Ingenious!

There should be an award for the most ingenious website of the day. Here's one I found via a discussion thread on Goodreads: homemade-sex-toys.com.

You may be amused (I was) by their quiz: 'Sex toy or baby toy?' which asks you to identify a number of pretty strange items (and the answers show them in their packaging).

Also, their 'Build you own sex doll' page is weird yet amusing. There is a problem with these dolls, though - when they posed two dolls together, 'they were so hot for each other, their chemistry literally got out of control and some of their parts started melting. The problem: Cyberskin and some types of rubber are not compatible – when they come into contact, both materials start breaking down into an oily substance.' I had a sudden vision of what might happen to a roomful of these things, all posed together....

The local sex shop has closed

Actually this may be misleading, because what you think of as a sex shop and what I consider to be one could be rather different.

Yes, the two 'adult' shops in town selling clothing, DVDs and sex toys are still very much around. However, we used to have a local ropeworks. They made some of their own and bought in other stock, and you could get anything from garden twine to the rigging for a tall ship or foot-diameter hawsers. They also did a huge range of snaplocks, clips and other fastenings, canvases for trucks and marquees for events.

Since I tend to buy rope in industrial quantities, if only a couple of times a year, that was where I bought it. And not just for bondage, I might add (for that I mostly bought 7mm diameter polyprop braided, in different colours). For example I used them to source stuff to set-dress a stage for a goth band and similar things as well.

I rolled up there this afternoon and found the sign had gone. The factory next door told me they'd closed two months back. The recession had done for them.

It's a shame the recession is hitting the small businesses so hard. In future I'm evidently going to have to order online if I want stuff in quantity and at a good price - though I admit to having a yen for some rope laid from fibreoptic filaments I saw a while back from a specialist supplier... think how good that would look in a club...

Conversation last night

Me: You know I've got an astrology piece in the next Erotic Review?

V: Yes...

Me: I was thinking I could do a Chinese astrology one for our new blog.

V: That would be good. You could just say which sex toy would be the best one to use for each of the signs.

Me: 2011 will be the Year of the Rabbit.

V: Does that mean it'll be a very buzzy year?