In other words, Mom don't read this one!

A couple of unusual stories caught my eye over the past couple of days... The first involves an incident last week at O'Hare airport. A Chicago Sun-Times article reports that a man named Mardin Azad Amin was stopped by airport security after a suspicious object was found in his baggage.

So, Amin, 29, handled the delicate situation this way: He told security the object was a bomb, Cook County prosecutors say.

The security guard then asked Amin to repeat what he'd said to a supervisor. This time, Amin was chuckling as he spoke, prosecutors say.

In fact, Amin was trying to disguise the fact that the black object -- resembling a grenade -- was a component for a penis pump.

Amin eventually told investigators he'd lied about the object because his mother was standing nearby when it was discovered and he didn't want her to know about it. Unfortunately, he might get up to three years in jail for lying to officials (and his mom, of course).

The second story comes, appropriately enough, from the world of Second Life (also mentioned in a previous post). This Wired News report covers a Second Life convention held in the real world (San Fransisco) last weekend. Specifically, the article discusses a panel dedicated to sex in Second Life. I would call it cyber-sex, but it turns out that it's not so cyber any more... A robotics engineer, who's avatar name is qDot Bunnyhug, presented "the first open-source interface for controlling sex toys from within the virtual world."

"I created the first Second Life sex-toy interface in July of last year and had it running within three days of creating my account," qDot says. "Actually, it's why I started my Second Life account."

He describes that first attempt as "really bad," and says it limited you to changing the vibrator's speed just once per second, which resulted in a stuttering effect in the vibrations on the other end. "You could update the values once per second, and there were ways to smooth the transition between the power levels, but it still didn't feel quite right," he says.

But he couldn't quite stay away from the vibrator interface. He built a new version entirely with open-source code (from libsecondlife.org). It enables you to send 10 to 20 updates per second to the vibrator, resulting in much smoother speed transitions than the first release. It also offers anyone with time and coding ability the chance to customize their own teledildonics system.

Teledildonics?!? There's a word I never imagined I would read.

OK mom, you can start reading again...