Apparently Victoria’s Secret acquired La Senza. I had no idea, and must pay more attention to the undies mergers and acquisitions marketplace. Alas, Victoria’s Secret remains one of the few major franchises that Canadians must still go south of the border for.
I’m blogging about this so that a) I can include a photo of a scantily-clad model and b) so that I can quote the awkward headline.
Victoria’s Secret not slipping its lingerie into Canada, La Senza boss says
Victoria’s Secret bras and panties aren’t likely to be available in La Senza stores (LSZ.TO) despite its U.S. parent company’s deal to buy the Canadian lingerie retailer.
La Senza will continue to operate independently and there also aren’t any immediate plans for Victoria’s Secret to open its own stores in Canada, Laurence Lewin, president and chief operating officer of the Montreal-based company, said Thursday.
Speaking of models, I was having a conversation about them the other day. Is the Era of the Super Model over? I (obviously) don’t pay much attention to the world of fashion, but I feel like there are far fewer models who are household names than, say, ten years ago. Is this true, or am I just out of the loop?
The person I was talking to pointed out that actors have taken away a lot of the advertising work that models used to do. If you open a magazine like Cosmo these days, you’ll see a lot of actresses doing makeup and fashion ads. Could this be a reason–that actors have bogarted the super model stardom?
Teabagging, of course, is a sexual practice and a term coined, I believe, by John Waters.
It took me a while to understand what this meant in-game, but I figured it out. See, when you’re shot and ‘killed’ in Battlefield 2, you lie around, crippled and staring at the sky for 15 seconds waiting for a medic. If you don’t get resuscitated, you respawn.
If an opposing player–particularly the one that shot you–wants to taunt you, he can come by and repeatedly crouch over you, in your field of view. Hence, the in-game teabagging.
YouTube, of course, has a record of all human activity. Safe, if a little rude, for work:
My pregnant friend Lesley sent me this article from last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. It’s all about the big and messy business of bovine sperm harvesting. Things I learned from the article:
They actually use a steer or castrated bull as a kind of fluffer. Or stand-in. I can’t quite hit on the right metaphor for this: “‘Their role in life is to stand there and be mounted,” Mr. Carscadden said. ‘I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the alternative, which is to go to the food industry.’”
One shot by the ‘undisputed big boy’ of Canadian bulls, Godwyn, is worth CAN $250,000. That’s good for 2500 doses, or $100 per potential calf.
Godwyn has to suffer a lot before he gets off:
The bull mounts the steer three times, but is interrupted by the collection team on the first two to induce a big yield on the third. “On the first one, they’ll literally grab his penis and not allow him to ejaculate or penetrate,” he said. “On the second one, they spray the penis with disinfectant.”
And, on the third mount, the collector reaches in with an “AV”, or artificial vagina, just in time for the moment of glory.
Who has the worst job, the castrated bull or the sperm collector? A tough call.
I was reminded of a story an Irish friend told me about horse breeding. We went ‘down the country’ to observe the goings-on one day and learned the breeders used a female donkey as a fluffer before the actual extraction.
Here’s something I didn’t know about Old Bendy, ye olde Monarch of Hell, Mr. Horny Horns. Apparently there’s one feature that’s omitted from most modern depictions of Satan: his massive boner.
I was listening to the Slate Explainer podcast which takes us smoothly from the UN General Assembly to the pits of H-E-double hockey sticks.
Slate contributor Daniel Engber cites the Councils of Toledo, 30-odd synods held over three centuries in Spain (not, as we heathens might expect, the Ohio birthplace of Corporal Maxwell Klinger). In 447 AD, one such Council gave the modern world the first official description of the Lord of the Lower Depths:
A large black monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs – or one cloven hoof – ass’s ears, hair, claws, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and a sulphurous smell.
That quote comes from a WWF page on the, uh, demonization of the poor, unsuspecting bull.
Pre-Christian pagan religions were all about the phalli (here’s an academic paper on the subject), so it’s no surprise that church elders would ascribe a mountainous manhood to (oh well I never) Mephistopheles. There’s a famous 5th century Greek play, for example, where the male characters wore big phalli as part of their costumes.
I’ve watched the re-emergence of burlesque with a kind of awed bemusement. There appears to not only be a professional burlesque circuit, but also extensive amateur activities as well. It’s kind of like R-rated karaoke.
Over the last 10 years, women have dusted off pasties and tassels in a rediscovery of classic burlesque, which ended its heyday in the early 1960s with the sexual revolution and increase of sex and nudity in other venues. Now, an over-sexed public is cheering for the sexy glamour of burlesque, which offers a glimpse but doesn’t bare it all.
Here’s something I suspected, and this article confirms it: “Today–amid the powerful influence of the multi-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry–the audience is more middle-class, urban and female.”
That’s interesting to me, as neo-burlesque (as it’s called) is obviously not about the titilation, but about the performance itself. Clearly, then burlesque isn’t the long tail of stripping, because it’s aimed at an entirely different audience.
I really don’t know what to make of this trend (there’s also a related, puzzling trend concerning roller derby). I guess I’m all for women taking ownership of their sexuality, and clearly there’s enough interest to make for a viable economy in which lots of different groups can participate.
I should note, however, that this is one of those trends whose visibility may betray the actual size of the burlesquing population. Sex sells, so I’m sure every media outlet has covered neo-burlesque some time in the past five years or so.
Seems like it’s the Night of the Living YouTube around here, but here’s another video. Via Waxy, this one is a fine bit of machinima by some dude called JD.
The Sk8ter Boi in the video does not, actually, have ‘baggy clothes’, but I quibble. I continue to be really impressed by the cinematography and editing that the average punter is now capable of.
From the Utterly Not Safe for Work Camp (and Jeremy), here’s PornoTube. It is exactly what you think it is–an X-rated version of YouTube. What’s shocking about this is that for once, pornography actually followed the mainstream in technology adoption, as opposed to the other way around.
I’d imagine that PornoTube will devise a sound business model long before YouTube, though.
Julie pointed me to Urban Affairs, a company that provides a variation on the grimy love hotel:
Urban Affairs provides romantic hideaways with spectacular views in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Our discrete and beautifully appointed penthouses in this majestic city are available by the hour for your intimate trysts.
The website is kind of hokey, and only in the design firm’s portfolio, so it’s unclear whether this is an ongoing business, a design sample or a hoax.
They do provide photographs of an apartment (it looks to be on Seymour Street) which, for my money, doesn’t qualify as ‘beautifully appointed’. And the rates? $75 an hour or $100 for two hours.
I took a quick look around for a live site, and happened upon www.urbanaffairs.com, ‘your black singles community’. ‘Urban’ being a euphemism for ‘African-American’, I suppose.
The Kanamara Matsuri (Festival of the Steel Phallus) is an annual Shinto fertility festival held in Kawasaki, Japan in spring. The exact dates vary, but the main festivities fall on a Sunday. The penis forms the central theme of the event that’s reflected everywhere; in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decoration, a parade of mikoshis, etc. etc.
The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating shrine, once popular among prostitutes who wished to pray for protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Today, the festival is used to raise money for HIV research.
Apparently Victoria’s Secret acquired La Senza. I had no idea, and must pay more attention to the undies mergers and acquisitions marketplace. Alas, Victoria’s Secret remains one of the few major franchises that Canadians must still go south of the border for.
