I really, really hope this happened as given. From Acephalous: My morning: A play in one uncomfortable act.

I love this (well, not love, but you know what I mean): Online daters sue matchmaking Web sites for fraud.

Match.com, a unit of IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.

[snip]

The company said it does not comment on pending litigation. But Match spokeswoman Kristin Kelly said the company “absolutely does not” employ people to go on dates with subscribers or to send members misleading e-mails professing romantic interest. The company has about 15 million members worldwide and 250 employees, she sa

Salon’s Meghan Laslocky has a story tailor-made for this site, about people having “relationships” with their Real Dolls: Just like a woman.

Thanks to J.A.Y.S.O.N. for the link.

I like this one. How’d they know I’m such a sucker for a meet-cute scene? I anticipate one of those somewhat painful moments when the cab driver, like Ghosts of Pasha and birthday “Ted” before him, finds out it was all a prank, but I think their heart is pretty much in the right place here. Anyway: Improv Everywhere mission: Romantic comedy cab.

Via Miniver Cheevy I learned of these extremely fun color-coded marriages as delivered by the Church of the Subgenius: ShorDurMar categories.

Hey kids, Lewbowski Fest just ended in LA and is coming up again in KY in a few months. Mark it 8, Dude.

From Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin: Desperately seeking Lily. It concerns a 1950’s-era toy that shows a little rubber model of a naked woman gyrating seductively. And it’s kind of interesting to me, and not just for the obvious reason; I’m curious about the thing’s actual backstory (as is Xeni Jardin), and I’m also amused by the meta-idea of a popular weblog using the bully pulpit of its network effects to try to tease out this particular truth.

He claims he’s not looking for advice, just confirmation of the fact that the more time he spends in relationships with women, the more “slick moves and mad skills” he acquires. So Michael Williams asks for his older, married readers to confirm or deny that observation.

Yeah, well, I think he doth protest too much. Anyway, I pulled out my false teeth long enough to give him some advice from Gramps. Then I felt guilty to be writing long comments on his weblog when I’d been neglecting mine so much, so I figured I’d better link to it: Slick moves and mad skills.

I’ve felt a certain bond with David Sedaris ever since he almost got me killed. I was driving to work on the 405 freeway, negotiating the South Bay curve on the southbound side, in the fast lane next to the concrete divider (this was before the carpool lane was added — there’s a carpool lane there now, right?). And I was listening to Morning Edition, and they were playing Sedaris reading from The Santa Land Diaries. (I’m linking here to an expanded version of it that was part of a later This American Life episode. It’s a RealAudio stream, which I hate, but in this case it’s worth putting up with the technological suck to get the hilarious content. Sedaris begins at 4:41.)

It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and I came fairly close to slamming into the center divider, which would have been interesting, in that I would have made a scuff mark matching the one I’d made on the northbound side shortly after getting my driver’s license a few years earlier. But I guess that’s a story for another time.

One more digression before I get to the actual link this item is about: I finally saw Elf, with Will Ferrell. It was actually pretty good, thanks to (as Adam pointed out in his review at Words Mean Things) Will Ferrell’s complete commitment to selling the joke, at whatever cost.

David Sedaris’ little sister Amy is in the cast of Elf (as Adam also pointed out), and since the movie could well be taken as a riff on Sedaris’ earlier comic mining of his department store elf experience (though they were careful to mix things up by putting Will Ferrell in Gimbel’s, rather than Macy’s), I was alert for any explicit references to The Santa Land Diaries.

And there it was! It came when Ferrell’s Buddy was meeting Zooey Deschanel’s Jovie, as she was decorating the tree. At one point she shoots him a suspicious glance and says, “Did Crumpet put you up to this?” (Crumpet was Sedaris’ elf name at Macy’s.)

Okay. I think I’ve purged most of the mental debris that crowded into my brain when I saw this item by Sedaris in The New Yorker: Old faithful. It’s got nothing to do with elves, or Christmas, but it’s good stuff. Go read it! Thanks.

You probably already saw a mention of this, but if not it’s worth a look. Congressman Henry Waxman has a new report out that shows that 11 of the top 13 abstinence program receiving federal funding (funding that has doubled under Bush) include blatantly false educational tidbits as part of their outreach efforts. Anyway, I’m linking to it via Pandagon because I like their title: Lies, lies, lies.

A fun item on what did, and didn’t, pass muster with MSN’s automated blog censors: Seven dirty blogs.

From Liza Sabater, whom I just now discovered via her enviable googlerank for the phrase “george bush sally hemmings,” an uplifting story that will resonate with anyone who’s ever been to the emergency room with an allergy-constricted airway: For love and turkey.

From Gina Lynn writing in Wired comes this interesting item: Ins and outs of teledildonics.

Cybersex gets blamed for a lot of things, including social isolation, infidelity and divorce. It’s a temptation previous generations of lovers didn’t have to face, and it’s technology, and therefore it’s scary for a lot of folks.

Yet remote interaction technology — or, as I like to call it, teledildonics — has as much potential to bring people together as it does to drive people apart. If you travel often, or if you’re in a long-distance relationship, this technology provides another avenue for intimacy, especially if it’s harder for you to use toys with a partner than have sex au naturel.

Anybody who says John Edwards is “way out of the mainstream” obviously hasn’t run into him and his wife at a Wendy’s on their aniversary.

I’m not sure why I like these “open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond” so much, but I do. Anyway, from Muffy Srinivasan, via McSweeney’s Interent Tendency: An open letter to my three-year-old daughter, Sylvie.

Ann Coulter obsessive (though I understand he prefers “shrill blonde harpy obsessive”) Barry Ritholtz writes to bring the following actually-fairly-disturbing item from the New York Press’s Mark Ames to my attention: The Coulter challenge.

In brief, Ames is challenging Coulter to have sex with him. If she does so, and succeeds in, um, satisfying him, he promises to vote for Bush. If she fails, she has to “dress like a genuine Republican woman.”

Okay; this letter is cool: Gentle Jesus. So go read that.

Now, check out the chain of blog postings that led to my reading it:

• The original posting (since gone 404) was apparently at a site called Elephants with Wings.
• It then was linked to, and reposted (thankfully), by Signal Shift.
• Which was linked to by Fresh Bilge.
• Which was linked to by Unqualified Offerings.
• Which was linked to by Atrios at Eschaton.
• Which was linked to by Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes.
• Which was linked to by the obscure obsessives at lies.com.

You have to link to this now, yourself! A friend of mine did, and he found a wallet with $1000 in it the same day! Someone else didn’t, and he got in a car accident and had his foot amputated! Ohmygod!

From the Fishbowl: The Mac is a Harsh Mistress

One of the advantages of working at a really large company is finding interesting stuff in the printer bin.

This particular item apparently made the blog rounds allready, but just in case you missed it: 12 Reasons Same-Sex Marriage will Ruin Society. The Gator Gay-Straight Alliance “Flash!” site is fairly intolerable, but I think I might be Straight is easily the best flyer I’ve seen from a college organization, and the Not-A-Cutout project seems pretty cool.

From Janus/onan comes word of this nifty service: Imaginary girlfriends. “The girls are real. The relationship is not.”