richardcahill.net

Melania, 'Tis of Thee

8/6/2016

Before we get started on the main subject of this post, a shout-out to teen American athlete Virginia Thrasher, who won the first gold medal of the Zika Olympics in her event, the women’s 10-meter air gun competition.

Many Americans reacted with pride to this event. Others reacted by saying “Who cares?” And “Who cares about air guns? I’ve got a closet full of real AR-15’s and enough ammo to last me through a double dose of Doomsdays,” but these people are not aware of the significance of Thrasher’s achievement, as they are Americans and do not know the metric system. A ten-meter air gun is a pretty unwieldy weapon, and it is quite an accomplishment for a teen girl to lift one, let alone hit anything with it.

But it is the Olympics, and it is time for us to get patriotically stoked over winning competitions in sports that we had no idea existed, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sports fans from other nations and shout together our love of competition with them, while privately thinking they smell bad and dress funny.

The other big sport of the summer is election 2016, and while we have spent months detecting the character, or lack of it, in the two surviving candidates, the question of who is better qualified to be First Spouse has been examined far less exhaustively, and this past week the spotlight shone on Melania Trump, who stands to become the first FLILF* since Jackie Kennedy should her husband win the election, but not for such great reasons.

It was revealed that Melania was probably working illegally in the United States in 1995, since nude photos of her, both solitary and locked in embrace with another nude female model person, have surfaced from that year, and they were probably paid for posing for them, since in 1995 the nude selfie posted for free on Instagram had not been invented. Plus, the pictures were taken by a French photographer. Asking women to get naked was not invented by the French, but when Frenchmen do it, in their greasy, unwashed language, women seem to comply unquestioningly.

Which might be excuse enough for Melania, except that her husband has been going on about illegal immigrants taking work away from natural Americans, and there were certainly plenty of legal Americans willing to rip their clothes off and pose for the camera in 1995. Also he's mad about them raping us and being criminals besides. Now it is obvious that Melania was no rapist, just an alluring European with an overweening desire to expose all of her luscious young body to the fresh air of freedom, and get her personal parts next to another liberty-loving young woman’s, probably for cash. That’s the criminal part, because apparently Melania was here on a tourist visa.

Which meant she legally had to get naked for free, and while she probably has on numerous occasions, back then when you were photographed nude and the country gawked at your firm young flesh, you got paid for it. Nowadays you have to do it without charging, and then beg for money on GoFundMe, but it was a better world then.

So Melania is probably lying. I hear you saying “Who cares? All she has to do is keep the White House silverware clean while her husband gets laid by other women just by asking “Hey, baby, do you want to have sex with the Leader of the Free World?” or "You can touch me anywhere except the hair."

That’s true, but what else has she been lying about? Apparently having a degree in architecture, but that’s something America has never required in a First Lady. And she says she speaks five languages, but since we Americans only speak one, how can we tell for sure? Besides, she comes from a part of Europe that is so linguistically messed up that you have to know five languages just to get all the people on your block to put out their recycle bins on the same day.

But when January rolls around, we are going to have either the first First Dude, a guy who unquestionably knows his way around the White House, including the secret closets where they keep the best interns, or the first First Lady who is a professional nude person.

Great country or what?

*First Lady I’d love to have intercourse with

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Are YOU Ready For World Naked Gardening Day?

5/2/2016

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The original Naked Gardeners

World Naked Gardening Day is coming up on May 7th, and I hope you are all ready for it. The girl and I have been planning for it for months. “Don’t forget you have to be back here for World Naked Gardening Day," she told me as I was making plans to travel back to Pennsylvania, my native state, to visit my people there, and where I currently sit, typing this.

“I won’t,” I assured her, and I haven’t—I’ll be back in San Diego by the 4th. Hopefully I'll get the same nice new plane back there as I did when I came out. The new in-flight entertainment screen was great--there were games you could play for free on it, and I played trivia and poker all the way here, which showed me, contrary to my previous opinion of myself, that I know nothing about anything and cannot play poker.

But I'll be back on my adopted home turf and ready for WNGD. I’ll be ready for the traffic and the crowded shopping venues, especially at Home Depot, as Southern Californians, for whom World Naked Gardening Day is nearly as important as Arbor Day, flock to buy the fertilizer, trowels and hedge clippers that will complement their naked selves best on May 7th.

Ironically, it was here in Pennsylvania that my most intense gardening, although not naked, experiences occurred. My family of nine lived off our land—that and my dad’s job as a line foreman for the Philadelphia Electric Company—and all summer radishes, cucumbers, squash and other vegetables we kids had absolutely no use for sprouted in our garden.

We grew one produce item me and my siblings would eat enthusiastically--tomatoes—and the beginning of August, when the tomatoes were being plucked thick and fast, my mother would celebrate by buying a swine’s worth of bacon and we would eat nothing but bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches until the first day of school.

But nudity and tilling the soil did not mix. We were serious Catholics, and while Catholics have many holidays, or as the Church so jovially calls them, Holy Days, that are unknown to other denominations, World Naked Gardening Day was not among them. In fact, Catholics back then had added an 11th Commandment to the original roster, and that commandment was:

Thou shalt not see anybody else naked, nor shalt anyone see you naked.

We followed this rule because we knew the alternative was an eternity in Hell, even as, at one point, there were eight of us living in a house with two bedrooms and one bath, which made Hell look a little more tolerable. I don’t know how old I was when I realized most people don’t go into the bathroom or the closet to change their clothes. Sometime between when I started shaving and my honeymoon night is as close as I can come to pinning it down.

It’s rainy and miserable here in Philly, as it so often is here until at least the middle of June, when it gets rainy and hot, so I don’t know if World Naked Gardening Day is ever going to catch on here. And when I get back home to celebrate, there’s not all that much to do—after a failed attempt to plant our condo yard in Korean Grass some years back, we had every inch of it covered in easy-to-cultivate river rock, so the only gardening chore I really have to do on World Naked Gardening Day is spraying weed killer on anything that dares spring up between the stones.

That’s easy enough to do in the dark.

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Mormons Are Addicted to Porn

4/25/2016

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Utah has declared porn a public health crisis. The resolution was passed unanimously by the porn warriors of the Utah Legislature and signed into law by Utah’s governor. State Senator Todd Weiler, the author of the measure, maintains that the bill “is not a ban on porn or an attack on masturbation.”

This is political wisdom, because estimates of porn viewing and masturbation per capita in the Beehive State range as high as every person in it. For certain every male person. Doubly certain every legislator. In fact, the act of operating a legislature has often been compared to masturbation, in terms of actual significant achievements accomplished during a typical session.

The legislation was inspired by the Mormon Church, which views “porn addiction” as a plague that is destroying society. How do you become a porn addict? Just watch porn once (and presumably polish your bayonet while doing so) and you are a full-fledged porn junkie, according to the Latter Day Saints, comparable to a meth head or a heroin addict, except your habit doesn’t cost money, lead to crime or destroy your health. There are actual porn rehabs in Utah, where the faithful can go to get the porn monkey off their backs. The Twelve Steps to Recovery promoted by Alcoholics Anonymous have been condensed for Wankers Anonymous to one:

Keep your pants on while sitting at your computer.

The state legislature of Utah was no doubt inspired by the Republicans of Congress, who are themselves embroiled in a titanic struggle to keep Planned Parenthood from selling baby parts, which Planned Parenthood doesn’t do.

All the evidence that PP sells baby bits consists of one video faked up by a guy who is now under indictment for it. That didn't stop Republicans in Congress from forming a committee last October to investigate it. How long will it be before Congress stops investigating something that didn’t happen? The answer is, not yet.

The anger at Planned Parenthood selling baby parts grows every day it becomes more obvious that they’ve never sold baby parts, and that rage at something that never happened is being stoked by Committee Chairperson Marsha Blackburn, previously mentioned here for challenging President Obama to a skeet-shooting contest, who knows that if you are not intensely concerned with at least one nonexistent problem, you are not a real American and might as well join ISIS.

There are Democrats on the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives. They want to quit and go home, but Marsha won’t let them. Why? “She’s a fucktard,” one of the Democrats explained.

In the meantime, abortion remains legal, but many people, mostly Republicans, want to make it illegal again, except in the cases of pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger.

Or if you’re really, really worried your unborn child will grow up to be a porn addict.

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Arguing About Women Far Safer Than Arguing with Them

6/18/2014

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The awards season is drawing to a close, and those few of you concerned with prizes named after guys like Pulitzer and Nobel still have to admit that you were glued to your TV screens over the weekend when Spike TV announced its winners in the Hotness category of its Guys' Choice Awards. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of hotness for women, hotness can be simply defined: it's that quality a woman possesses which makes a guy want to perform the solitary sin while viewing her image.

The winners were Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johanssen, Brooklyn Decker andJessica Biel. You can click on each of their names to view the results of an image search for each. I overcame my usual disdain for research in order for you to have access to the facts here. You're welcome.

Jessica Biel was awarded The Holy Grail of Hotness. Strangely enough, the three most recent cover girls of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue were also awarded the Holy Grail of Hotness, making at least four Girls of the Grail.

The Huffpo article which first drew my attention to the Hotness Awards is followed by 120 comments, most of which sneer at one of the winners at the expense of the others in the true manner of guys who, no matter what their physical qualities, fashion taste, or the months or years of sexual deprivation they have endured, feel entitled to make aesthetic judgments about women who are not going to favor them with anything more than a blank stare in the unlikely event they ever meet.

Partisans of women who were left off the Hotness list are crying foul here as well. To them I say, be at peace. Guys are still logging on to images of Jessica Alba and Kate Upton anyway and succumbing to the urge to slap the bishop when they do, despite both these legendary hotties falling short of the top rank on Spike.

The advantage of having an Internet argument about women is that you don't even have to pull up your pants before you can start enjoying it. However, it doesn't compare to a live argument in a sports bar or a living room full of empty beverage containers, where a disagreement about which supermodel who will spend her entire life ignoring you is hotter than the next can turn on a dime into an argument about which hockey team has enough Russians on it to be a champion.

Guys love to argue. Some are better at it than others, having mastered the three steps of winning any man-to-man argument: 1: Yell. 2: Bully. 3: Accuse your opponent of having a vagina. These men terrorize anyone with more nuanced opinions. Admire their skill. Know that they have spent hours yelling in the mirror. They consume nothing but beer and nachos, the preferred training diet for professional arguers.

Those of us who have given up arguing, which is most of us who actually have women, occasionally escape to a bar just to watch the pros in action. A good loudmouth can cow an entire tavern into agreeing that the Oakland Raiders are the finest football team in the land, or that Ginger is actually more desirable than Mary Ann, opinions that few American men really hold, although I for one agree with the Ginger premise. Then we retire home, to that cozy place where being wrong in any controversy means hours of ugly silence followed by abject apology followed by laundry-doing or closet-cleaning-outing or some other penitential chore.

And being right is even worse.

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British Caught Looking at Al Qaeda Naked Selfies

3/3/2014

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In another bombshell dropped by Ed "No Place Like Moscow in the Winter" Snowden, it has been revealed that a British intelligence service has been monitoring worldwide Yahoo! Messenger webcam feeds to make sure terrorists aren't using Yahoo! for their communications.

As a consequence of this surveillance program, the British spooks have found out that people send naked images to each other over the Internet. The entire Western intelligence community has been sent reeling over this shocking discovery.

"Why do we bother protecting this perverts from jihadists in the first place?" asked one senior analyst, who declined to give his name. "We estimate that of all the Web cam feeds we secretly monitor,up to 11% consist of nude images. Roughly ten percent of the human race is wanking at any given time."

When informed by this column that that percentage seemed about right, the anonymous source snorted "They all deserve to have a truck bomb parked up their keisters, then."

"Not so fast," said another senior spy, who struck this observer as pale, slightly dehydrated and suffering so much from lack of sleep that one of his hands was visibly trembling. "It's our duty to protect all these luscious young girls and splendidly gifted male innocents from terrorist violence. The right to send images of one's intimate bodily parts over the Internet is what the Western world has come to stand for. Look at this one, for example. I can see you're thinking the same thing I am--My God, what a honey! Fortunately, our secret spy algorithms enable us to locate an IP address physically in mere seconds. I'm planning to spend the next several weeks protecting this dewy-skinned citizen from the frightening designs that Hezbollah has on lush blonde babes aching for the fulfillment only a man can give them. Got to go."

A third spymaster advocated a more evenhanded approach. "Look, we do have operatives who get queasy looking at scads of naked pics. And we have others who right away see in them great opportunities for political blackmail and extortion, because that's the way we secret agents like to roll. But we can't stop looking. If Al Qaeda found out we weren't looking at nude webcam feeds anymore, they would be free to communicate via them, maybe by scribbling terrorist plans on their naked genitals and showing them to each other, or shaving maps of the locations of future suicide bomb attacks into their back hair.

"It's all part of protecting our civilization, so when you're getting naked with your computer and someone else who's getting naked with their computer, just remember you may be getting a British government employee a little bothered and dry-mouthed as well. He or she is just doing their job. And by the way, those questionable pictures of the Queen and her corgi HAVE DEFINITELY BEEN PHOTOSHOPPED!

"And that's all you need to know about that."

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Keeping It in your Pants is So Last Century

7/31/2013

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Ugly guy+nice penis=He wants to show it to you. ASAP

Last week was a huge week for guys exposing themselves. The nation's most politically prominent exhibitionist and candidate for mayor of NYC, Anthony Weiner, once again was busted for capturing his essence in pixels and then Tweeting it to a romantic cyber-partner.

"This guy is just an incredible p*ckerhead," America thought to itself. "He's already lost his job as a Congressman for putting pictures of Little Anthony on the Internet. People were ready to let him be Mayor anyway, but now he's done it again. I mean, we all know guys that can't keep it in their pants, but at least they know better than to take a picture of it every time it pops out."

Legitimate criticism, sure, but consider this—Weiner just can't help himself. He is merely following the Social Law of Penis Size, which states that the timing and frequency of a man's revealing his penis size is in inverse proportion to his physical attractiveness, assuming the size of the penis is noteworthy. To illustrate:

Handsome, indifferent-looking and unattractive men with unexceptional penises—the penis is seldom mentioned.

Handsome guy with a big one—you'll hear about it on the first date.

Indifferent-looking guy with a big one—you'll hear about it in the first five minutes of the first date.

Butt-ugly guy with a boa constrictor in his BVD's--it's printed on his business card.

Or Tweeted to the world. That's Weiner's problem. Or consider this: Since the invention of the camera phone and the possession of one by everybody over the age of six, every teenager in the US has sent a picture of his or her genitals to some other teenager, which technically makes every single one of them simultaneously a producer, a distributor and a victim of child pornography. Weiner's just courting the youth vote.

Weiner's man-lumber did not stand alone last week, however. A Subway employee gained some viral notoriety by posting a picture of himself rubbing his guy gear on a freshly-baked Subway roll. This column has complained previously that Subway rolls don't taste like anything, but that is not the solution the writer had in mind. This Subway person could have plunged his male essence into the mayo for its fifteen minutes. He could have wrapped his bro bone in little Subway cheese triangles. But no; he chose to massage the taste of his package into the one item that has to be on a Subway sandwich—the roll.

Subway fired him, rather than change their corporate slogan from "Eat Fresh" to "Eat Me."

Still another man-unit in the news belonged to Lucien Greaves, who placed the essence of his dudeness on the tombstone of the deceased mother of the head of the Westboro Baptist Church, which tombstone is located in Lauderdale, Mississippi, as part of a "pink mass" which Greaves and his fellow Satanists, who all hail from New York, claim will turn that woman gay in the afterlife. This could be regarded as a favor, if it is in fact ontologically possible; eternity is a long time and switching up sexualities is bound to pass some of it.

The local cops in Lauderdale aren't thinking theologically, however; they've issued an arrest warrant for Lucien for indecent exposure. He's escaped back to New York ahead of the law and the extradition of him and the leading citizen of his trousers back to Mississippi is considered unlikely. The authorities in Mississippi are said to merely wish to discourage copycat crimes, apparently afraid that every hipster in Brooklyn would otherwise now want to make a pilgrimage south to desecrate a Dixie grave-marker by waving his man-wand over it.

Speaking of Brooklyn, that is where our final briefly famous dipstick hails from. They had a "Brooklyn's Smallest Penis" contest, and somebody actually came. And won. Nick Gilronan took home the bragging rights, such as they are, selfishly ignoring, in the glow of his sudden celebrity, the likelihood that the guy who really has the most microscopic man-worm in that borough probably never even heard of the contest. That guy spends every night at home, snorting fat lines of raw Enzyte off his glass-topped coffee table while scouring the Internet for some pneumatic device that will magnify him to the size of Nick Gilronan.

And he's not voting for Weiner.

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Where's My Hooters Calendar?

5/6/2013

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I must have permission to use this picture-- Hooters emailed it to me

I had it right here. I got it the other day while I was at the ballpark with my Significant Other, who insisted I sign up for the Hooters' emailing list in order to obtain it. The Hooters girls had themselves a nice booth and some nice push-up bras and were encouraging passing baseball fans to grab an eyeful and a calendar while they signed you up for their list.

At least I'm still on that, or, to put it precisely, I remain a member of the Hoot Club. Every week they send me invitations to Hooters Events, and there are quite a few, most of them wing-centric. I've been invited to the West Coast Hooters Swimsuit Pageant, which is going to be held in Santa Ana, only a hundred miles of choking, crawling traffic jams away from where I live. As a reward for going and paying to ogle young girls in bikinis who wouldn't touch me under any roofie-free circumstances, I get five free wings.

Or I could meet Shawna, Hooters May Girl of the month. For that I get ten free wings. Apparently Hooters is feeling a little insecure about her. Couldn't say why.

Since north of here we're having one of our nice all-consuming California wildfires this weekend, Hooters emailed me notice that they are jumping on that bandwagon by giving everyone affected by the fire five free wings. That's right—as you drive away from the advancing flames while watching them consume all of your personal treasures in the rear-view mirror, you are supposed to think "Oh, boy—five free wings, here we come!"

Those Hooters execs aren't ashamed to market. No, they are not.

But my calendar is gone. It was sitting on the dining table in my special lady's house. I barely glanced at it, because my girlfriend and I have strict standards we hold each other to regarding ocular admiration of attractive young members of the opposite sex. I am allowed to look at young women in revealing clothes through my sunglasses as long as I merely shift the focus of my eyeballs and don't actually turn my head to do so. She is permitted to frankly stare at any attractive male for as long as she wants, and even mutter something like "yeah, baby," under her breath if she really likes what she sees. She was ogling a bare-chested jogger so unmercifully the other day from the car that I offered to swing around the block again so she could take a picture of the guy with her cell phone. She checked her watch and decided we didn't have time.

The calendar stayed on the table for a few days. I suggested hanging it up in her office, where I frequently work. She said "You're not hanging that thing up in my house!" in a tone of voice as decisive as a drone strike and not much quieter, either. "Hang it up in your house."

I failed to pack it, however, and then I made the mistake of opening it. I swear this was because I only wanted to find out what day of the month Memorial Day fell on this year and we didn't have any other calendars with the holidays marked on them in the place.

No sooner had the plastic wrap been peeled off of it than it disappeared. She decided that her graduate assistant needed the calendar more than me. She suspects him of having a less than completely successful love life, and apparently feels that a girlie calendar would help.

Me, I'm taking the guy out to Hooters and letting him have my five free wings. Wings aren't my favorite things. I don't dislike them; I just feel that, like crab legs, they are more trouble than they are worth. I prefer something meatier. I'll have a cold beer and think what I always think when confronted by a plate of Hooter's wings, which is, Doesn't anybody around here ever think about breasts?

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The Naked and the Royal

9/19/2012

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Kate wearing punishment hat

It has been a difficult month for the British royal family, with the Queen's corgi dying and most of its interesting members being photographed naked.

The dog's death was not unexpected. A new puppy was immediately presented to the monarch and witnesses reported that they could see a steely glint in the Queen's octogenarian eyes as she silently resolved to outlive that creature as well.

"It's the same way she looks at Prince Charles," the sources said.

The younger members of the family were busy being photographed without their clothes on. Prince Harry plunged naked into a swimming pool in Las Vegas and a half-dozen or so naked girls jumped in with him. Photos were taken of the whole naked affair.

I wish I had this effect on girls. When I jump naked into a swimming pool, no girls strip off their clothes and jump in with me. All I get are threats to call the police and invitations to leave, along with very forceful suggestions that I get my own swimming pool.

Prince Harry was shipped off to Afghanistan as punsihment, where the Taliban promptly promised to kill him, as the Quran apparently orders death for skinny-dipping. This is why most members of the Taliban look like they have never completely submerged their bodies in water in their entire lives.

Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, the future King's main squeeze, was photographed being topless in France. Kate was not bounding in and out of a swimming pool; these photos were taken at a satellite-like distance by a member of the paparazzi. France, if you are not familiar with it, is where British people go to experience nice weather. All French women take their tops off at the first glint of sunshine. That is why the British are scandalized by Kate; not because she was frolicking nude with her husband, but because she was acting like she was French.

As punishment, the Queen is making her wear a hat specifically designed to attract insects (see above).

The question is, why would anyone want to check out the royal set, as opposed to lingering over any other image of mammaries? Because if there's one thing you can find on the Internet, it's boobs. Run any search for any dignified or slang term for breasts—bust, rack, tits, teats, knobs, funbags, gazooms, hooters (you may also get a menu with that one) and you will get more hits than you can possibly check out in a lifetime. And not a corgi lifetime, either. If you really have time on your hands, add an adjective (big, augmented, small, black, teenage, Swedish, ginormous) and the images will multiply exponentially. This is due to the First Law of the Cyber-Age, which has been noted here before, and which is as follows:

ALL NAKED PICTURES WILL EVENTUALLY END UP ON THE INTERNET.

This law is retroactive to prehistory. If you don't believe me, check out the link here.

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These Skanks Are Made For Walking

6/22/2012

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The blissful reality couple

This writer's world was rocked to its foundations last week when Cosmo magazine called reality TV star Coco a "skank."

The respected publication, the cover of which I often peruse while standing in line at the supermarket, mostly because it almost always features a picture of an attractive celebrity woman with her clothes about to fall off, but also because of the intriguing blurbs about the articles inside. These articles are often titled similarly, with cover teasers like "The Ten Things Your Man Wants You to Do in Bed," or "Ten Tricks Guaranteed to Drive Him Wild." or "Ten Sure-Fire Techniques to Make Him Beg, Weep and Moan."

That's thirty potential research projects. I point them out to my Significant Other, a respected academic, when we shop together, but she still refuses to buy Cosmo, or have it bought for her.

Cosmo coming after Coco with its claws out made me wonder who exactly Coco was. It turns out she is the extravagantly-breasted wife of rapper-turned-lead-faced TV actor Ice T. Ice T. has a recurring role on Law and Order: SUV, which follows a police unit that specializes in crimes committed in sport-utility vehicles.

Or so I assume, because I don't watch either show. I don't watch reality TV except in passing and I don't watch any Law and Order episode unless Lenny is in it. Cosmo called Coco out because she was wearing ultra-tight clothes to walk her dog. I clicked on Coco's Web page and noticed on her picture there she was not wearing anything, except a tiny silver chain up her magnificently curved buttocks and another one around her amplified mammaries. And when I say "tiny chain," I mean a chain so tiny a moody gerbil could bust right through it.

What is a skank? you may ask me, right before you Google it to make sure I am correct. To me, a skank is an uncultured woman, possibly with addiction problems, whose intimate parts may be compromised by one or more untreated infections. This is a harsh characterization of a person merely wearing a tight shirt over her glamour globes. In defense of Coco, I think it would be fair to say that any garments smaller than the parachutes that fly out of the end of the space shuttle as it lands might appear tight on her.

Cosmo, from the looks of its covers, must ordinarily approve of the way Coco dresses, so the aesthetic being promoted by the magazine is Don't dress like a cheap skank! Dress like a very expensive prostitute!

It may be that Cosmo is failing to keep abreast of the times here, as unlikely as that may seem to be, what with the number of "slut walks," and "slut parades," being organized both here and abroad as occasions for women to protest every offense against them from rape to being told what to wear. Can the "skank walk" be far behind?

It's almost worth moving to a trailer park to find out.

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The Complete Guide to Computer Dating, Part V...Moderating on the Cupe

2/16/2011

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A flagged photo on OkCupid

Disclaimer: My reader noted I'd quit posting the disclaimer. Just got tired of pasting it here. If you need a disclaimer, read below.

Miraculously, about a month ago, the free dating site OKCupid asked me to be a "moderator" for them. Let me emphasize that I did not ask for this position. It just came to me on the wings of serendipity right after I decided to write the Complete Guide to Computer Dating.

I favor computer dating, as I have made plain. It is not however, for the thin-skinned or easily disturbed. The free sites have a significant number of users who are not taking the opportunity to find love here entirely seriously. If you cannot abide by the assortment of trolls, exhibitionists, spammers, cam girls. flim-flam artists and plain bonk-ass loonies who may contact you on the Cupe or POF, go to one of the pay sites, where they are less common. Being a moderator on the Cupe means you get to examine questionable profiles, pictures or messages and then, along with your fellow moderators, or "mods" as we refer to ourselves rakishly, vote to delete the questionable item or decide that it doesn't offend sufficiently to merit deletion.

In order to come to our attention, an item on the site has to be "flagged." The people who do this are known as "flaggers." There is a button next to every picture, profile and message on the site that says "Report This." There is a little icon of a red flag next to it. If a user hits that button, I get to see the item.

Remember, any user can block any other user in the computer dating world, if they are being unpleasant, and never have to deal with them again. Flagging is for offenses that the flagger regards as so egregious, the offender should be removed from the site. Except for some flaggers, who seem to think by clicking the flag button, they are sending a message to the flaggee. We get messages like "You're hot" or "Nice butt" all the time. This is true of me, of course, but obviously not meant for me.

Individuals who make this mistake are referred to by the moderator community as "flagtards."

OKCupid has guidelines for we mods. Some of them are precise. "Full nudity" is prohibited in pictures, for example. I follow this rule, even though the Internet abounds with full nudity and outright porn. It is a little known fact that Al Gore, after inventing the Internet, waited only fifteen minutes to post a nude picture of himself on it. For further documentation of the Net's sex drive, you may review this video from the musical "Avenue Q."

The definition of "full nudity" seems simple to me, but it is not to the flaggers, or even some of the other mods. See the flagged pic here. The flagger says of it that "It belongs on a lesbian site."

Well, so do I, but I'm not qualified. Regardless of her orientation, the lady in the photo is not fully nude. There are far more revealing pictures on the Sports Illustrated web site. Am I the only one looking at them who is not a lesbian? People also flag pics of women in g-string underwear or see-through bras. You may not like g-string underwear or see-through bras, but if you find yourself wearing one or both anyway, you are not fully nude. Amazingly, some of my fellow mods will vote to delete them nonetheless. Repressing sexuality is still a spectator sport here in the US.

There are people who do put nude pictures of themselves on the site. Most of these include an erection. I vote to delete them. Some of them are just an erection. I delete those as well, even though a picture of just your schlong may not be "full" nudity. Very occasionally women will post nude pictures of themselves. I'll delete them, too. I don't let my appreciation for naked women interfere with my personal integrity. At least, not any more. At the very least, not that often.

The Cupe has a rule that pictures must be of the user. Users put pictures of their cats, dogs and kids up and they are against the rules of the Cupe. I always vote to leave them alone, as long as the user has actual pictures of themselves as well. I'm not big on following inane rules, but many of my fellow mods are, and they don't mind making up their own, either. They vote to delete anything anyone complains about. Denied the opportunity to become true oppressors like concentration camp guards or vile small-town cops by history or circumstance, they seize the tidbit of authority that moderating at the Cupe gives them and wield it like the hammer of Thor, crushing the bits of free expression the lovelorn post like milkweed in sidewalk cracks.

Others are cool like me. We call the right wingers "modtards."

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