5:57 AM:

More Smackdown topics I never got around to writing about until now:

Earliest memory:

I'm not sure what my single earliest memory is, but this is definitely in the running. I was, I dunno, let's say I was two. I was just waking up, still half-asleep, when I noticed that, during the night, I'd somehow twisted the blanket in which I was cocooned in such a way that I was now a few feet over the surface of the bed. (Imagine, if you will, something like a mailbox on a pole.)

I tried to recreate that enough times over the following months, but never managed it.

(I also thought that if I tried hard enough, I might be able to fly, albeit briefly, but that never worked either.)

I can't think of anything to say about this, really...

Dirty? I'm not admitting to that. Cluttered? All of it.

Oh, gosh. I cry at commercials, for Pete's sake. That stupid ad in which the guy gets down on one knee because he's dropped something under the table, and the woman he's with thinks he's proposing and has the wedding and everything flash through her head until she's cruelly disillusioned? If I could remember what it's an ad for, I'd boycott the product.

Shmuel's Soapbox is an infrequently-updated site featuring too much day-to-day trivia from Shmuel's life, and the very occasional interesting essay. The current leg-shaving storyline, never adequately explained, has all the signs of a pathetic, sensationalist attempt to increase readership. Shmuel, honey? Don't quit your day job.

When I was in high school, I had two Master Plans I vacillated between: committing suicide, or running away from home.

It took years, but, obviously, I opted for the latter.

I'm not sure how old I was. Third grade seems about right, give or take a year. I'd asked a question about something I'd read; perhaps how the sperm cell from the father got into the mother in the first place, that not having been explained very well in the Charlie Brown Cyclopedia, perhaps something else; I forget. (I do know that halfway through The Talk, I ran to the bookshelf, pulled out a copy of The Midrash Says and was, like, "so that's what it meant by 'semen'!")

Anyway, my father sat me down in the dining room, and explained Everything -- why boys and girls had different equipment down there; how Tab A fit into Slot A; why stimulation of Tab A once it became functional was to be avoided; that different parents handled The Talk in different ways and at different times, so I shouldn't go blabbing this stuff around the school; and so on. It was a remarkably thorough and enlightening conversation, and that was it.

Oh, who knows. Thirty-year-olds were old, man. Sheesh, when I was twelve, I was in awe of my fifteen-year-old cousin, who was practically a grown-up.

Well, I suppose I got on CompuServe by proxy back in 1980, although my role was pretty much confined to looking over my father's shoulder as he got me some information. I started using his account myself in high school, I think, probably around 1987. My first BBS was in late 1993 (followed, within two days, by about a dozen more), and my first Usenet posting (through a BBS) appears to have been this one. I think I got on the Internet proper using my father's account in 1994, and got my very own account in 1995.

Or were you talking about something else?

I can't think of a suitably clever way of misunderstanding this question. More's the pity.

Editing, with any luck. Barring that, perhaps bagging groceries, preferably on the night shift of a 24-hour superstore. Either of which might be a better choice than grad school, truth to tell...

I finally got my copy of From Porn to Poetry: Clean Sheets Celebrates the Erotic Mind the other week.

First, a disclaimer: I am so biased. I was a staffer at Clean Sheets for a couple of years. While I haven't gone back and checked, it seems probable that at least one comma in this book was placed there by Yours Truly, as part of my proofreading duties. So despite the fact that I have little cause to feel the slightest bit proud of this book, the fact is that I do.

That having been said, this is very good stuff. Well-written, fun, thoughtful, playful, educational, and, yes, hot, it exemplifies everything I liked about the webzine while I was there. A number of selections from my personal hit parade are there, and while my all-time favorite was left out, that's a very idiosyncratic choice, so I wasn't really expecting it to be included. (You guys should have no trouble seeing why I like that one.)

I have only two nitpicks. The first is that while it's not hard to tell which genre a given piece falls into, I'd still prefer it to be explicitly noted; the word "article," "fiction," or "poetry" at the top of a given piece would have sufficed. The second is that the binding is too tight, requiring the use of both hands to keep the book open. I'll leave it to you to figure out why this is not a desirable quality in a book of erotica.

Still, biased or not, this is probably my favorite erotica anthology just now. If you're into this sort of thing, check it out.

(Or, okay, techincally you could just find all the pieces in the archives, but there's nothing like black ink on crisp white pages...)

Okay, the evidence now suggests that I owe the Noxzema people an apology. There are now two hypotheses battling it out for why I seem to alternate between having no shaving problems and slicing the heck out of my legs, but the brand of razor has been isolated as not being the reason. Or at least not the only one.

One hypothesis is that I'm capable of handling a razor properly when I'm lying down in a bathtub, but not when I'm sitting or standing; the other is that I need to give my legs about a week to recover between hair-removal sessions. I'm hoping the former accounts for it; I'm worried that the latter does.

Then again, to put it in Dungeons and Dragons terms, it could just be that I fail my dexterity check half the time...