Catwoman/Chanteuse Eartha Kitt passes away....

By Christopher Wilson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Eartha Kitt, who rose from the Southern cotton fields to captivate audiences around the world with sultry performances as a singer, dancer and actress, died on Thursday at the age of 81.
Kitt died of colon cancer for which she was recently treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, said Andrew Freedman, a long-time friend and publicist.
The cancer was detected about two years ago and treated but recurred after a period of remission.
"She came back strongly. She had been performing until two months ago," Freedman told Reuters by telephone from Los Angles. "We had dates booked through 2009."
Slinky, sensuous and cat-like, Kitt described herself as a "sex kitten" and used her seductive purr to charm audiences across the world.
Actor-director Orson Welles once called Kitt "the most exciting woman alive" and, along with Lena Horne, she was one of the first African-American sex symbols.
Kitt picked up a string of awards during her long career, winning two Emmys and being nominated for a third, as well as a Grammy. She also had two Tony nominations.
Her hit songs included "C'est Si Bon," "Let's Do It" and "Just an Old Fashioned Girl." She also was widely associated with Christmas because of her hit "Santa Baby." The song, recorded in 1953, went gold this year and she received the gold record before she died, Freedman said.
Despite those accolades, Kitt may have been at her best in her nightclub act, which allowed her to use her feline, seductive manner to its fullest.
"She loved cabaret performances," Freedman said. "If there was ever an opportunity to do a small intimate venue with about 150 people, that was always her preference."
BLACKBALLED
Kitt was blackballed in America for speaking out against the Vietnam War in the 1960s -- most notoriously at a White House luncheon in the company of first lady Lady Bird Johnson. Kitt then began performing in Europe, where she had been popular early in her career, and eventually returned to the United States to great acclaim.
"She was never one to look back on her life," Freedman said. "She was a true individual who believed that if you had a true belief in yourself, your talent was authentic."
"My greatest challenge was to be able to survive in the business and to be able to survive according to what I was doing. Not what other people were doing," Kitt told Reuters in a 2005 television interview at the Newport, Rhode Island jazz festival.
"I just stuck to my own guns and I think that was one of the way's I have survived. The audience is not supposed to know that I'm scared, the shyest person in the world."
Kitt was born to a black-Indian mother and a white father on a plantation in South Carolina in 1927. She once described herself as "that little urchin cotton picker from the South, Eartha Mae" and often spoke of a tough childhood in the impoverished segregated South. She was often harassed for being light-skinned before being sent to live with an aunt in New York City.
But Kitt's life in New York also was marred by abuse and poverty until she got her start as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company and made her film debut in "Casbah" in 1948. On television she was perhaps best known for her role as the sexy Catwoman in the 1960s TV series "Batman."
In an interview with The Times of London in April Kitt described her approach to performing by saying: "I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt ... I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt is until the gods take me wherever they take me."
She was married in the 1960s to real estate developer Bill McDonald and they had a daughter, named Kitt. She also was known for her relationships with Welles, cosmetics mogul Charles Revson and Arthur Leows Jr. of the U.S. movie theater chain. R.I.P Dearest rubberdom Ertha....

A humble tribute for the late Bettie Page (R.I.P)

> LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bettie Page, a 1950s pinup model who helped set
> the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, has died. She was 85.

> Her agent Mark Roesler says Page died Thursday night at a Los
Angeles
> hospital after suffering a heart attack nine days ago. He says she
> never regained consciousness.
>
>
> Page attracted national attention with magazine photographs of her
> sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie that were
quickly
> tacked up on walls across the country. Her photos included a
> centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling Playboy
> magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.
>
>
> Roesler says Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with
> pneumonia and was about to be released when she suffered the heart
> attack Dec. 2.




"....a true american treasure, who will be greatly missed" - Rubberdom/FJB

Sign of coming more conservative times in Amsterdam

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to close brothels, sex shops and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major effort to drive organized crime out of the tourist haven.

The city is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including gambling parlors, and the so-called "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly. Also targeted are peep shows, massage parlors and souvenir shops used by drug dealers for money-laundering.

"I think that the new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals" said Lodewijk Asscher, a city council member and one of the main proponents of the plan.

The news comes just one day after Amsterdam's mayor said he would search for loopholes in new rules laid down by the national government that would close marijuana cafes near schools citywide. The measures announced Saturday would affect about 36 coffee shops in the center itself — a little less than 20 percent of the city total.

Asscher underlined that the city center will remain true to its freewheeling reputation....

Meanwhile at Rubberdom

FETISH PARTY AMSTERDAM

http://www.skintwo.co.uk/boudoir-bizarre-fetish-valentine%E2%80%99s-party-amsterdam/

Naughty No More - YouTube. Next stop Kinkspace.com

CENSORSHIP R' US

The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times


Slipping down the slope of YouTube's new sex and language guidelines
5:25 PM, December 3, 2008

Bad stuff. (Photo courtesy Flickr user solidstate)

In an official blog post Wednesday, YouTube announced that it had enacted a new set of guidelines to sanitize its most viewed lists by cracking down on videos with "profanity" and "sexually suggestive" content.

The changes, YouTube wrote, are meant to "help ensure that you're viewing content that's relevant to you, and not inadvertently coming across content that isn't."

Let's remember first of all that YouTube has had trouble luring big bucks from advertisers, and so this clean-up undoubtedly has two eyes on the bottom line.

The way it works: If a video violates the guidelines, it will be demoted -- removed from the front pages and marked as "age restricted" -- so only registered YouTube users who claim they're over 18 can watch. YouTube's Most Viewed and Top Favorited pages are often where videos go to become mega-viral sensations, so if you want your vid to qualify for this viral launch pad, you'd better not break the rules.
That is, if you can find them.

YouTube is specific about what it means by sexually suggestive. (er like rubberdom?)But it says nothing about what profanity might mean in practice. (The site offered a similar nondefinition back when it banned drug-related videos.) Staying mum is a PR tactic, of course, because obscenity and profanity are notoriously fluid and slippery concepts. Any attempt to nail them down will bring a wave of examples the definer forgot to outlaw, or couldn't foresee. And that's why the definitions you do see ...
... skip specifics in favor of uselessly abstract notions of public taste.

Take this oft-cited attempt from an 1972 decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is sometimes employed by the Federal Communications Commission. Profane terms, it says, are "construable as denoting certain of those personally reviling epithets naturally tending to provoke violent resentment or denoting language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance."

Whoa, that sounds bad. Does YouTube really think its users find four-letter words -- like those for poopy, peewee, peepee, and whoopee -- "grossly offensive"? In all my YouTubing, I can't recall a single instance of YouTubers becoming "violently resentful" upon seeing a dirty word. By and large, actually, it's YouTube members that are using the dirty words.

Even a cursory glance at the content of many original videos, and the comments on every video, shows that questionable language is baked into the YouTube aesthetic. Which means that if the company wants to help its users find content that's "relevant" to them, then burying that content may not be the best way to do it.

But most community-unfriendly of all is that YouTube is offering absolutely no hint to its users about what counts as profanity. Besides the refusal to offer a definition, guidelines or examples, it won't even send violators a message when their video gets the scarlet letter. It just happens quietly and automatically. So, basically, the idea is that you have to follow the rules even though the rules are secret, and when you're punished you won't know why or when. Sort of makes it hard to be a good citizen.