If you're looking for blog ideas, Prompt-a-Day will provide you with a daily writing topic and suggested amount of time to spend on it. Vox was doing this for a while, and I thought it was a great idea. Too bad I'm not posting on Vox.

Joe Mathlete Explains Maramduke

Marmaduke has finally died, thus completing the 2006 American Icon Yuletide Expiration Hat-Trick that James Brown and Gerald Ford kicked off several days ago. It remains uncertain whether he committed suicide, was murdered by his owner-girl (who did a fantastic job at making it look like an accident), or simply lost his balance in one of his frequent auto erotic asphyxiation binges.

Like any comic strip that reached its nadir about two decades ago but whose shambling bulk nevertheless marches on zombie-like through newspapers world-wide, Marmaduke is ripe for a send-up. Joe Mathlete combines just enough sarcasm, dry wit, and profane, disturbingly sexual content to make you remember how badly this sucks, and why doesn't God just let it die already. Now if he would only do the same for Family Circus, Garfield, and Dennis the Menace, he could probably quit his job. I'm sensing the beginning of a cottage industry here.

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True Porn Clerk Stories

As soon as I start sharing websites with friends, I ought to start putting them up here.

The prologue to this website says that the stories were collected starting in 2002. It seems to me that I learned about it before then, but even a usenet search doesn't pull up anything prior to 2002.

Anyway. Some good writing here, interesting insights, and a great read.

This is the one porn impulse that I honestly don't get. (Oh, all right. I don't get peeing on each other or hurting each other, but I think I understand intellectually how one might get there.) I don't understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time.

Much as I hate to say it, it seems to be a straight guy thing.

There's definitely a Captain Kirk-style exploration up and down the imaginary social ladder in both the straight and gay sections. In addition to the dozens of variations on (oddly - or sadly) still taboo interracial pairings, we have More Dirty Debutantes and White Trash Whore on the straight side, Straight off the Street and The Other Side of Aspen on the gay side. You can fuck rich or fuck poor on either side of the invisible barrier between the straight and gay sections. But you can only fuck lesser in straight.

I think it's because there's not enough otherness in gay porn. There's still bondage and S&M stuff, plenty of dominance and submission, but even the most submissive sub is still a man just like the dom, just like the viewer. How much separation can there be?

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