This Weekend's Blogging Has an Unexpected Theme

And that is the mammalian development of the human female, since today was Go Topless Day, a holiday I would have been happy to mention ahead of time if I'd heard of it ahead of time.

I'm sad to see that Go Topless Day is a subsidiary of the mildly loony Raelians (a UFO cult, though one of the nice ones); toplessness is much too important to be left to religious nuts of whatever persuasion. But, hey, everyone's religion started as a disreputable cult off in the hinterlands somewhere, so perhaps I shouldn't judge.

If you celebrated today's holiday, good for you. If not, there's always next year.

The Things You Find When You're Not Looking For Them

This morning I stumbled across the website for The Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Appreciation Society, which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of New Yorkers (mostly young and female, from the pictures) who have been getting together for at least the past two summers to read Hard Case Crime and similarly noirish stuff, usually in Central Park, with their tops off. (There also seems to be a connected series of read-ins on the roof deck of some building, where full nudity is allowed.)

Yes, there are pictures, and many of those pictures will not be safe for work. That seems to be the point of it: it's more "look at us having fun reading and tanning with no shirts on" than "and here's what we thought of these books." I've chosen one tame image to put here, to illustrate the concept. (If anyone from OCTPAS comes by and wants me to remove it, my e-mail is in the right sidebar.) I'm also happy to see the focus is clearly entirely on the fact that they think this is a fun thing to do, and not on wanting people to look at them. (There's plenty of the other on the Internet already, of course.)

I was hoping for book criticism, but tits are pretty darn nice, too. I never want to be someone who complains about tits; that would be sad. But it would be swell if those readers wrote a tad more about what they read, particularly the ones that multiple topless readers enjoyed -- because that could make a completely wonderful back-of-book blurb.

Still, this is an activity that should be encouraged. Well, both of them: reading and public toplessness. Not necessarily together, I suppose, but there is a lovely chocolate-and-peanut-butter piquancy to the combination. The world turns out to be a little more interesting and exciting than I thought it was when I got up this morning.

Lust by Ellen Forney

Like many papers, Seattle's weekly -- I think I'm supposed to say "alternative weekly," though there's no established industry of stodgy weeklies for those alt-weeklies to be the alternative to -- The Stranger has personal ads, in which its lovelorn or just horny readers try to find each other for mutually beneficial activities. Unlike other papers, though, The Stranger has Ellen Forney (cartoonist and teacher of cartooning, author of Monkey Food, which I just realized I read and reviewed a couple of years back) illustrating one of those ads -- from the LustLab section, where strangers anatomize in explicit detail their sexual needs and wants to find just the perfect kinky partner -- every week.

Lust collects a whole bunch of those ads, along with five interviews that Forney did with some ad-writers. And I will warn you: a number of the ads and folks in here are certainly kinkier than you are, no matter how kinky you are -- kink isn't a linear spectrum, and there are folks here off in various directions, seeking their very particular nirvana. Assuming you can handle the idea of other people having sex in ways you don't think you would enjoy, Lust is cute and fun -- each of Forney's illustrations is like a little advertisement or calling card (like those cards that used to paper London) for that person's desires, with a clean, illustrative style that varies a lot for the different pieces.