How many times has this happened to you: you're watching TV, minding your own business, when all of a sudden there's an old friend of yours having sex on network television. Gawd, if I had a nickel for every time that's happened, I'd have, well, ten cents. But that's still a lot more than I'd expect. OK, and I'm not being entirely honest. In both cases I had to go out of my way to catch that bit of television; given that we don't have any kind of TV service, I don't experience these events spontaneously.

Most recently, I received a videotape from my parents. They said they had taped a show and thought I would find it amusing for "various reasons". All very mysterious. Last night we popped in the tape, which turned out to be a TV show called "G-Spot" from the Movie Network. Think "Sex in the City", only not entertaining. But there, in the list of guest stars for that episode, was my old high school friend Sasha. In the "Aquaman" episode, Sasha plays... oh, let's just quote it:

The following day Livia introduces Gigi to Jackson, a handsome and fabulously wealthy documentary filmmaker. She is instantly smitten. However, she soon discovers his fatal flaw when after a wonderful session in bed, she finds him sleeping in a bathtub filled with water, a trick he learned in Tanzania to alleviate his back problems.

In other words, Sasha gets cast as the episode's sex object. He does a sex scene or two, and spends most of the episode naked (because of his habit of sleeping in the bathtub).

I am deeply impressed. Here's my old friend, whose looks and physique (and oh, acting ability, which I'll say is considerable) allow him to get cast as "Hot Guy". If there's a better path to self-actualization, I can't imagine what it would be. Alright, Sasha, I'll admit that I don't really need to watch you do a sex scene on TV, though if you find yourself in the arms of, say, Kate Hudson on the big screen I won't look away. Also, I apologize in advance for any blackmail photos I unearth.

I've previously written about the other time this happened. My ex-girlfriend spent a season on the reality show Kink, which documents Toronto's kinky scene. And there she was on TV gettin' it on with her then-current girlfriend. (Aside: "The Only Time" by Nine Inch Nails just came on in my music mix. She introduced me to NIN, and this song reminds me of her.) That was a little more unnerving, both because Sasha and I never had that sort of relationship, and because my ex's TV sex scene was ostensibly not acted.

What's weird is that at least two other people from my high school class have found some success in television. Jeff had a good run playing a vampire on what I assume is the Canadian equivalent of Buffy. And Tally's documentary Lifelike about competitive taxidermy is doing well, having recently been screened at SXSW. And we're talking about a high school class of only 80 people. Must have been something in the water. Remind me to write an entry some day about the other classmate who's now a prophet.

A few weeks ago, Nath asked me why so many people "spell out" their email addresses on the web, using the words "at" and "dot" rather than "@" and ".". Now, I assumed this was just common knowledge. You do that because evil spamlords are constantly walking across the web sucking up anything that looks like an email address so that they can ask you to set up a mortgage to help a Nigerian man enlarge his penis. Or something like that. Writing your email address in a form that doesn't look explicitly like an address helps foil these automated tools, though the extent to which this simple trick still works is debatable.

What I really want to mention is Nath's previous assumption about why people do this. She thought it was because they were being pretentious. And she had the perfect analogy, too. She equated it to people who spell out their street address, hanging an ornate "Sixty-Five" on their house rather than "65". I love that! I wish that were the right answer, because it's so much more interesting than the real reason.

Conversely, it would be interesting if people spelled out their street addresses to avoid receiving junk mail, as if the words "Sixty-Five" could act as an impediment to anybody writing down your address.

Nath's assumption also brings to mind the question of what one ought to do to present one's email address in a pretentious manner. I don't have a good answer to that one. But I'd welcome your thoughts on this subject. Please send them here:

What is it now, about 45 days since my last post? Alright, sure, this has been a busy term, but it still saddens me that there are household and world events that have transpired without comment, without analysis, without self-indulgent navel-gazing. Let's face it: it's disgraceful. Each of us must do our part to lower the web's signal-to-noise ratio. Here, I'll pitch in: Hitler!

In any case, the term's winding up, and pockets of stress-free time are opening up here and there. There was some minor stress this evening, due to my inability to locate my birth certificate in order to fill out my passport application. Nath found it (though we don't know which of us put it there), but while searching frantically I had forgotten about the pot of assam I had left to steep. Thus I consumed a large cup of rather strong black tea, meaning that I'm not about to fall asleep any time soon. Must be time for some thingo entries. I'll see how many I can conjure up.

I'll tack a brief site-related comment on to this message. For those of you who don't follow this site on RSS, it should be obvious by now that the Stagnometer is broken. The text on the main page isn't faded. Even more blatantly, I haven't yet received a message from my father telling me that I'm looking faded (my usual incitement to post an update). I know that the OFB people upgraded their web server; perhaps my CSS hack broke. I'll have to look into that some day. In the meantime, you can enjoy Thingo in our patented Perpetual-Maxi-Contrast mode.