Charlize Theron, Jessica Alba and Halle Berry are regularly named the world's sexiest women. But who are the unsexiest women alive? A men's magazine decided to find out.

The Flemish production company Studio 100 has signed a deal to produce a new kids' TV show for the BBC. The company behind the long-running VRT children programmes Samson and Gert, is planning to break into international markets after its success in selling its shows to television companies in Francophone Belgium.

Last week I decided to take an informal poll among the people who know me. I asked one question: "Do you think I'm a prude?" Nobody said yes, so some were surprised when I went on to say that I hold what is generally considered a prudish opinion: I hate porn.

Toei-affiliated theaters around Japan are currently showing a controversial film entitled "Even then, I swear I didn't do it." Directed by Masayuki Suo, the movie is based on the true story of a 26-year-old man, accused by a high school girl of groping her on a packed rush-hour train, who went through a living hell.

At the Sweet Spot Cafe in the northern suburbs of Seattle, you get more than a foam topping on your cappucino. You get a waitress in a bikini, or maybe a tight-fitting T-shirt, and a choice of drinks with names such as Wet Dream (with caramel and white chocolate), Sexual Mix (a caramel macchiato) or Erotic Pleasure.

Hollywood star Johnny Depp is to produce one of two films about the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko said to be in development.

A friendly band of San Francisco pornographers can't wait to get inside the old armory on Mission Street and start tying people up, artistically.

Not only tying them up, but also spanking them, swatting them, cuffing them and whipping them, with sensitivity.

Former Smiths singer Morrissey could represent the UK at the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, the BBC has confirmed.

By now most all know that the thought of two women engaged in love making is one of men's most tantalizing fantasies, but recent media and public attention has shown that it is a growing fantasy in women as well. But is lesbian love really sex?

EbOY is a small group of four people. The Berlin based group creates re-usable pixel objects and takes them to build complex and extensible artwork.

They've got a new FooBar poster, and guess what .... Newsvine is visible :-)

It's the worst kept secret in town. If you want to buy a porn CD, all you need to do is stroll into Palika Bazaar — the unofficial porn CD haven of the Capital — and pick up whatever you like. And now, the market has another claim to fame: it's fast emerging as a centre for smuggled adult toys too.

Italian movie legend Claudia Cardinale has called on film directors to do their part to bring about world peace. "The art of cinematography should be used to promote intercultural respect and cooperation, to revive a sense of responsibility and defend notions that are indispensable to peace," Cardinale said.

In a city where you can get just about anything delivered to your door — groceries, dry cleaning, Chinese food — pot smokers are increasingly ordering takeout marijuana from drug rings that operate with remarkable corporate-style attention to customer satisfaction.

It's all about steam
It's all about stamp
It's all about style
It's all about style
I love the razzle-dazzle
To make a splash out in the street
It's all about steam
It's all about stamp and style *

Welcome to your new magazine about Style !

When lifestyle became popular a generation ago, a number of critics objected to it as voguish and superficial, perhaps because it appeared to elevate habits of consumption, dress, and recreation to categories in a system of social classification. Nonetheless, the word has proved durable and useful, if only because such categories do in fact figure importantly in the schemes that Americans commonly invoke when explaining social values and behavior. (source)

Patterns of social relations, consumption, entertainment, dress, ...

but also reflections on attitudes, values, worldview, ...

Culture, subculture, counterculture ...

and lots of yumminess for the necessary schwung !

Once a simple rodeo for freaks, Burning Man has evolved into a high-tech desert fantasia

In the 10 years or so since she first started modelling, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve gal Bianca Beauchamp has gone on to become "the world's foremost latex fetish fashion model." Now, who measures and awards this distinction remains to be seen, but there's no doubt that in the land of latex, Beauchamp is huge—and we ain't just talking about them sweet and hefty DD silicone sacks she carries around with her either.

Whips, leather, piercings and role-playing: if these things tickle your fancy, you may want to check out Showcase tonight.

The fifth season of KINK, a series that explores fetish communities across Canada, takes a look at the love lives of seven locals from Canada

The number of live music festivals has soared this year - and not just to the delight of music-lovers. Amid the guitars, tents and wellies, corporate sponsors are increasingly visible as companies realise how lucrative investing in live music can be.

In the early 70s, the punk movement was brewing on both sides of the Atlantic, fuelled by a generation of disaffected young people who wanted the world to wake up.

Forget Gloomy, Pale-Faced and Self-Obsessed Goths, There's Another Darker Cult for Parents to Worry About ... EMOs

ABC is poised to relaunch its streaming video service in the fall, after what it calls a successful test under its belt, with a tweaked broadband player and more shows available online for a shorter period of time per episode.

A separate source, NewsVine founder and former Walt Disney Internet Group manager Mike Davidson, said that some people tuning out was to be expected.

"It happens on TV, it's going to happen online," Davidson said. But he also didn't think that any falloff was the most important part of the data.

"There are so many good things about this," he said. " It's a huge, influential company taking the first steps." He also pointed to some of the other data, including one that said 87 percent of the online viewers were able to recall the advertisers who sponsored the stream.

How does our online sexual journey influence our offline one? Is it fair to divide the two? Internet experiences are part of our overall sexual development, for sure.

Can attraction between partners in an idealized, imaginary space transcend such mundanities as average bodies and crooked teeth when you meet in person? It has for me, many times.

From the page:

-- Hong Kong's first sex workers film festival is set to kick off, showing movies about prostitutes' lives aimed at shedding light on a taboo subject in Chinese society. --

From the page:

-- A controversial Russian film portraying Japan's World War II Emperor Hirohito has opened to large audiences in Tokyo. --

From the page:

-- When men appear as buxom, scantily clad females in video games like "World of Warcraft," it is more about winning than finding an outlet for a real-world affinity for gender bending. --

From the page:

-- The word 'paedophile' inevitably sounds ugly to us, and it looks rather unlovely too. That Latinate 'ae'; it's all perverse and threatening. However, the US English version - 'pedophile', with the first syllable spat out to rhyme with 'dead' - is possibly ickier. As ghastly as both is 'Hard Candy', a film in which a sinister 14-year-old girl submits an early-thirties male photographer to a sunny afternoon's mental and physical torture. 'Lolita' it isn't, although they should probably give you a lollipop afterwards like they used to do at the doctor's. --

From the page:

-- No-strings, guilt-free sex with strangers - it's not the kind of Saturday-night entertainment you often hear discussed in the office on Monday morning. So it may come as a surprise that as many as 1.5m British couples have admitted to trying it. --

From the page:

-- So for the benefit of women everywhere (and for your benefit too, guys—remember, a happy woman makes for a much happier man), we're going to let men in on a little of what really makes us tick, deep down. Read on for 11 near-universal secrets of womankind. Some may shock you, others may be things you've suspected for a long time (but never had the nerve to ask about). But know this: the woman in your life? She's hiding more secrets than these, including a few you'd never imagine. Lucky you—you get to spend a lifetime learning them all. --

From the page

-- ... we've scoured the country for guys willing to share the private truths they wouldn't normally confess. Some are a bit crass. Some you've always suspected. Some are surprisingly sweet. (Guys don't like to reveal the mushy stuff, either.) But read on, and you may discover that the truth about men isn't all that ugly. --

From the page:

-- Even in the darkest days of their 1975-1990 civil conflict, the Lebanese were never known to let war get in the way of a good party. --

From the page:

-- The US music industry is enduring a bruising summer as top acts like Bruce Springsteen, Ashlee Simpson and the Dixie Chicks struggle to sell out concerts.

With traditional big earners like the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney not touring the US, promoters have been filling in with acts such as South American singer Shakira and country stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, but charging the same price. --

-- If you think about it, sex is weird. We have two people engaging in the pursuit of tension release by sticking something somewhere and vigorously, or not so vigorously, moving. When you add to this odd mental picture, the plethora of heights, weights and degrees of flexibility -- without breaking any physical limits or laws of physics -- it is astounding what the human body can do.

Great sex is about more than body types -- it's also about being individual, personal and unique. Your physical shape, your height and your flexibility are all factors that you may think limit your sexual antics. Here's a quickie cheat sheet of sexual positions for these important considerations for good sex. --

From the page:

-- Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have announced The Who's first world tour in more than 20 years, beginning Sept. 12 in Philadelphia and featuring an Oct. 11 concert at KeyArena in Seattle. --

From the page:

-- On June 25, the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times published a "Modern Love" column on how to use animal training techniques to fix your man. Titled "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," it almost immediately reached No. 1 on NYTimes.com's list of most frequently e-mailed articles.

No big deal. Columns about men, women, and relationships are perennial favorites. But almost three weeks later, the piece remains near the top of the NYTimes.com's constantly churning list of most-e-mailed articles and shows no sign of sinking. "Shamu's" run makes it the newspaper equivalent of Dark Side of the Moon, the Pink Floyd disc that has owned a spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart for all but a couple of weeks since 1973. --

From the page:

-- Red Buttons died Thursday. He was 87. The red-haired entertainer won an Oscar for his acting, but first made his name with comedy. He was born Aaron Chwatt in New York City. He won an Oscar for the film Sayonara, in which he played a soldier in Japan after World War II. --

Comment:

Also see oldfogey's obituary.

From the page:

-- The men are young, gorgeous and up for it. No wonder Western women see a Third World holiday as the gateway to casual sex - sometimes in exchange for cash. But as a new film highlights female sex tourism, Liz Hoggard asks who really pays the price. --

From the page:

-- So, album of the year for that title alone; but just how relevant or revolutionary is Peaches in 2006? Aren't we all relaxed about sex and sexual politics these days? Well, maybe people are in places as gleefully filthy as Peaches' adopted Berlin. But, in Britain? No way. This is still uptight, immature, hypocrite-central; a country where 'gay' is a by-word for 'lame', where the tits-out tabloids work themselves into a frenzy of moral indignation over racey photos of Mrs McCartney-Mills and where John Prescott and Jordan are publicly vilified for having a sex life. Clearly, we need Peaches' message that sexuality is fluid and sex itself is ridiculous, hilarious fun more than ever. --

From the page:

-- Parisians, and tourists, will be able to swim in the Seine - or at least on the Seine - from tomorrow for the first time in 13 years. --

From the page:

-- The Australian prime minister John Howard has called for Big Brother to be axed after two male housemates allegedly sexually assaulted a female contestant. --

From the page:

-- While Michael Jackson holes up in Bahrain, his legal problems are piling up in California, where two lawsuits are casting new light on his bizarre lifestyle and lavish spending habits, as well as further eroding his rapidly depleting bank balance. --

From the page:

-- But we should be grateful for Ms Curtis-Thomas for reopening an important debate about what exactly is obscene, which has been silenced by a wilful conflating by the porn industry of sexual liberation and exploitation. The girls of Nuts and Zoo may keep their pants on but porn is not just about human orifices, it's about holes in our thinking. --

-- "YOU'RE going to listen to me." This was the taunting command of an AOL customer service representative who sounded like a jailer twirling his keychain. The customer on the phone wanted to complete his business, but the person on the other end of the phone did not share a sense of urgency. --

From the page:

-- The following ten fetishes were comprised through a survey that was filled out by AskMen readers. There are plenty of others that have been omitted, which may be somewhat tamer or ten times wilder. --

From the page:

-- France, the country which invented the philosophy café, has just had another smart idea: the train of thought. From this week, passengers who book by internet on certain long-distance French trains can arrange to sit next to other passengers with similar interests. --

From the page:

-- Labour MP has introduced a Bill to consign 'sexually explicit' men's magazines to the top shelves of newsagents' shops, alongside hardcore pornography. Neil Tweedie examines her case, while a 'Daily Telegraph' writer and the editor of 'Nuts' set out their opposing views. --

From the page:

-- Superman is returning! And he's really expensive. Humorist Brian Unger puzzles over why Time Warner is spending somewhere in excess of $350 million to produce, distribute and market the superhero epic -- and why the CNN cash cow will be paying for it all. --

-- "Bettie's got a cult following in America. She is a pop icon. A lot of people dress like her, they do a burlesque show, and a lot of people will put on the wig and do acts like Bettie Page. And fashion and everything, the looks were inspired by things that she wore then. When Madonna had the cone bras in the early 90s, she was doing that in the 50s. As for her sexuality, I'm sure she was aware of it. You know, the word naïve keeps coming up, but to me it was a knowing naiveté. She knew what was going on but it was the attitude of the 50s to pick and choose what you wanted to look at and how closely you wanted to look at it. I think she was doing her job, and she was making her living, but I'm sure she knew what was going on. But it didn't serve her in any way to really investigate it and I think when she thought about it, she was making people happy and she wasn't judging them for a fetish. It was like, 'OK, so you like shoes, you like whips or whatever.' I think within the realm of what they were doing it was like acting or playing dress up." --

-- Culturally, the Western world sees Iran as cloaked in black robes and turbans, a nation repressed by conservative mullahs and ideologically pristine.

Behind the image is a stark reality -- more than 65 percent of the nation's population is 25 years old or younger, and there is a youth culture eager to break free.

Filmmakers Amir Hamz and Mark Lazarz capture that restless spirit in a new documentary titled Sounds of Silence. The film profiles a generation of artists who are creating and distributing new music behind the back of the Islamic republic.

Unlike the traditional music approved by religious censors, these musicians choose to rock -- and even rap -- all the while, dodging the authorities.

And the music they create finds unlikely inspiration from the Koran and revered mystical poets and philosophers from Persia's golden age. --

-- The mother of a Texas teenager has sued MySpace.com for $30 million, after her daughter said she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on the social-networking site.

According to an article published Monday in The Austin American-Statesman newspaper, the 14-year-old said she was contacted by the 19-year-old defendant through her MySpace Web page in April. He was arrested in May, the article says.

The lawsuit alleges that MySpace.com has lax security in protecting its users, many of whom are younger than 16, the article says.

"MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online," Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, told the newspaper. --

-- "No one is expected to take off anything in these sessions," Little Woo says by way of introduction to her burlesque yoga, "but people can find it a very liberating experience. Even the bikini-impaired might strip down to their panties and bra."

Thankfully, it will take a long while to peel off the extra layers I have loaded on especially for this practice of her upcoming class. For I am not your pastie kind of girl, although I confess the lithe teacher has already coaxed me into a see-through tutu and titillating red feather boa.

We're in a private studio on East Cordova, and, while the accompanying sound is undoubtedly music to strip by (The Stripper by David Rose, Charlie Parker's Funky Blues), this is not bump 'n' grind erotica.

Little Woo is fusing the vibrant Vancouver burlesque scene -- a revival of the vaudeville art of tease that owes much of its crossover from fetish to mainstream to the likes of Dita Von Teese -- with the dominant world of yoga in the city.

Just think more fishnets than Lululemon.

"People get drawn to burlesque," says Woo, whose background includes teaching music at the Royal Conservatory Music in Toronto. "They see performers on stage and they wish they could emulate them. I'm here to give them confidence, to draw out their inner sass."

But, she stresses, "It's all quite lighthearted, and in a safe and playful environment."

Resplendent in a corset, stockings and heels (she's dubbed the 'shaman of burlesque' by fellow performers), Woo runs through her routine, flowing effortlessly from one posture to the next. It's yoga, but not as you might know it. --

Born on June 18th 1969 as the first child in an average normal family, except for the illiterate, abusive father, and the dutiful mother, sacrificing her own life for her children, including that lousy excuse for a husband, all because she made the mistake of marrying him, and because she strongly believes in living with the consequences of one's actions, Irma spent the first 17 years of her life in the small town of Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands.

Being able to read at age 3, she later on became an avid reader, and having read just about everything the local library had to offer at age 10, she started nagging her mother to bring her to the main library at the other side of town every few days.

She never liked being a girl, and could even be seen praying at night for God to turn her into a boy overnight, always being disappointed if such obviously wasn't the case the next morning. She drove the Catholic nuns at kindergarten crazy by refusing to play with dolls, and by disappearing from the school yard, driving off on a go-cart, of course only to be noticed a couple of blocks down the road by thoughtful adults, bringing her back to that same school yard, where the nuns made sure she knew she was a naughty child. Nevertheless she must have liked going there, because when she was suffering from Pfeiffer's disease, she was told she wouldn't be allowed to go to school the next day, if she didn't sleep in the afternoon, and this for almost an entire year.

Pfeiffer's disease plagued her once more, in secondary school, even though one is supposed to only be able to get it once, where she almost had to retake her 4th year, having missed a couple of months. She studied Latin and Greek, took the obligatory field trip to Italy, smoked marijuana in the pupil's basement, tried to fit in but failed miserably, called just about every teacher by first name, except for the few remaining priests and elderly teachers, played the recorder, even though she would have largely preferred the piano, tried ballet, gymnastics, football, karate, tennis and a couple of other sports, but not ice hockey because that really wasn't considered a sport for girls, played theatre, felt awkward about her blossoming femininity, underwent a breast reduction because her G-cup sized bosom caused a constant backache, lived through a rather dramatic divorce (her parents' divorce that is) of which she insisted to spare you the details, and took off abroad, a whole 40 kilometres from home mind you, to enter university.

Because it surely would be dangerous, a young girl alone in a big bad city, she spent the first year in Antwerp with yet other nuns, who rented rooms to lady students. Because it was such a hassle asking for a key every time she would return to the nunnery after 8 p.m., she duplicated the key, which never was discovered, even though the nuns came close at more than one occasion, one of those being that night when the police rang the bell at about 1 a.m., waking up the entire building, because they wanted to confirm it was her who had called about the smell of gas, and a smell of gas there was by the way, even though the Jewish man her friend and she asked for confirmation, looked as if he was about to strangle them, while all they did was save him and all the other inhabitants of that street from a possible explosion.

She studied economics, as a second choice, as her heart went out to literature, but some thought a girl doesn't need an education anyway, being an inferior creature, and others were afraid an education in literature would only prepare her for a life on the dole. After a couple of years however, she decided she really wouldn't like to pursue a career in the economic field, and quit, exchanging economics for journalism, information and communication, graduating cum laude and getting her first Bachelor's degree, specialising in intercultural communication. After that she considered her knowledge of sociology and anthropology to be inferior, went back to university, and got a Master's degree, graduating cum laude again, after having written a thesis on female genital mutilation, or, using a term with less negative connotations, female circumcision.

All this time she had been working at the same time, starting out as a babysitter for two cute but spoilt Japanese kids, whose father worked in the diamond trade, first as an employee, but later on starting his own company, in which she then did administrative work as well as sorting diamonds, and this for several years. After various temp jobs, she worked at the tourist office of the city of Antwerp for about a year, during Antoon Van Dijck's Year in 1999 (Anthony van Dyck, the painter). One of the temp jobs she did afterwards brought her to a company that developed software, where she was active in helpdesk support, consulting and services support and marketing support. Unfortunately there was a worldwide reorganisation and she found herself, like so many others, unemployed. She was fired the American way, being told one afternoon, after lunch, seeing her e-mail and network access closed down immediately, and being told she didn't have to come back the next day. Good thing she lived at walking distance from the office, and she didn't have a company car, or she would have had to arrange for a taxi in order to get home. Not the fact she was fired but the way in which she was, came as quite a shock, all the more because just one week before that particular day, she had a job evaluation conversation, where she was promised a raise and an interesting career plan, with more emphasis on tech aspects of her work.

As she was unable to find a satisfactory job, and didn't like living on unemployment benefits, she took an intensive course in network administration and basic web development and scripting during 10 months, only to find out, she still wasn't able to find a job, having to compete with young guys straight out of college or university, or system administrators with years and years of experience, even though she was invited for job interviews many a time, and didn't limit herself to finding a job in ICT. The excuses she heard varied from being too old for the labour market, not fitting the all male team, being overqualified, not having enough work experience in that particular field, surely not being able to speak French, being Dutch and all, and being too much of a generalist.

After more temporary and various jobs, participating in an exam for communications expert for a position at the city of Antwerp, she made it through several rounds but got a phone call one morning she didn't make it through the final round. That same afternoon however she got another phone call, asking her whether she would be interested in working for the city of Antwerp in another position, at the special unit Sham Marriages and Forced Marriages, where she now most of the time is interviewing couples wanting to get married, while at least one of them is not having the Belgian nationality or a permanent resident permit, in order to find out whether they want to get married for other reasons than to obtain such a permit. She is also trying to help victims of sham marriages, as well as victims of forced marriages, or people being afraid of being forced to marry.

In her spare time, she likes of course being online, being a member of numerous communities and luring people into following her to those communities, loving anything beta, defining herself as an e-schizophrenic, being an expert in dilly-dallying, being addicted to silly quizzes that are like psychology for the lazy, as well as information and news, being a master in starting new blogs that afterwards don't get enough of her attention, using the nom de plume Morgaine LeFaye, and occasionally publishing poetry and short stories. Offline she still likes reading, writing, going to the theatre, the opera, and a concert once in a while, buying shoes, having long conversations, either over the phone or face to face, and, since she moved from an apartment to a house, gardening, or so she thinks, as due to various reasons, she didn't have the occasion to spend hours gardening just yet.

She lives together with a redheaded Dutchman, who online goes by the unpronounceable name wchulseiee, and whom she met online, about 7 years ago. He was crazy enough to relocate to Antwerp, and is admirable for putting up with her complex and difficult personality. She defines herself as bisexual and polyamorous, with an interest in various fetishes and kinks, emphasising this doesn't mean she is a nymphomaniac, on the contrary, she has known several periods of being asexual.

She spends a lot of time thinking about relationships in general and hers in particular (with family, especially her mother, friends, partner and potential other partners/lovers, ...), the concept of polyamory and the consequences, living together or living alone, bdsm, fetishes, new encounters, the impression you made on her, work, a career change, poetry, the short stories she should write down, handwritten letters, the smell of memories, identity, which camera to buy, her qualities and character flaws, insomnia, how she ever is going to keep her mind quiet once in a while, her immediate future, synchronicity, which language to learn next, both her online and offline friends, her need to relate to people, her being distant and very not physical when feeling troubled and unhappy, the whimsicalities of life, how to break out of vicious circles, catch-22 situations, inconsistencies, how she is an aunt since the beginning of September, children, why there are days she craves attention, how Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and anything that catches her attention as she is rather curious by nature.

She still has a lot to learn in life, for instance how to sleep, how to find inner balance, how to accept herself for who she is, whomever that may be, as she still is trying to figure that out, how to worry less and enjoy more, how to be more optimistic and self secure, how to be more confident writing in English, as she still is feeling inferior for not having an expert knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, which prevents her from expressing nuances, even though she is being assured by several people there's nothing wrong with her English language skills and there aren't that many people that are polyglot.

Her latest addiction is Newsvine, which she loves and adores, all the while still hoping one day it will be less US (of A) centred, and more importantly, multilingual so she can be a proud ambassadress of Newsvine for the Dutch speaking population on earth.

Phew. Could you read that in one single breath?

(also try my 'Bio')

-- Within an hour of logging on to an internet gambling site, Richard Mahan had won £90,000. But his luck soon changed and, ignoring the sage advice of gamblers everywhere, he tried to claw his way back.

He used 13 of his parents' credit cards and, as he gambled into the early hours, ran up debts of £158,000. Mahan, 25, then tried to kill himself in what is believed to be Scotland's worst case of internet gambling addiction.

His parents, Linda and James, called in the police after the credit card companies told them that their insurance would not be valid unless they did so.

Forfar Sheriff Court was told yesterday that Mahan kept gambling at his parents' home in Brechin, Angus, in April last year until he exhausted the limits on all the credit cards.

Sheriff Kevin Veal said: "If £150,000 can be lost in 50 minutes under clandestine conditions in the early hours of the morning, it is an issue so great that it needs to be addressed by the wider community. It is a social issue."

Brian Bell, the procurator fiscal, said: "Initially he'd made over £90,000 in profit but within an hour he continued gambling and started to lose money heavily until the credit cards ran dry. He then tried to commit suicide. The credit card companies indicated that unless the matter was reported to the police the insurance cover would not come into place and the parents would have to pay back the money."

John Clancy, representing Mahan, said that the case highlighted the dangers of the lack of regulation of internet gambling. "The court should be aware that internet gambling, along with alcohol and heroin, is the scourge of the 21st century because it is unregulated," he said. "It also raises questions about the wisdom of credit card companies allowing borrowing levels to be raised without any real checks. --

-- No more chick food! Forget the quiche and tofu! And while you're at it, torch those tighty-whities and dump the minivans. Be a man, man. Eat meat!

That's the message of a new tongue-in-cheek commercial for Burger King's humongous Texas Double Whopper sandwich. It's just one of several new restaurant advertising campaigns that take a (depending on your viewpoint) humorously realistic or annoyingly sexist slant on an old debate: guy food versus girl food.

TGIFriday's has also joined the meat-is-macho bandwagon with its Meat Fanatics commercial in which a guy ordering the vegetable medley is razzed by his beef-eating buddies until he adds sausage.

The 60-second Burger King spot - a spoof on '70s feminism - shows men marching down the street, burning their briefs, unfurling signs that say "Eat This Meat," dissing quiche and singing their new manthem, to the tune of Helen Reddy's 1972 hit, "I Am Woman": "I am man, I am incorrigible, and I'm way too hungry to settle for chick food."

The commercial culminates with a minivan tossed over a bridge and the voice-over slogan, "Eat like a man, man." --

-- A new online computer game is poised to go where few games gone before: the bedroom.

"Naughty America: The Game" is an online, massively multiplayer game that claims to be "the first of its kind." By combining one-on-one chat functions, player profiles and multiplayer dating games with options to interact both online as well as in the real world, the game offers players a sexy alternative to the typical fantasy and science-fiction of most role-playing games.

Available in adult stores, "Naughty America" can also be downloaded online and that — among other things — is causing controversy. While adult stores require photo ID in order to make purchases, how can the game's makers be sure their customers aren't children?

In "Naughty America," players can let loose their wild side with trips to the game world's casino, tattoo parlor or sex shops. They can own their own apartments or use one of the public venues provided to throw a sex party or to indulge in a personal fetish.

Safe Escape Studios and Eight Legs Inc., co-creators of the game, insist that Naughty America is intended only for mature gamers.

Eight Legs President Noah Dudley said enacting safeguards is a major concern.

"We're working with a company called Sentry that provides background checks and can assist in age verification," he said, though he admits that the specifics of Sentry's involvement are still up in the air.

The game will also require a monthly subscription fee paid with a credit card.

But Donna Rice Hughs, president of "Enough Is Enough," an organization dedicated to protecting children from Internet dangers, is unconvinced those steps will be enough.

"Kids are adept," she said. "If there is a way of getting around them [Internet safeguards], they will find it." --

-- Heather Mills McCartney has been forced to admit to her unsavoury past after pictures of her posing for a pornographic book emerged which showed her performing sex acts on a stranger.

The estranged wife of Sir Paul McCartney admitted she had taken part in the photo shoot which showed her smothered in baby oil and performing sex acts with a male model.

Other explicit pictures showed her acting out bondage scenes with whips and simulating sex.

The German book, titled Die Freuden Der Liebe - The Joys of Love - was published by hardcore porn company Orion who are based in Flensburg in Northern Germany in 1988.

Like the thousands of other porn books the company publishes, it had no descriptive or instructive words - only page after page of sexual images.

Miss Mills McCartney's lawyers have admitted that she had taken part in the erotic shoot. But they denied that it was porn. --

-- Normally at this time of year, as the summer solstice approaches, the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge is populated largely by mystics, meditators, hippies and people with slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitars.

Tonight, however, it will play host to a culture vastly older than itself.

The Bardi dancers, who live 200 kilometres north of Broome in the north of Western Australia, have accepted an extraordinary invitation to be the first Aboriginal group ever to perform at England's most famous sacred site.

"It's a mind-bending thing, eh?" said Duaine Ah-Choo, as he arrived at Stonehenge on Saturday to examine the site before the performance.

"It's an ancient, historical thing. Like our sacred sites."

The Bardis, saltwater people from the Ardiyooloon community (formerly One Arm Point), comprise five generations within their group.

Duaine, Brent Mouda, Lyle Davey and Frank Moochoo Davey and their elders made the 14,000-kilometre journey from home at the invitation of the Salisbury International Arts Festival, which is staging a selection of Aboriginal cultural events in this year's program.

The performance is also part of Undergrowth Australian Arts UK, a two-year program of Australian cultural events. --

-- 'I wanted it to be about my journey,' says 'Suzanne Portnoy' (nom de plume). 'I didn't want it to be just bonking.' Portnoy, an articulate vivacious London publicist in her mid-forties, has written an erotic memoir, The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker (Virgin books, £7.99) detailing her post-divorce sexual awakening after a 10-year marriage, the latter four of which she spent miserable, frustrated and celibate.

Did I say awakening? A more accurate term might be 'explosion'. Gritty and explicit, it joins the growing female 'erotic odyssey' genre sparked by Belle de jour (A Round Heeled Woman; The Bride Stripped Bare; The Sexual Life of Catherine M). Portnoy takes the reader on a no-holds-barred tour of swinging, saunas, group sex, fetish clubs, sex with strangers in the lunch hour, online hook-ups, and what she terms 'pleasure without commitment'.

'I'm the urban myth,' smiles Portnoy. 'I'm the woman men wish they could meet but don't believe exists.' --

-- The artist, who always brings about novelties in the world of Rai music, has chosen the Moroccan winner of Studio 2M singing contest, Judia Belkabir to feature this duet.

This exclusive single is believed to reach a great success as well as launching Judia's new-born career to the recognition of a wide Arab and European public.

Cheb Mami is the pioneer of the new "Rai attitude" whose objective is to universalize Rai music by opening it up to Western influences while carefully preserving its traditional character. --

-- Shortly after the release of her new album "Nta Goudami" (Face Me), the Algerian diva, 83, died in a Paris hospital with a heart attack.

Rimitti was still an active performer and recording artist. She was to appear at the BBC Proms season in August.

[ ...]

The rai godmother was born in Tessala, a small village in the countryside of western Algeria. She was the first women voice to denounce through rhythmic poetry and songs women's repression in society.

She has long been a legend to whom all young rai singers have owed their freedom of expression as well as their linguistic and moral rebelliousness.

Her brilliant career stretches back to the 1950's. She was the spokesperson of the Arab Maghreb population. Her songs focused on everyday struggle of living, pleasures of sex and love, alcohol, friendship and war, all performed in the everyday language of the streets. --

-- Walking in stilettos didn't faze Chiwetel Ejiofor (pronounced "chew-it-tell, edge-oh-for.") Neither did squeezing his trim 5'10" physique into a tight red dress, or wearing a poofy Diana Ross wig.

What really needled the star of the British comedy "Kinky Boots" was the modern form of torture called body waxing.

The painful procedure was required for him to portray Lola, a drag queen who inspires a soul-searching shoe manufacturer to launch a line of male fetish footwear. --

-- Pin-up provocateur Bettie Page was a scandal in 1955. Now she's become an American icon.
Even when she's lashed to a chair, chains around her ankles and a gag over her mouth, there's something innocent and practically perky about pin-up Bettie Page. It's still there in the images, 50 years after they were taken.

Whether she's posing with leopards, brandishing a whip or - in thigh-highs and stilettos - coyly looking back over her shoulder, Page always manages to come across as nothing more than a particularly curvaceous girl next door, just having some All-American fun.

Which isn't quite the way folks saw her in the mid-'50s, when she was an underground sensation on the covers of pulp magazines such as Wink, Beauty Parade, Black Nylon and Titter. In the uptight Eisenhower era, those photos landed her in the hot seat of a nationally televised Senate hearing on pornography.

As depicted in "The Notorious Bettie Page," Friday's new release starring Gretchen Mol, the pin-up icon helped redefine what we think is sexy in the 21st century. --

-- The difference between naked shots and porn is spreading your legs," Molly Crabapple tells me. We're sitting in Clem's, a Williamsburg honky-tonk, along with two Press editors and a friend of Molly's who's a former freak-show girl. "Molls and newsmen—very noir," Molly says, and takes a sip of her ice water.

Molly is 22 and striking, olive-skinned with an aquiline nose and breasts with the curve and heft that everyone wants either to have or to hold. She's articulate and educated, if a bit too knowing. She's there to talk with me about SuicideGirls.com, the softcore sex site that's gone mainstream by purporting to offer naked young alt-girls in a female-friendly online community.

Until recently Molly was a Suicide Girl, having posed nude for the site twice, once alone and once in tandem with another girl. She was paid the usual rate of $300 for each shoot and didn't spread her legs on either occasion. She's well-spoken, but her complaint is much the same as those of most every other girl I've spoken with: "SuicideGirls is the Wal-Mart of alt-porn." She's said the same at her page on the site, but you won't find the comment there; it's been purged, along with just about every other critical comment any Suicide Girl has made has made about SuicideGirls.

The bloom, it seems, is off the rose. --

-- Bettie Page, a fetish goddess in black leather and bangs, was the perv pinup of choice back in the Eisenhower era. Any old sleaze could turn Bettie's life into a kinky S&M wallow, a cinematic stroke book. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that director Mary Harron, who co-wrote the scrappy script with Guinevere Turner, doesn't do the expected. She's too sly for that, too subversively funny. Her version of American Psycho in 2000, following her acclaimed 1996 debut with I Shot Andy Warhol, dodged the gore to take an ax to male vanity and greed. Her timeless theme here is the gap between real women and male sexual fantasies. Bettie, a sweet-natured girl from Nashville armed with her belief in God and the natural glory of her own body, giggled at the men who liked to see her model and pose with whips and chains. The dirt never touched her. She wouldn't let it. --

-- An American cook's adventures in the kitchen have won the first literary prize for bloggers turned authors.

Julie Powell's tales of French cooking beat the intimate diary of a prostitute and a guide to the UK's best "greasy spoon" cafes to take the Blooker Prize. --

-- Bob Carlos Clarke, the photographer who has died aged 56, specialised in erotic images of women; his models - who ranged from Jerry Hall and Rachel Weisz to teenage girls plucked off the street - were often clad in skin-tight latex, posing provocatively, even pornographically, and his images attracted both controversy and critical acclaim.

Subversive, voyeuristic and overtly sexual, with titles such as Unexploded Female and Adult Females Attack Without Provocation, his pictures did not endear him to the feminist movement. But he successfully combined his fetishistic photography with commercial work (for companies such as Levi's and Smirnoff), real life images and portraits, and established a reputation as versatile photographer and talented photographic printmaker. --

-- Bettie Page was plunging into the day's work: autographing pinups of herself in various Naughty Girl personas, with kitschy bangs, high heels, mesh hose and tasseled underwear.

Nurse Bettie. Jester Bettie. Maid Bettie. Voodoo Bettie. Cowgirl Bettie. Jungle Bettie. Wild Orchid Bettie. The task ahead was arduous given her many ailments, including diabetes and stabbing pains in her back, legs and hands.

But 82-year-old Page — a taboo-breaker who helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s — is not a quitter. --

-- Everyone knows the porn universe begins and ends at either end of the Ventura Freeway that spans L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. Here in New York, the question isn't how much porn is made here, but rather, is there a porn scene at all? I was asking myself that question the other night when I attended a party for the release of a new adult film entitled "House of Ass." (What? You were expecting "A Long Day's Journey Into Night"?) A porn film release party in New York? I thought. This I have to see. --

-- Foretold in myth and legend as the year of the gay cowboy, 2006 actually looks sure to be the year of the faux-lesbian, writes Kira Cochrane. --

[...]

-- All of which would be great, positive and progressive, if these images had anything to do with real lesbian lifestyles and real gay women. Unfortunately they represent nothing of the sort. So I guess that I should clarify my terms: 2006 looks sure to be the year of the faux-lesbian.

Rather than representing lesbianism in any essential sense, what these images actually seek is to co-opt it, to contain and commercialise a preference that can, by its very nature, be alienating, even threatening, to heterosexual men. --

-- Top burlesque star Dita Von Teese takes her kit off for thousands of pounds — but she tells Hannah Betts that the only time she feels naked is when she's not wearing her lipstick or heels.

Dita Von Teese is, undisputedly, the woman of the moment. Responsible for igniting the passion for burlesque that has swept through Britain and the States, and the muse behind fashion's return to hourglass femininity, she confirmed her A-list status in December by marrying her rock star paramour, Marilyn Manson.

With every shiver of her marabou and shimmy of her tassels, Von Teese has found herself at the centre of debates concerning a host of F-words: not least, femininity, feminism and fetishism; burlesque, as it becomes clear, providing something of a crash course in psychology. --

-- Before she watched soldiers shoot a man on the streets of Northern Iraq, before she talked to the woman who said that being imprisoned with her two children for triple homicide was better than the life she lived with the husband and in-laws she murdered, before she spent a month shooting a film in a language she did not speak, playing a victim of rape and familial abuse, in a beautiful but war-torn country, among people who had a violent feud with her own bloodline, Ozzie Aziz was just a normal, drag-queen-and-midget-loving, S&M-garbed, Madonna-wannabe club singer. --

[...]

-- Bekhal's Tears is the result of the collaboration of two ''soul-mates'' (Aziz's word) who are descended from ethnic groups locked in a historic conflict: Kurdish filmmaker Lauand Omar and Cypriot Turk Aziz. A rare cinematic expression of Kurdish life, it's one of the first films to be shot in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. The movie, sometimes amateurish in its shaky editing, shows the mountainous beauty of a region that has become synonymous with violence. It's a moving story of troubled, traditional people coming to terms with the weapons and ways of Western society, and particularly of a humble daughter determined to make a change. --

[...]

-- Bekhal's Tears depicts a family not standing by each other, but turning on a daughter who brings ''disgrace'' after her fiancé rapes her. When the film premiered in Kurdistan, it got a standing ovation. ''The young people loved it,'' Omar says. Then during the press conference, audience members accused the filmmakers of being outsiders showing a false picture of Iraq.

''There was a lot of anger,'' Omar says. ``Some, mostly men, [verbally] attacked me, saying that such problems do not exist in their society, and who was I to come here and make them all look bad in other countries? ... That's when I realized that I was achieving what I wanted. The movie touched the people.'' --

-- Vinylla, Brighton's longest running fetish club, returns for its second fixture of 2006 - an Easter Bank Holiday special on Sunday 16 April, 2006, at its regular venue, the Harlequin. --

-- The following interview was conducted with Eric Bresler, director of documentary film Otaku Unite!, at the New York Comic-Con on Februrary 25 and 26, with some supplemental questions being answered over e-mail. --

[...]

-- Each gender gets its own comic. Each genre gets its own audience. There's certain cartoons that just the video gamers watch and associate themselves with. So within anime fandom, there are definitely sub-divisions. And, of course, the adult stuff is a whole different world, which also leads into the world of furries, which I discovered throughout shooting the more "fetishistic" aspect of the subculture. Costuming, I think to a degree, is a fetish in and of itself, so for some people it's not very much of a jump towards a more sexual type of costuming. --

-- Dita von Teese, burlesque artist, retro pin-up and now the wife of Marilyn Manson, has risen from lingerie salesgirl to entertainer of choice at all the best parties. Between wedding and honeymoon, she found time to pose for a series of exclusive drawings by David Downton. Interview by Naomi West. --

-- One of Africa's best known musicians, Ali Farka Toure, has died after a long illness in his home country of Mali, the culture ministry has announced. --