Please dial carefully

Posted by Bob Weber on Dec 10th, 2008 in Humor, Sex & Dating | 0 comments

18 year old Elizabeth Frisinger was having a great time on a class trip, right up until she sent a text to the wrong person.

Funniest personal Ad EVER!

Posted by Bob Weber on Mar 24th, 2008 in Humor, Sex & Dating | 0 comments

So I’m not sure if there are any copyright issues in posting a Craigslist ad to my blog. If this is a problem for the copyright holder, please let me know and I’ll take it down.

UPDATE: Got permission from the author, so I should be OK

That said, this is, by far, one of the most amusing personal ads I’ve ever read. Hopefully the individual who wrote it isn’t as down on her luck as it sounds, I might feel bad about saying her advertisement is funny. If she is down on her luck, I would recommend starting a blog. If you work hard, post a lot, and write with this level of quality, you can probably make $2-$3 a month from Google Ads – enough to keep you in Ramen…

In an effort to appease my best friend I am finaly posting a personal ad on Craigslist. I have tried explaining to her that I don’t currently have a whole lot to offer a potential mate. She scoffs and informs me that I am a great person and that I should at least make an effort. Here it is. This is my effort:

I am an unemployed single female seeking a fun guy for friendship and maybe more. I don’t want to feel like a leech, desperately clinging to a guy with a fancy schmancy office job (complete with health insurance!) because he can pay for things. I want an equal. A true partner. Being unemployed and broke together as opposed to apart will probably help to boost our self-esteem.

Don’t worry about taking me anywhere fancy on our first date. I completely understand that the best you can do is inviting me to your studio apartment for some Ramen. I won’t mind at all that we sit on orange crates and that an empty cable spool is our table. I will gladly stand on one foot with one foil wrapped hand tightly gripping your television antenna as my other arm reaches towards the window so that we can watch a very scratchy Simpsons rerun. I totally understand that you can’t afford cable right now. Don’t worry, I can’t either!

If things go well, perhaps we’ll have a second date. This time, you can come over to my place. Don’t get any ideas though. Remember, niether one of us can afford condoms. I’ll make you Ramen and after we’re done eating we can search under my couch cushions for change. Maybe we’ll come up with enough to buy a piece of gum from the gas station across the street. We’ll have to split it though, because I’m not sure that there is enough change for two double bubbles in my couch.

Don’t worry about running out of activities just because we’re both broke and unemployed. There are plenty of things that we can do together that don’t cost any money at all:

- Use my neighbor’s internet connection to cruise craiglist’s “free stuff” for items that we might be able to sell on ebay.
- Steal toilet paper from public restrooms when we can’t afford to buy any.
- Go for walks.
- Go for more walks.
- Have competitions to see who lost the most weight last week when they couldn’t afford any food.
- Offer to clean people’s windshield’s at gas stations for the tip.
- I’m sure you can think of even more!!!

About two weeks before the end of every month I will expect you to sit on street corners with me as I pathetically attempt to make up rent money buy “playing” the guitar. (If you actually know how to play the guitar, I’ll definitely write you back!)

If you happen to get a job while I am still unemployed, don’t worry. It will be quick and painless to break up with me. I’ll feel really crappy about no longer being equal to you and in order to cheer me up you can take me out for a few drinks. Due to the lack of food in my stomach, it will only take about two beers for me to get completely shit-faced and start crying about how I don’t want to lose you to your co-workers and asking “who will sit with me on street corners now!?” While I am in this dependent and pathetic state you can take me back to my apartment and finally sleep with me (using the condoms you just bought with your first paycheck). Slip out the door after I pass out and never call me again.

I won’t try to call you back. After all, by then my phone will have been completely shut off due to lack of payment.

All I ask is that if you ever see me on the street corner, still trying to figure out how to play my guitar, leave a dollar in my hat.

I am eager and excited to find my new (albeit temporary) partner!

Divorce rates fall – due to fewer marriages

Posted by Bob Weber on May 23rd, 2007 in Sex & Dating | 0 comments

Looks like divorce rates are down, but not for the right reasons.
Time has an article discussing the divorce rate and the corresponding lower number of marriages.

Adults these days, products of broken homes, are chosing to cohabitate rather than get hitched. This corresponds to fewer marriages and fewer divorces per capita (not per marriage).

One interesting point made in the article was this

Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., says divorces are dropping in the college-educated sector because many spouses “are learning how to negotiate marriages based on less rigid gender roles than in the past.”

“College-educated wives are more likely to work than less-educated wives, and a recent study found that unlike the past, a wife’s work now tends to stabilize marriage,” she said.

Contrary to Coontz comments, college-educated mothers are choosing a more traditional gender role by staying at home with their children. Enough mothers are leaving their careers that it is causing some concern in feminist circles.

The debate is being fueled by “Vanity Fair” contributing editor Leslie Bennetts, who argues women face “tremendous dangers” by giving up financial autonomy to stay home with children, in her book “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?” (Voice, $24.95).

The latest statistics show the percentage of working mothers with infants and toddlers has declined, albeit slightly, starting in the late ’90s — something Bennetts doesn’t see as a good thing for women. Married and in her 50s, with two teenagers, Bennetts says she is sounding an alarm for Generation X and Y mothers who she believes are living a fantasy that their lives will never be disrupted by divorce, unemployment or the death of a partner. If something bad happens, she said, these once-business-oriented stay-at-home moms think they can just jump back into the work force with little effort.

“I think women have been sold a bill of goods, and the media is partly to blame,” she said. “There are innumerable stories about the stresses of the juggling act. And then the stories about opting out. That’s only half the picture. It doesn’t talk about opting back in.”

Makes me wonder what the actual cause of our divorce rate is, what can be done about it and if the institution of marriage is ultimately doomed. I remember, as a kid, watching Sci-Fi movies depicting a future with a strange communal living environment. Now I’m beginning to wonder if that might actually happen…

Texas Judge dismisses MySpace case

Posted by Bob Weber on Mar 7th, 2007 in Government Waste, Our Changing World, Personal, Sex & Dating | Comments Off

Just found this, but back in February a Federal Judge in Texas dismissed a suit against MySpace. The lawsuit was brought by the mother of a 14 year old girl who lied about her age on MySpace, made a date with a 19 year old and was assaulted while on the date. They alleged that MySpace should have done more to make sure the 14 year old was who she said she was.

Sparks' decision to dismiss the lawsuit was based mainly on the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which exempted websites and Internet service providers from responsibility for what their users said online. The law also states that those providers can't be held liable for adopting imperfect protections against indecent or harmful content — a provision aimed at encouraging sites to do the best they could to safeguard users. To its credit, MySpace has taken several steps to guard against sexual predators, such as limiting the contact between adults and users who say they are younger than 16 years old. It is also lobbying state legislatures and Congress to require convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, and it plans to unveil software that could help parents see how their children are identifying themselves on MySpace.

This relates closely to my recent post about adult websites. A website should not be held accountable when an unsupervised underage minor is exposed to unacceptable content, especially if they lie about their age.

In related news, the Connecticut legislature has take the opposite approach.

Connecticut lawmakers unveiled legislation Wednesday that would require MySpace.com and other social-networking sites to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can post profiles.

It will be interesting to see how much time and money is wasted in court due to this law…

Internet Porn

Posted by Bob Weber on Feb 25th, 2007 in Ideological Misconceptions, Sex & Dating, Tech | 1 comment

Kelly over at A Yoga Coffee Outlook posted a comment about an initiative to ask Adult websites to require a password-protected login before allowing even free access to explicit adult content.

Kelly's response is quite insightful and an opinion that I agree with completely. To expound on her point of view, to address some misconceptions about the Internet and generally express my personal irritation with using the “what about the children?” argument to intrude on our constitutional rights, there some points I would like to make.

Internet regulation is extremely difficult and expensive to enforce.

The Internet is a global phenomenon. Many sites are run from outside the United States. Laws regulating content not only violate 1st Amendment free speech rights of US citizens, but also require cooperation from other governments if the violating sites are run from severs on foriegn soil. Efforts such as these (or other regulations on things like file shareing and online gambling), if put into law, are phenomenally difficult to enforce and defend in the courts.

Porn is an economic driver of technology.

Since the inception of the Internet, adult sites have been one of the primar

y ways to monetize the technology. Online Pornography, like it or not, is a very lucrative business. If their current practice of allowing free viewing is a effective marketing technique (which we must assume it is) there is no motivation for the sites to voluntarily require passwords to view free content. This being the case any initiative is doomed to failure.

There is no central authorizing body.

There is no central repository of personal information that can be accessed to verify a person's age. As such there is no way for any site to verify that a visitor is over the age of 18 and eligible to view free content. Most sites with adult content make an effort to validate their viewer's age, but without making the visitor jump through hoops (which again, the industry is not motivated to do) and collecting credit card or other information, there is no easy way to confirm the visitor is of legal age. If 'password protection' was enabled it would probably be extremely easy to circumvent, especially for a teenager that has grown up in the current technological environment.

The burden of responsibilty for protecting children must rest squarely on a parent's shoulders, not on the benevolence of an adult website provider or on the government.