign of hope and faith. We’re all just plain ol’ humans on this planet. Nobody’s all that superior to anybody else. It’s not doctrine or ideology that’s gonna “save” us; it’s how we take care of ourselves and one another.

Which is what I should’ve told the guy who stalked me across Belltown on Sunday morning.

I was wandering the sidewalks, snapping pix of the rapidly disappearing snow. Suddenly, outside the Crocodile, a clean cut young man with steely eyes and a rigid smile stood in front of me. “Good morning. Have you heard about Jesus?”

I could have told him the line by the guy in the original Swept Away, who, upon finding a crucifix on the desert island, grumbles that Jesus is everywhere, just like Coca-Cola. But instead I smiled and said, “Of course,” and walked away.

“I hope he sees you in heaven.”

“I’m sure I will.” (I declined the temptation to add, “I’ll tell him ‘hi’ for you.”)

He followed me east on Blanchard. He yelled, “You have an evil spirit. A rebellious spirit. It must be made right.”

I ignored him, forgetting the painful lesson I’d learned on childhood playgrounds: Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop them. It just makes them harrangue you worse.

I sprinted onto Third Avenue. He followed.

I darted into Dan’s Belltown Grocery. He followed. He confronted me by the frozen pizzas. “Would you like to go to church today?”

“I do sometimes. But it’s to a church of my choice.”

“What would that church be?”

“Either the University Friends Center or the Church of New Thought in Laurelhurst.”

He mumbled something about the need to beware of false churches (presumably meaning all other than his own).

I strode out of the store and back onto Third. I darted across the street, hoping to snag myself a table for one at Ralph’s or Top Pot. He finally walked in a different direction.

I now know I shouldn’t have been as obsessed as I was with my own selfish, egoic privacy. I should have talked nicer to him. I should have asked him to consider the benefits of trading his narrow-minded sense of mistaken certainty for the universe-expanding adventure of doubt, a world (and a God) bigger than any of our own finite minds can imagine.

…and possibly future professional crossword puzzle constructor, I’ve just found truly turn-on lingerie. Sorta brings new meaning to “going down.”

It’s not strange that Seattle would host singles’ nights for “plus size” people. It’s slightly strange that an Indianapolis paper considered it a story worth reprinting.

…to Russ Meyer, the combined Edison, Lumiere, Fellini, and Kevin Smith of the sexploitation cinema. Meyer died at age 82, having never completed The Jaws of Vixen, the magnum opus he’d promised for a quarter century.

The original Olympic Games were performed naked. The current Athens incarnation of the event has come as close to that as the world’s more conservative broadcasters (i.e., NBC) would allow.

It seems as if Nike and Adidas decreed that all the players they outfitted for the Games, in any sport, would look more like beach volleyball players.

Even the track-and-field women this year are wearing midriff-bearing tops and dorsal-cleavage bottoms. Only the fencing, sailing, equestrian, baseball/softball, and indoor volleyball competitions still involve full attire, and they’re not getting much prime-time air in this country.

The guys are showing off more, too; especially in bicycling and weightlifting, not to mention swimming and diving. Where the men wear longer duds, they’re still tighter duds. Even the men’s basketball uniforms, at least from some countries, are significantly less baggy than the “long shorts” look of today’s NBA.

I happen to like half-naked women, and I don’t mind half-naked men. As I wrote about Seattle Storm player Lauren Jackson, who posed nude for an Australian art-photo mag to promote her appearance with the Aussie women’s basketball squad, athletic nudity represents a wholesome sexiness, a sexiness based on strength and achievement.

(By the way, just how did Australia become the new East Germany, winning medals far out of proportion to its scant population?)

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching with the sound turned to MUTE, switching between NBC, the various NBC-owned cable channels, and CBC. I’ve not followed any particular sports or athletes, but have enjoyed the whole spectacle of the thing. If I had cared about any one particular sport, NBC’s coverage would’ve disappointed me greatly.

The whole shtick about Olympics TV coverage in this country, ever since Roone Arledge formulated it for ABC in the ’60s, has been based on one big contradiction: Try to get the whole country interested in the Games, but assume your viewers don’t necessarily like sports and aren’t particularly interested in any of these esoteric competitions.

So, every four years (then, when the Winter and Summer games were biennially split, every two years), we got hours of human-interest profiles sandwiching minutes of athletic footage. When we were allowed to see the action (tape-delayed and selectively edited), what we saw almost always focused on US players, with the rest of the world pretty darned much ignored.

This time around, NBC seems to be finally starting to get it right, at least in its daytime and cable incarnations. The prime-time shows are still disjointed mish-moshes of whatever somebody’s decided will generate the hottest storylines that day. But the rest of it, scattered around the clock and the cable dial, we’ve gotten to see individual events more or less from start to end (though not in real time). Many of these events have even starred champions from other lands.

On the whole, though, I still prefer CBC’s barer-bones, more direct approach. Of course, CBC covers Olympic-component sports year round, unlike NBC, making its crews and its viewers more familiar with them.

(It’s a shame North American viewers are blocked from viewing the BBC’s streaming online video coverage.)

“Ask about our Mary Kay Letourneau drink special, made with 12-year-old Scotch.”

The host of public TV’s The Frugal Gourmet from 1973 to 1997, who died sometime this past week, was one massive heap-O-contradictions.

He popularized world-fusion cooking, and devoted many episodes to travelogue footage, yet lived in Seattle and Tacoma all his life. (Even when he made his show under a contract to Chicago’s PBS affiliate, he commuted from here to there to tape it.)

He was a mellow, genial personality on camera, but could be a pompous brute in person.

He promoted fancy, exotic, and often expensive-to-make dishes on his show and in his cookbooks, but also enjoyed some of Seattle’s moderately priced restaurants (such as Mama’s Mexican Kitchen).

He was an ordained Methodist minister, working in “noncommercial” broadcasting, yet amassed quite a little capitalistic empire for himself.

And he spoke of family values, yet was dogged by allocations of boy-abuse and rape that, while settled out of court, led him to retire in disgrace. (This was five years before ministerial boy-abuse became a national scandal.)

Smith had a long-term heart condition, and in the past few years had used a motorized wheelchair (complete with a horn, which he used to belligerently honk at cars), but from all accounts remained active, participating in charity events and researching new cookbooks—despite having lost his show, his endorsement deals, his kitchenware line, and his reputation.

Here’s a link to a video clip, presumably from a Japanese reality-TV show, featuring male strippers, censored hetero-sex scenes, and an all-female studio audience. (View at your own discretion.)

I found this after coming home tonight from a discussion with a female friend who, like many women I’ve talked with over the years, complained that the media didn’t do enough to depict men as sex objects. But, like all the women with whom I’ve had this discussion, she admitted she didn’t care to view male nudity. It wouldn’t be a direct turn-on for her. She just felt it would be politically fairer for men to have to subject themselves to such treatment.

I tried to tell her that many men would love the chance to be ogled at by women who just wanted one thing from them (if that one thing wasn’t money). I also tried to explain that the traditional male body-image stereotype wasn’t that of a sex object but that of a work object. Lift that barge, tote that bale, go off to war and die for somebody else’s profit. In this muscle-bound context, flopping genitalia are the most un-“manly” body parts imaginable.

So, I’m asking all my dozens of female readers: Do you enjoy male nudes? With or without the “fairness” issue, are you actually interested in such sights? I won’t promise to put any on this site, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about the matter. Include your name (real or fake), and note whether you’d like your response posted on the site.

Bodies have always been with us; so have body-revealing clothes, such as the 17th-century fad for breast-baring by prominent women— even queens.

(on a package of Overload peanut butter cups, one of them topped with “rainbow candy” coated chocolate pieces): “Mars, Incorporated has no affiliation with the producer or distributor of this product and has no participation in the production of this product.”

THE FINE PRINT #2 (from the introductory disclaimer to the e-book The Top 100 Lovemaking Techniques of All Time): “Some of the techniques described in this book call for you or your partner to have cough drops, mints, ice cubes and other objects in your mouth. Be very careful not to swallow these objects while performing these techniques. If you think there is even the slightest possibility that you could accidentally swallow one these of these objects, STOP PERFORMING THE TECHNIQUE IMMEDIATELY. There are plenty of other ones that you can do instead.”

…I’ve found with the already famous, yet extremely rare, Lauren Jackson nude photos from the Aussie art-mag Black & White.

As you might expect, the Seattle Storm basketball star is not only a great role model, but also a great model. Her taut muscle tone is the product of working out, not of surgical treatments. Even in monochrome scans, her life energy bursts forth.

…and those of us who simply love old pop ephemera, can view entire issues of pre-1970 skin books (even the articles!) at Vintage Girlie Mags.