Old 97's Set For Summer Tour

Old97s

Rhett Miller and his bandmates in the Old 97’s will be fueling up the locomotive for a summertime tour. They will be hitting the road for their upcoming new studio album, Blame It On Gravity, which will land in stores on May 13 via New West Records. For now there are only sixteen dates, but we do know that more are scheduled to be announced soon. So for our friends on the east coast, don’t worry, they haven’t forgotten about you.

05.30.08 - Houston, TX (The Meridian)
05.31.08 - Dallas, TX (House Of Blues)
06.01.08 - Tulsa, OK (Cain’s)
06.03.08 - Omaha, NE (Slowdown)
06.04.08 - Minneapolis, MN (1st Ave)
06.05.08 - Chicago, IL (Metro)
06.06.08 - St. Louis, MO (Pageant)
06.07.08 - Lawrence, KS (Wakarusa Festival)
06.10.08 - Denver, CO (Gothic Theater)
06.11.08 - Salt Lake City, UT (The Palladium)
06.13.08 - Vancouver, BC (Richard’s On Richard)
06.14.08 - Seattle, WA (Showbox)
06.15.08 - Portland, OR (Wonder Ballroom)
06.17.08 - San Francisco, CA (The Fillmore)
06.19.08 - Los Angeles, CA (Crash Mansion)
06.20.08 - San Diego, CA (House Of Blues)

Labels: Old 97's

AT&T CEO says hard to find skilled U.S. workers

2 hours, 33 minutes ago

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.

"If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said.

Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers.

"I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is," he said.

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth; Editing by Gary Hill)

Labels: USA

Thrillist - CantersCheer: Canter's and Camacho's at Dodger Stadium
Starting Mon thru the end of the season
In addition to HQ tacos from Camacho's, stadium feasting options will now include Corned Beef Sandwiches and Matzo Ball Soup from Canter's, which you'll end up carrying around yourself after a bubby vendor makes you feel guilty for never visiting anymore.
Get excited for the season at Dodgers.com

Paul B. Farrell
PAUL B. FARRELL
10 reasons your taxes are going up
No matter who's elected president, the debt party's over
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
Last update: 7:32 p.m. EDT March 24, 2008
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Reason No. 1: "Most Americans have yet to feel any of the costs of the Iraq war," write Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in an excerpt of their new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," in Vanity Fair. "The price in blood has been paid by members of the volunteer military. The price in treasure has been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for the war."
Well, folks, the party's over. Campaign rhetoric won't hide America's excesses, denial, incompetence and arrogance much longer. No matter who's elected, taxes will increase to cover massive debts. Greed has driven America's great economic engine into a "debt contagion" ditch with a recession, bear market, price inflation, and weak job and housing markets ... you bet your taxes will increase.
Yes, our five-year war was totally financed by borrowing. But unfortunately, "deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed. They cannot. Americans will have to pay for the war at some point -- and when they do, they will be paying not the Bush markdown but the full price," the authors say.
We've been mislead by Washington's Enron-style accounting that hides many costs:

*
Supplemental financing bills, outside the budget
*
No veterans health-care estimates included
*
No equipment replacement costs to restore our military
*
Nothing about increases in state and homeland security

The real cost isn't $800 billion, it's already $3 trillion. And still, it doesn't include ...

*
Interest on the ever-increasing $9.3 trillion federal debt
*
Damage to our credibility from a weak dollar
*
Out-of-control inflation in energy
*
And the brutal damage to Iraq and other Gulf states

Washington's hiding all that from us. We were sold a war-on-the-cheap, to cost a mere $50 billion to $60 billion, to be self-financed out of oil revenues. Today we're spending $50 billion every month! This war is already an economic disaster for America and the bill's still coming due.
Still, we know there's strong opposition to taxes. But can a new president change much? Certainly not with two-thirds of the budget in untouchable entitlements and interest costs. Besides, Washington's not run by our 537 elected officials but by 35,000 lobbyists. And after the elections, all 35,537 will still be part of a conspiracy that hates change and loves to spend the $3 trillion Federal budget.
Mark my words: Taxes will (must!) be increased to recover from years of excessive spending, accumulating deficits and future earmarks. A new president may expose the problems but without Congressional restraint the taxpayers will get stuck paying "the full price."
Frankly, since both parties are mired in narrow ideologies, it's questionable whether either can manage a $15 trillion GDP economy. Read "Mismanagement 101," Dan Gross's Newsweek column: "As oil hovered near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about high oil prices. OPEC president Chakib Khelil responded acidly that crude's remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with the 'mismanagement of the U.S. economy.'" And our heavy reliance on borrowing keeps making it even more difficult for the next president.
But unfortunately, even though the party's over, that $3 trillion war debt is just a fraction of America's out-of-control debt which is bigger than the official $9.3 trillion federal debt. It's reason No. 1 taxes are going up.
Here are another nine problems increasing our government's debt and adding pressures for new tax hikes. I'm sure you can think of many others:
2. America's new Wall Street welfare program
This one's scary. For the first time in almost a century, the Fed's bailing out the investment bankers, those wild speculators who got us in this mess -- bailed out while two million homeowners face foreclosures and increasing interest rates.
The real sinners are free to sin again! Like J.P. Morgan Chase's $2 -- now $10 -- freebie of Bear Stern's equity, while the Fed stuck the taxpayers with billions of Bear's junk debt. Now Wall Street's greedy traders are free to start speculating again, playing in the same old $516 trillion high-risk derivatives casino. Bad move: The Fed's setting America up for an even bigger crash around 2012.
3. The Fed's nationalizing America's financial industry
Bear Sterns is a symptom of a systemic disease. As BusinessWeek put it: "Financiers preached the free-market gospel and pocketed unheard-of sums of money, yet when times got tough they called for a government bailout."
The Fed's dealing with America like a third-world banana republic, effectively nationalizing our financial industry! Wall Street's speculators have over $200 billion in junk write-offs. But like the government accounting tricks hiding war costs, Wall Street has also been inflating junk asset values and ginning up profits. And now the Fed's even helping them mask losses to prevent panic. Eventually this PR stunt will cut Wall Street's future earnings and increase taxes.
4. Huge resistance to cutting social and entitlement programs
Lobbyists like AARP will fight all cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security entitlements, even though those unfunded benefits will balloon to $50 trillion to $65 trillion within a generation. Economists say solving this problem will take Draconian cuts of 40% in benefits or tax increases of 40%. If we don't, entitlements will consume the entire budget in a generation. Untouchable near-term: Ergo, minimal cuts, higher taxes.
5. America's pork barrel lobbying machine
The Washington Post says lobbying is "Washington's biggest business." All those 35,000 lobbyists will be around for the entire 2009-2012 first term of the next president, and all screaming for government handouts. The Democrats need them. And while McCain promises to veto earmarks, his campaign's inner circle is made up of special interest lobbyists, ostensibly working for "free."
Expect little change. Lobbyists earn big bucks squeezing megabucks out of the federal budget, and your taxes pay the bills.
6. White House's free market nonaction policies
"We're on top of it," said the President in his St. Patrick's Day speech at the New York Economics Club, as if the credit meltdown had little effect on the economy. The Treasury secretary even got a Katrina-style "great job, Hank" for working one whole weekend to magically fix the crisis.
Unfortunately, the Treasury and the Fed are following the same playbook that pushed the 1970s economy into a long, deep recession. Pimco's Bill Gross says we need an aggressive Rooseveltian fiscal package. No chance. This administration only knows a free market (for business) and tax cuts (for the top).
7. Aging infrastructure: roads, bridges, water, sewer, etc.
Imagine taking that $50 billion monthly cost of fighting and rebuilding Iraq and shifting it to upgrading our own highways, hospitals, power, sewer and water plants. Dream on. Yet our deterioration continues and deferred maintenance only works so long. Expect higher gas taxes, plus sizeable cutbacks in state and local services, or general tax increases.
8. Paradigm shift: consumer spending vs. consumer savings
In one generation our savings rate declined below zero. Policymakers favored a consumer-driven economy, capital formation fell and debt piled up. Meanwhile, consumers took a cue from an out-of-control "spend and borrow" government piling up huge deficits.
9. Recession reality replacing arrogant optimism
The past five years the Wall Street Bubble Machine relied on an artificially low 1% Fed rate to create the housing boom and then the subprime-credit meltdown. Meanwhile our optimism and faith in capitalism sank with all the phony asset values and stock prices concocted by Wall Street ... and it'll happen again ... because Wall Street's relentless, all-consuming greed is setting up the economy to crash and burn again, all too soon ... and the taxpayer will pick up the tab ... again.

Labels: Taxes

Originally posted: March 20, 2008
Music biz looks at giving fans all the songs they want in exchange for broadband access fee

AUSTIN, TEXAS---While most of the 12,500 registrants at the South by Southwest Music Conference were out playing on a beautiful early-spring afternoon a few days ago, the latest plan to save the music industry was being scrutinized at a dimly lit panel discussion inside the Austin Convention Center.

There some of the industry’s brightest minds were gathered: veteran manager Peter Jenner, McGill University professor Sandy Pearlman, Big Champagne Web site founder Eric Garland, entertainment lawyer Dina LaPolt, and consultants Bryan Calhoun and Jim Griffin.

On the table was Griffin’s nascent proposal to have broadband users pay for any music they download through a fee bundled into their monthly Internet access bill. It would allow consumers to download, upload and share music without restriction, and create a pool of money collected from Internet service providers to compensate music copyright holders.

As news of Griffin’s plan spread, it was instantly dissected. It was even inaccurately labeled “a culture tax” by at least one critic on Pho, a contentious Internet mailing list on digital technology that Griffin founded.

“Government involvement in the arts is abhorrent to me, and I do not favor a tax,” Griffin said. “This is a network licensing model” that would function much in the way cable TV billing does.

“Our industry now functions on a tip jar,” he said. “We have to be extremely persuasive to get people to pay [for recorded music] or make it roughly involuntary to pay” in the same way that “sports has made it roughly involuntary to pay with cable TV deals.”

The fee would not apply to broadband users who do not download music. Still, Griffin expects that “70 to 80 percent of users would pay” to gain access to all the music their hard drives could hold.

The proposal would require deals with Internet service providers worldwide, and could potentially represent a huge pool of revenue, even at relatively modest monthly rates (figures bandied about hover around $5 or less per user per month).

The proposal follows one that surfaced two months ago from Canadian songwriters, which sought a $5 government tax on every wireless and Internet account in the country. Both proposals are earnest attempts at adapting to and profiting from customer behavior rather than trying to quash it. In the last decade, the music industry’s primary means of dealing with unauthorized Internet downloading has been to issue threats and lawsuits. A few weeks ago, U2 manager Paul McGuinness called on Internet service providers to disconnect users who trade copyrighted files and urged governments to get involved if they don’t.

But there were signs at South by Southwest that at least some music-industry insiders were getting tired of such tactics. Suing file-sharers, Griffin said, “is shameful.”

His plan would create a live-and-let-live world in which peer-to-peer file sharing would co-exist with iTunes and other legitimate MP3 music stores. With an estimated 750 million people expected to be hooked into wireless broadband networks in Western Europe and the United States alone in the next decade, the potential revenue from licensing fees on Internet service providers could be substantial.

Yet such a forward-thinking plan might already be too little too late for the industry, McGill’s Pearlman said. A portable data base containing all the music ever recorded is imminent, he said. “Once this paradise of infinite storage is entered,” he said, “it will represent the end of all intellectual property rights.”

Apple is reportedly taking the first steps toward that “paradise of infinite storage” by investigating a plan that would give customers free access to the 6 million songs in its iTunes store. Consumers would be asked to pay a premium price for their digital player upfront from Apple, but then would be able to download an unlimited number of songs for the life of the device. To work, the plan would require approval from the 2,000 record labels that service iTunes.

In nearly five years, 4 billion songs have been sold at iTunes. But more than 1 billion music files are traded each month on peer-to-peer networks, representing about 20 percent of U.S. Internet users. Meanwhile, the music industry, a $15 billion a year enterprise as recently as 1999, is now at $11 billion and dropping fast, as CD sales continue to plummet.

At past South by Southwest conferences, the key music industry players ping-ponged between anger and self-pity as they watched their business decline. But in recent years, a new hierarchy of power brokers has begun to emerge, with tour booking agents and band managers playing an increasingly more prominent role while connections to record labels become more tenuous. Music-licensing for advertising, TV shows and movies now rivals commercial radio as the most potent outlet for exposing new music, whether it’s Feist on an iPod ad, the Swell Season on the “Once” soundtrack or a Peter, Bjorn and John song on an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The mantra of industry veterans such as Jenner is “monetize the chaos.” After nearly a decade of declining sales, the industry has yet to figure out how to do that. But the crisis has at last led to some fresher thinking about how to create a legal and economic environment that embraces the current reality, a reality where any song soon will be available any time with the click of a button on a portable player.

As Garland said, “It’s no accident that technology and music companies are sitting down and talking [about new solutions], because the core value of music has been devalued. Strange bedfellows are made by a real cold winter night.”

greg@gregkot.com

International Herald Tribune
At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world 'on fire'
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Thursday, March 20, 2008

NECKER ISLAND,British Virgin Islands: Richard Branson was lounging under the starry midnight sky on this palm-dappled speck of an island recently when he popped a sobering question.

"So, do we really think the world is on fire?" Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio.

What he wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet.

Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Some of them, like Page, carbon-consciously jet-pooled in from Silicon Valley, where the financiers who bankrolled the Web boom of the 1990s have started chasing the new "New New Thing": green power. In an era of $100-plus oil, venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, another invitee, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into young companies that cook up biofuels and harness the power of the sun.

Blair, who is now a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase, squeezed in a few idyllic days here between assignments (he left early for Jerusalem). Another attendee only sort-of showed up. The Medusa, the 198-foot, or 60-meter, yacht owned by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, was moored off Necker Island all weekend, but Allen never came ashore.

The Caribbean getaway was the brainchild of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur. Stromback, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, joked that a gathering like this might seem nefarious to some people.

"In James Bond movies, evil-doers meet in exotic settings to plot the destruction of the planet," Stromback said, puffing on a cigar before dinner one night. But the people here, he said, were plotting to save the planet.

So far, however, the hopes and dreams of alternative energy have far outstripped reality. But for Stromback and many of the other participants, a confluence of two powerful forces - soaring oil prices and growing concern over global warming - means the era of economically viable green power is finally at hand.

Many executives and financiers, including some in attendance at the retreat, have a lot of money riding on global warming. Branson, for example, has invested in a host of alternative energy enterprises, including existing businesses within his sprawling Virgin Group.

Khosla, the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, has at least 33 investments in "clean tech," including new fermentation technology to make fuel-grade ethanol.

Much of the weekend was spent hashing over ideas in Branson's new open-air yoga pavilion. Talk ranged from the practicality of electric-powered cars to how much money would have to be invested in biofuels to reduce the price of crude to $35 a barrel, a prospect Khosla said was possible within the next 15 years.

But the big question that hung over the meeting was whether the nations or the world could ever work together to tackle climate change and emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

"We have an agreement that there should be an agreement," said Blair, who was dressed in a white polo shirt, blue cargo shorts and sneakers. "But there's no agreement on what that agreement should be."

Blair predicted that the United States would soon adopt a so-called cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, as the European Union has done with mixed success. "I'm a little skeptical that it will work unless it's part of a global deal," he added.

As an alternative, Shai Agassi, the former president of SAP's product and technology group, suggested having companies buy carbon insurance. Insurance companies, after all, price all kinds of risks. "They know how to put a price on it better than the bookies," said Agassi, whose start-up, Better PLC of Palo Alto, California, has been trying to create the infrastructure to operate a countrywide fleet of electric vehicles in Israel.

Everyone, it seemed, had some project in the works. Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, talked about his latest project, Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes sexy electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. Page has ordered one.

D. Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of the synthetic fuel technology company Rentech, talked about his plans to make biofuels for airplanes. William McDonough, the designer, showed off pictures of some of his latest projects: a building in Abu Dhabi with solar panels built into the windows, and a Wal-Mart distribution center with an energy-friendly grass roof.

And Page, who got married on Necker Island a few months ago, talked about problems that Google had faced in trying get permits to use solar energy.

There was plenty of time for fun and games, of course. After lunch one afternoon, Branson suggested that the entire gang sail off to Mosquito, a nearby island he also owns, aboard a dozen catamarans. He said there was a party over there.

Page, an avid kite surfer, struck out alone. One of Blair's security personal trailed behind in a motorboat. As the catamarans beached up on Mosquito, music was blaring and bikini-clad women were dancing. Branson deadpanned, "Normally the girls would be naked, but the prime minister is here."
Notes:
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Nine Inch Nails Album Generates $1.6 Million in First Week
By Eliot Van Buskirk EmailMarch 13, 2008 | 12:09:30 PMCategories: Digital Rights Management

Nin Trying to find out how much money Radiohead made from the digital release of In Rainbows was like pulling teeth, but Trent Reznor has made no secret of how the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV has sold. According to the band, 800,000 transactions generated $1.6 million in sales revenue in the first week of the album's availability, despite the fact that the 36-song version of the album is widely available on torrent sites.

Nine Inch Nails included free downloads in these figures, which are not being released to SoundScan in the traditional manner, according to Billboard.

Ghosts I-IV is currently the top-selling album on the Amazon MP3 store; again, Reznor paid approximately $38 to have it distributed there.

See Also:

* Trent Reznor Paid About $38 to Distribute Ghosts I-IV to Amazon (Updated)
* Trent Reznor Escapes His Label's Clutches
* Trent Reznor: OiNK Was Better Than iTunes
* Trent Reznor to Fans: 'Steal, Steal and Steal Some More'
* Nine Inch Nails Gets Creative With Radiohead-Style Release

Google could be superseded, says web inventor

The next generation of web technology is likely to be far more powerful than the current crop, Tim Berners-Lee said
Ethernet cables going into a broadband router
Jonathan Richards

Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.

The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.

Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web".

The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can "communicate" with other information.
Related Links

* E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam

* Web 3.0 and beyond: the internet's next 20 years

* Technology giants spark innovation free-for-all

Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.

"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."

One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had "semantic data" built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.

The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established — a bit like the process known as "tagging". One expected application is in the pharmaceutical industry, where previously unconnected pieces of research into a drug or disease, say, could be brought together and assimilated.

Mr Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at CERN, the European Organsation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, would not be drawn on the type of application that the "Google of the future" would develop, but said it would likely be a type of "mega-mash-up", where information is taken from one place and made useful in another context using the web.

Existing "mash-ups", such as progams that plotted the location of every Starbucks in a city using Google maps, were a start, he said in an interview with Times Online, but they were limited because a separate application had to be built each time a new service was imagined.

"In the semantic web, it's like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can 'mash' them together and use them for different things."

Mr Berners-Lee, who is now a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaborative project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, sought to put into context the rapid growth of social networking sites in recent years, saying that once the semantic web was rolled out they would be thought of as one of many types of network available.

"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."

He also spoke about what he described as one of the key challenges of the web today — confronting the security risks associated with large databases of information that were attractive to criminals and identity fraudsters.

"There are definitely better ways of managing that threat. I think we're soon going to see a new tipping point where different types of crimes become possible and lucrative, and it's something we constantly have to be aware of.

"One option is to build systems which more effectively track what information you've used to perform a particular task, and make sure people aren't using their authority to do things that they shouldn't be doing."

SKINEMA


DARK MEAT 2
Enterbelladonna.com
Dir: Belladonna
Rating: 10

I was just in LA for a week to host a comedy roast for Adidas that failed miserably. For those of you who think my writing isn’t funny, just imagine how disappointing I am in person. Neil Hamburger is a natural compared to me in front of a microphone. I’ve been drinking heavily to wash the memory away. It hasn’t been working. My friend Matt Sharkey suggested we have an orgy, or at least what sounded like an orgy—it was a nice sit-down dinner with a bunch of porn sluts. Matt has been working on a book of naked porn gals around their houses and in the process has become BFFs with Belladonna.

Do you know Belladonna? She’s fantastic. She’s like the David Copperfield of porn—she can make anything, and I mean ANYTHING, disappear up her ass. She could fit the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower up there with ease. I generally like that sort of extreme stuff in my porn at this point in my life after having seen just about every manner of sex act known to man over the years. Now I watch only for the sport of it, to see if someone will stretch the body’s limits beyond what could have been imagined. Belladonna is pretty good in that department. So I agreed to the dinner. I figured if anything was going to clear my head it would be naked women. Then I went to her house with my wife and everything went wrong.

First off, she had clothes on. Lots of clothes. Layers in fact. I looked at my wife like, “What the fuck?” She led us into her living room and told us she’d be right back, that she was going to change, which I took as her going to get naked and stick something up her butt to feel more comfortable. “We should probably take off our clothes,” I told my wife, “I don’t want her to think we’re squares.” So we started to disrobe. I was shirtless and my wife down to her bra when Belladonna returned in sweatpants and a t-shirt. She gave us a confused look.

“I thought you were going to get naked,” I told her.

“No, I said I was going to get changed,” she said.

“I thought that meant naked.”

“No…”

“I didn’t know you wore clothes… around the house… or ever. You’re a porn star.”

“I’m a mother. My child is in the next room.”

“Oh.”

Crissie and I put our shirts back on and the three of us sat uncomfortably, staring at nothing in particular, waiting for Matt and his wife to show up. I wanted to go home. Then Sasha Grey showed up (the porn gal from that Shot by Kern episode) and she had clothes on. Then we saw porn stars Joanna Angel and Jenna Haze and they had clothes on. It was fucking Bizarro World. It’s like they all had amnesia and forgot that they are supposed to be naked all the time. I mean, these were women who all love butt sex and multiple dudes at the same time and there they were, all acting like they were normal people. With clothes on.

We ordered sushi and I was certain that when it arrived everything would change. I thought that the only way porn stars probably like to eat sushi is out of each other’s crotches or by sticking it up their ass and then shitting it out into another girl’s mouth. And I was very excited to see it unfold. I nudged my wife, gave her a smile and the quick, repeated Groucho Marx eyebrow raise that indicates something zany is about to happen, and whispered to her, “This is it!” But then they all reached for chopsticks and put the food in their mouths and ate it like regular folks and it was completely boring and totally sucked. A complete and total letdown. Belladonna asked me how my meal was. I looked at her with contempt and said, “It’s fine. Just fucking fine. Thanks.”

CHRIS NIERATKO
For more of Chris go to chrisnieratko.com or NJSkateshop.com.