This Is Halloween

You may have noticed yesterday that Fosco wasn't quite in the Halloween spirit. Well, last night he realized why: he had forgotten to get out his Nightmare Before Christmas figurines!

In the background, we have Oogie Boogie's Boys and in front (and sadly out-of-scale), there is Jack Skellington driving a toy car.

Other Halloween news: if you hate the trend among women of dressing sexily and pretending that's a costume, then you should listen to this song by the delightful Jill Sobule (remember when she started the whole lesbian fad when she kissed a girl?). The name of Jill's new song is "Women Whose Halloween Costume Is Just That They're Slutty" and I'm glad someone (besides Fosco) noticed this.

In fact, just last week, Fosco's sister was telling him about one of her classmates. The classmate is a very intelligent and ambitious young woman who knows her literary theory cold (and who is not afraid to make this clear in class). She's a self-assured (maybe even arrogant) and well-educated young woman. And yet, she told my sister that she always dresses up for Halloween as one of two things: a Playboy bunny or Tinkerbell. Now Fosco would never deny that intelligent women cannot be sexy (or should not be sexy), but he is uncomfortable with these women choosing to dress as caricatures of sexual availability. Doesn't this seem like a problem?

Happy Anniversary!

Fosco Lives! has been around now for exactly six months. As Fosco is a homosexual and therefore unable to be trusted with that most sacred of bonds (i.e., marriage), he isn't quite sure of the appropriate etiquette for celebrating a six month anniversary. Is fellatio involved? I sure hope so.

Or perhaps a brief post about the tiny (yet non-zero) impact that Fosco Lives! has had on the blogosphere in the last six months. How about that?

Most Popular Post: the all-time most popular post on Fosco Lives! is Fosco's meditation on Playboy's "Girls of the Big 12" pictorial. Read it here. Why has it been so popular? Several reasons:

• Composer John Mackey linked to it from his blog and recommended it to his numerous loyal readers.
  
• For a month after the publication of that Playboy issue, it got a hit a day from .edu domains in Texas and Oklahoma searching for "Playboy" and "Girls of the Big 12."
  
• At least once a week, this post gets a hit from someone searching for Tasia Bauman (NSFW). Clearly, websurfers want to see more naked cowgirls (or at least this one). It's fun to watch the domains from which these searches are conducted: the US State Department (could it have been lesbian Condi?), gillette.com, and (interestingly) quakeroats.com. Do you think Quaker is looking to replace spokesgrampa Wilford Brimley with some sort of nude rodeo? Signs point to yes.
  
• Even now, aat least once a day, this post gets a hit from someone who is searching Google for the phrase "shaved pubes." The strange thing is that, much of the time, the searcher actually clicks through to this post and reads at least a portion of it. Most of these searches come from foreign domains, which maybe sort of explains it. But, I have to ask: is it really so hard to find shaved pubes on the internet? Isn't there an easier way than to route through this page? I love the traffic and all, but jeez... Who doesn't know where to find shaved pubes online? Ten-year-olds?

Best Press: Fosco's post on Gay American and former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey (yes, that is his official portrait above). Read it here. The day that McGreevey's tell-all book came out (snicker), AOL Cityguide featured a link to Fosco's post on both its "North Jersey" and "Washington DC" pages. See screen cap below:



That "Sexy Back?" link takes you right to moi. Well, I thought it was cool.

Most Validating: Fosco's review of a Diamanda Galas concert in Santa Cruz (which you can read here). The review got picked up by the official Diamanda Galas website and is prominently featured in the Press page on that site. Now if only I can get Matthew Barney to read some of my reviews of his work...

Hungriest Readers: for several weeks last summer, Fosco was eating at San Francisco restaurants recommended by perpetually chirpy chefette Rachael Ray. Read Fosco's reviews of Chow and Bocadillos. Fosco's reviews were included in the weekly "RR Roundup" conducted by the surprisingly charming blog Everything Rachael Ray. For those two weeks, Fosco got an interesting mix of new readers and he enjoyed the chance to scandalize Rachael Ray lovers with references to Lindsay Lohan's vagina.

That's probably enough self-congratulation for now, so allow me to say "Thank You" to all of you who read Fosco Lives! You have made the first six months a hoot and I look forward to the next six.

"Mom, Dad, I shaved off my pubic hair!"

When Fosco was in college, Playboy did a pictorial feature of the "Girls of the Ivy League." My organic chemistry lab partner ended up being one of the two featured models from the Big H (and she's a doctor now). One day I ran into her in the Science Center and she crowed the news (and showed me the polaroids from her session). I never quite understood why she wanted to do it (and her quotes in this Crimson article make it seem even more confusing--posing nude isn't that much different from posing semi-nude). But it was actually fascinating to see a person that you see everyday (and who doesn't actually look that much like a model, although she's cute) airbrushed into full pinup glory.

I think there are a number of interesting questions when college students pose for skinmags. How can you not be fascinated by the idea of generally enlightened and intelligent college women lining up to pose for Playboy? What is life on campus like for these women? What do their parents think? And, ten years from now, do you worry that it will come back to affect your professional reputation? So interesting!

So let us consider Playboy's "Girls of the Big 12"(link SO not safe for work) pictorial (I don't follow these things, truly, but there's this thing called Fleshbot...). What can we learn from this?
[N.B., I used to have direct links to the individual pix below, but they get redirected. The curious reader will have to go to the "Girls of the Big 12" link above and figure out which picture is being referred to in the items below (it's not too hard).]

• If you pose wearing only a cowboy hat and chaps, it's important to do it tastefully, according to Texas A&M student Tasia Bauman:
  

  Bauman said she thinks the photo is "tastefully done," and her parents and grandparents agree.

  You can tell it's a tasteful photo because she's wearing her dress thong. Read the rest of the story in the local newspaper.
  
• And what if haven't exactly told your parents that you posed? Oh, and what if you're so worried about their reactions that you don't want to reveal their names? Well, then you probably shouldn't do an interview with the local paper.
  
• It seems that future playmates should probably major in kinesiology or exercise physiology. Apparently, knowledge of the physical limitations of the human body is useful when you want to sit in a sink (she's the one from UTexas who is posing with a huge jug of popcorn).
  
• Did you know that, in addition to cattle-rustling, naked women also enjoy making out with each other in the snow? Although such behavior is apparently noteworthy enough to merit a column in the Denver Post.
  

I feel like I've learned a lot from this exercise, but there is still a major unanswered question: why do none of these women have pubic hair? Granted, Fosco hasn't had sex with a woman in a number of years, but he's pretty sure he remembers some hair down there. When did shaving become so standard, so common, that every woman in this pictorial does it? How did this happen?

Heterosexual porn is so strange.