Dude, you might as well take off your glasses.

This poem is by John Hall Stevenson from the late 1700s:

Don Pringello’s Tale: The Fellowship of the Holy Nuns,
or, The Monk’s Wise Judgement

There is a noble town, called Ghent,
A city famous for its wares,
For Priests and Nuns, and Flanders mares,
And for the best of fish in Lent.

There you may see, threat’ning destruction,
A hundred forts and strong redoubts,
Just like Vauban’s, with ins and outs,
And covered-ways of love’s construction.

In one, constructed as above,
There dwelt two Nuns of the same age,
Join’d like two birds in the same cage,
Both by necessity and love.

In towns of idleness and sloth,
Where the chief trade is tittle-tattle,
Though Priests are commoner than cattle,
They had but one between them both.

Our Nuns should have had two at least,
In Ghent they’re common as great guns:
Which made it hard upon our Nuns,
And harder still upon the Priest.

But he was worthy of all praise,
With spreading shoulders and a chest,
A leg, a chine, and all the rest,
Like Hercules of the Farnese.

Amongst the Nuns there was a notion,
That these two Sisters were assigned
To him, for a severer kind
Of penitential devotion.

His penance lasted a whole year;
And he had such a piece of work,
If it had been for turning Turk,
It could not have been more severe.

Our Nuns, which is no common case,
Living together without jangling,
All on a sudden fell a wrangling
About precedency and place.

They both with spleen were like to burst,
Like two proud Misses when they fight,
At an Assembly, for the right
Of being taken out the first.

Before the Priest they made this clatter;
Between them both he was perplexed,
And studied to find out a Text,
To end the controverted matter.

Children, said he, scratching his sconce,
I should be better pleased than you,
Could I divide myself in two,
And satisfy you both at once.

Angels, perhaps, may have such powers;
But it is fit and seasonable,
That you should be more reasonable,
Whilst you’re with Beings such as ours.

Be friends, and listen to the Teacher;
Cease your vain clamour and dispute;
Be ye like little fishes mute,
Before Saint Anthony the Preacher.

To end at once all disputation,
I’ll set my back against that gate,
And there produce, erect and straight,
The cause of all your altercation.

But first you both shall hooded be,
Both so effectually blinded,
‘Twill be impossible to find it,
Except by Chance or Sympathy.

Which of you first, be it agreed,
The rudder of the Church can seize,
Like Peter’s Vicar with his keys,
Shall keep the helm, and have the lead;
She shall go first, I mean to say,
And have precedence every day.

The Nuns were tickled with the jest,
They were content; and he contrived
To give the helm, for which they strived,
To her that managed it the best.

Just what it says on the label, from Usenet:

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Remember my post from September on what I called Google’s Mechanical Prude? About how their search autofill appeared to be filtering out a huge volume of adult keywords, even if you’d set your “Safesearch” preference cookie to prevent adult filtering?

Well, Tony Comstock got to looking at this over the last couple of days, and he appears to have figured out the mechanism better than I did. It’s apparently not filtering by keywords at all. Rather, there appears to be a sort of sexual “no fly-list” of websites (Eros Blog is on it), and if a given keyword or set of keywords would generate search results in which those websites appear prominently, the keyword is excluded from the autofill process.

Tony explains it better than I can: Are You On Google’s Secret List?

The annoying and disgusting part is that this appears to be a pure sex filter; other websites you’d think would be considered at least as offensive as sex sites, like neo-Nazi sites, don’t get filtered out.

Amber Rhea has been investigating also, and guess what? No sex education in the auto-fill for you!

And now it gets interesting. In this comment, Tony mentions that he got, and blogged, a response from the public face of Google Search, Matt Cutts. Tony provided this URL, which is currently 404:

http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony/2008/11/14/googles-matt-cutts-responds/

Why is it 404? For that, I had to do some Twitter sleuthing. Tony has a Twitter: “Matt expressed dismay that I used his e-mail without telling him first. My bad. I took it down and haven’t replaced the URL.”

So, apparently the reaction that Tony got from Matt wasn’t something Matt was willing to stand behind in public. Perhaps that’s good news, considering that Amber, who saw it while it was up, called it “very frustrating.” Tony’s nicer than I would have been; until Google has something public to say about this, I don’t think it’s cricket to be making private responses and then “expressing dismay” when they go public.

As for ErosBlog, we get more than 500 “navigational searches” a day. These are visitors who type [erosblog] or [eros blog] or [erosblog.com] into a Google search box, knowing they want to come here and looking for the fastest way to get here. Google’s search data, which tracks which website (this one) these searchers select from the results, is fully briefed on what these searchers are looking for. So why is it that Google Suggest draws a blank when somebody types an e, an r, and an o into the searchbox? Erosblog, erotica, eroticism, erotomania, is there really NOTHING in the Google search results to suggest to an [ero] searcher?

We know there is, because you’re reading it. And Google knows too, because they have the data. It’s clear that Google is actively choosing not to provide the best search experience it could provide, when the search topic is sexual. What’s not clear is why.

Google’s mission statement: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Unless the information in question is sexual information, apparently.

Update: Tony has blogged again, mentioning but not detailing his communications with Matt Cutts.

Britni’s comment expressing enthusiasm for sexual face-slapping reminded me of a picture I remember seeing. After tugging at the corners of my brain, I eventually found it:

Turns out it went by on Spanking Blog, and comes originally from The Training Of O. That’s Adrianna Nicole leaning into the support of his other hand.

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Just one of those tender little moments Monmouth is so good at describing:

When I got up to find the condoms, she lunged for my cock with her mouth. Playing the game, I couldn’t let her get what she wanted so easily. I slapped her face softly but firmly with the flat of my hand.

“Restrain yourself, or you’ll get punished.”

She smirked and took another shot, her mouth open, hungry.

I slapped her again across the face, harder, back and forth, the palm and the back of my hand striking the warm, flushed cheeks. To keep her still I held her head by clutching a handful of her brown curls between my fingers.

All I can really tell about the rowdy men mooning the camera in this photo is that they appear to be wearing old-fashioned military uniforms. But this got emailed to me with a “soviet soldiers” filename, so I’ll go with that — from the bad color balance (cheap East German snapshot film, ugh!) to the flat and endless forested horizon, it’s Soviet enough for me:

Somebody out there wants more buttock, so here’s the zoom cut:

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