It's Friday and that's a good thing, because you know, I’m sort of tired. I think I’m still recovering from all the busyness of the past month. Roman and I had a sweetly low-key date together last night that actually didn't (gasp) include teeth marks, needles or novelty headwear. It did, however, include Stellar's pizza, something guranteed to put me in a happy mood no matter. Stellars is right up there with foot massages when it comes to sensual bliss. But Roman is a sweet treat all by himself.

So I think I’ll just relax on Saturday, and then have fun with Max at his bondage workshop and the Wet Spot party Sunday. Nice to get back into my usual rhythm of life.

Speaking of my usual rhythm, go read the new Stranger column….

There's good news and there's bad news...

Airports Step Up Efforts To Seize Porn

(Snipped)...Although security personnel at airports have reportedly been given a list to reference when deciding whether to seize content, the criteria in the list has not been made publicly available.

In just a two-week time span, however, inspectors for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Logan International Airport have already confiscated a number of items, including digital pictures of women having sex with various animals, 100 copies of a scatalogically-themed DVD, and a number of bondage and fetish articles not normally targeted by authorities.

“Our main focus is on terrorism,” Ted Woo, spokesman for the CBP, said. “But this is something our agents are definitely on the lookout for.”... (Read the whole story here.)
Brought to you by the Bush Administration and the "Alberto Gonzales For Supreme Court" Fund... They're totally pandering to the religious right on this one. Jesus.

In other yeah-right news...

Faux New's Bill O'Reilly deplores The Folsom Street Fair. "These kinds of demonstrations, even though they raise money for charity, do harm to the gay community. When people around the country see this, they don't like it. And they start to stereotype homosexuals, and that hurts gay people everywhere." Yeah, cuz we all know how concerned Bill O'Reilly is that gay people not be discriminated against or anything. Uh-huh.

This is good news for me personally.... "Societies are worse off when they have 'God' on their side." Glad to hear it. That does explain why I've never murdered anyone, contemplated suicide, gotten pregnant as a teenager (or any other time) or had an abortion.

But just in case you thought I was the weirdest person in the state... I present to you: The Catman. Sort of takes the "furries" thing to a whole new level.

Teknikul Difficulties

I've been having various small computer-related difficulties lately, so I figured I'd put it all out there to ya'll, and some genius would have the answers for me.

Number One: Since I switched to Firefox, I can't get video clips to play. Or rather, sometimes they will, but more often, they won't. Not QT, and not WMP. I figure it's some script-permission thing? Anyone know how to tell FF it's okay to play vid clips?

Number Two: Since my comment system, BlogBack, is going away quite soon, I'm trying to export the comments as an XML file. Blogback is set up to do that, but I keep getting this error message when I try. "XML Parsing Error: not well-formed"
That seems unnecessarily nasty, but I have no idea what it actually means. I don't know jack about XML, so use small, simple words in any instructions you give me.

Number Three: This is a Blogger issue, and yes, I've looked in the Help section. Since I now have to use the Blogger comment system, I want it to look like the BlogBack one, where the comments appear in a pop-up window. However, even though I have supposedly enabled that function - it's not happening. Yes, I've cleared my cache file. Hell, I've rebooted. No dice.

Any suggestions?

Some Folsom pictures, and a funny story…

A very common sight at Folsom.

Fishing for something out a 3rd-story window.

Nice butt.

Twisted Monk temporary tattoos were seen in all the best places.

Women love them. Or maybe it's just the rope.

It's tough work, guys, but someone's gotta do it.

Whenever there was a cute girl in the air, I couldn't even get close to the booth.

Galahad being eyed by a man wearing his underwear around his ankle.

Really. See, there's his car key on his shoelace, too.

Max takes his turn rigging: Ladies first.

And boys later.

As the crowd looked on.

So, an amusing coincidence... Max and I arrived in the Seattle airport yesterday afternoon, collected our bags, and climbed onto the bus that serves the MasterPark (no pun intended) lot that we use. Sitting across from us were two nice-looking, thirtysomething guys. They were the kind of guys that, if you saw either of them alone, you wouldn’t immediately say “oh, he’s gay”. But somehow the two of them together – well, maybe it was the way they were sitting. Straight men, in my experience, just don’t sit quite that close to each other. It wasn’t that they were draped all over each other, not at all. And there wasn’t some big sexual energy or anything - in fact, if I had to make a guess, I’d say they were good friends but not lovers. At least, not seriously or currently.

But, truthfully, it wasn’t terribly hard to draw some conclusions about them, because one of them was wearing a t-shirt that read “Folsom Street Fair 2005”.

Now, I normally do not talk to strangers in public. I just don’t. I’m very reserved in that way. But Folsom is such a cultural touchstone. So I caught his eye and grinned at him, indicating his shirt. “Yeah, I was there, too.”

He smiled back. “You were?”

Max had been supervising the loading of our several bags, but that moment, he came and sat down next to me. “Yeah, we were there.” I said. “It was great, wasn’t it?”

So we sat and chatted about some things we’d seen, in that elliptical, coded way that queers and kinksters do when talking in a mixed public setting. There was a woman seated nearby who was obviously listening to our conversation, but she was just as obviously not understanding our references. Like this one:

“Did you see that the San Francisco Police Department had a recruiting booth there?”

“Yeah, we saw that. Too funny. I guess they thought, hey, all these guys like uniforms anyway…” (laughter)

The first year I went,” said Max, “I had a hard time telling which ones were the real cops and which ones were just…dressed. I figured out to look for the gun, that was the only way to tell for sure.”

We had a nice chat on the five minute drive, and bade each other goodbye when we arrived at the car lot, and I thought that was the end of a pleasant encounter. I watched the attendant heave our bags into the car, but when I turned around to look for Max, I saw him off in conversation with one of the two men.

God, he’s such a flirt, I thought, smiling. For a guy who says boys don’t make his lust-meter rise, Max does enjoy admiring and being admired by gay men. I’m so used to it that it didn’t cross my mind that it could be anything else.

Until Max got into the car and said, “So it turns out I used to work with that guy.”

“Wha-at?” Max is quite firm about keeping his professional life separate from him private life – that’s why you don’t see pictures of his face online anywhere. So I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about this.

“Yeah, a number of years ago I hired him for a contract gig. I didn’t recognize him – not until he reminded me - but he recognized me.” He laughed.

“Are you okay about this?”

“Sure, it’s no big deal. We’re sort of equally busted, if you know what I mean. It’s fine. I gave him my card and I got his, I might be able to use him again sometime.”

I always say: it’s a small town when you’re kinky…

Hi, kids… I’m footsore and weary from the fair, but wow, what a fun weekend.

It didn’t start off so well. I came down with a cold the day Max and I flew out of Seattle, and I was very cranky to think that I was going to be sick and feeling lousy all weekend. However, my pervy immune system rallied and while I was pretty icky Thursday, I was a trifle better on Friday and much better Saturday. I was relieved, because that was the day Max and I taught our classes and I wanted to be feeling perky. The Folsom Fringe conference was quite nice - the event organizers treated us very well, and the hotel was great to us. We got to chat with Fakir Musafar, who did our flesh hook piercing a couple of years ago. We both like Fakir a lot and haven’t gotten to see him for a while.

And by Sunday I was feeling almost completely healthy. Thank god, because I wanted to enjoy the street fair. I’m going to write a column about it, so I won’t go into lots of detail about what the fair was like here. I’m sure some of my friends will, so I’ll link to them as they post in their blogs.

Monk’s booth was, of course, the locus of a lot of kinky Seattlites. He and Griffin were busy all day on the suspension platform, tying people up and hoisting them into the air, to the delight of the crowd. And the crew (Galahad, Kitten, Tambo, Liss, and NerdyGirl) were selling rope like it was going to be outlawed tomorrow. Max also took some turns, tying up first a cute blonde girl and then a cute blonde boy. On the sidelines, I put a red rope harness on the sexiest black butch top I’ve seen in a while – damn, she was hot! It was definitely a “I love my life!” moment.

I took a bunch of pictures, so look for those tomorrow. Now I think Max and I have some final shopping to do before we fly home… Hmmn, maybe Stormy Leather is having a “Day After Folsom” sale…