Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is having some difficulty writing bloggy goodness today. Writers block or something. He’s started a Jennifer Love Hewitt post, a Weblog Awards post, a Friday Villainy Post, and a few others that he’s deleted. We’ll see what he can come up with for later.

In the interests of picking the low hanging fruit, your Maximum Leader will answer a loyal minion’s question. This minion, who wishes to remain annonymous, was wondering about the provenance of the three “porn” images (here, here, and here) to which your Maximum Leader linked yesterday. Your Maximum Leader is happy to share that information. Those images are photos of wall paintings from a brothel in the Roman city of Pompeii. As your Maximum Leader understands it, the various acts that the prostitutes would perform for a fee were painted on the walls of the reception hall of the brothel. Patrons could “view the menu” while waiting their turn.

In case you are headed to southern Italy and would like to see Pompeii for yourself, here is the offical site of the Superintendent of Archeology in Pompeii. (And here is an interesting virtual tour site.) But your Maximum Leader is informed by a visitor to Pompeii that the brothel is not on any tour.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, as you all know, doesn’t blog too much about his “real life.” But occasionally he reads somthing that affects him in such a way as to want to crack open the blast doors of the Villainschloss and let his minions glance in.

Today’s Hatemonger’s Quarterly made your Maximum Leader want to open the blast door.

You see loyal minions… Your Maximum Leader must live with the sensory affront that is Enya all the friggin time. A close relation of your Maximum Leader, who shall remain nameless (cough - mrs. villain - cough), likes Enya. So periodically, your Maximum Leader compelled by a desire to keep domestic tranquility intact, he has to listen to entire CDs in one sitting…

The horror… Oh the horror…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader fears he’s done it. Yes… He’s revealed too much of himself to the very Sexy Sadie and now she’s stymied. She is having to bleg for questions in her upcoming interview of your Maximum Leader.

Think of this as your moment. Have you ever had an aching desire to know some deep dark secret of your Maximum Leader’s? (Well you may have, but your Maximum Leader isn’t gonna tell you any.) Do you desire to know your Maximum Leader’s take on boxers/briefs? Does he play any musical instruments? Is he a good cook? Has he ever done anything really nice for someone else and not used it as leverage later? Does he have any interesting habits or foibles?

Now is your chance minions! Go to Sadie’s site. Send her your questions. E-mail Sadie those most random thoughts of yours. Drop her a line at: themirthfulones-at-mac-dot-com.

And while you are looking over Sadie (ahem) you might check out some classic sexiness de Sadie by reading her Fuck Yahoo post. Or her Sex & Politics Pt 1 & Pt 2 posts. Or Bad Grrls. You’ll be glad you did.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader posted earlier that some British profs chose Clement Attlee as the greatest Prime Minister of the century. (Snubbing Winston Churchill.) Now he reads that nearly half of Britons never heard of Auschwitz. What is happening over there?

Of course, upon quiet reflection your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that half of Americans have heard of Auschwitz either. (Or for that matter could name a single Prime Minister of Great Britain.)

Stupid people are easier to dominate in the MWO! Yay! There IS and upside to this story!

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader checks the Llamas out a few times a day. (You gotta keep your eye on those yippy beasts.) And he wants to draw your attention to their tribute to Napoleon on the 200th anniversary of his self-coronation as Emperor of the French.

Your Maximum Leader loves it! And allow him to say that he has reproductions of all two of the three of the portraits the Llama’s have posted. Lord Nelson hangs in your Maximum Leader’s study next to Winston Churchill. And the Duke of Wellington hangs above the stairs leading to the dark dungeon depths of the Villainschloss.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader tries not to obsess over site traffic numbers. He is a pretty self-confident fellow who finds most of the validation he needs within himself. But it is fun nonetheless to look at my site traffic numbers once or twice a month.

Speaking of site traffic, your Maximum Leader congratulates a href=”http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/057105.php”>Dr. Rusty on his eminence in the blogosphere. Your Maximum Leader can say that he visits Rusty’s site every day and commends that all his minions do too. And your Maximum Leader should add that Rusty seems to have figured out the place of blogging in his life. It should go: God, Family, Fishing, Blog (3-5 entries daily), Work.

It was reading that post of Dr. Rusty’s concerning blog traffic in hours read that prompted your Maximum Leader to check his own site traffic and write this post.

Excurus: Your Maximum Leader would like to explain something to his minions. In Rusty’s post he mentions bloggers that do not use Sitemeter. Your Maximum Leader is one of those. He doesn’t use it for a number of reasons. First, as Rusty points out, Sitemeter is notoriously inaccurate. And your Maximum Leader, if he wants to have statistics, want reliable metrics. Second, your Maximum Leader is something of an (aesthetic) control freak. That little Sitemeter icon thingie is damned ugly and he doesn’t want it on his site. And third, your Maximum Leader is paying for his bandwidth (of which he has much - much more than he needs - more later) and has accurate numbers from his hosting company. (Which by the way is Superb.net. They are great!)

On to the point…

Your Maximum Leader is pleased to announce that Nakedvillainy has been increasing it’s daily readership by a few people every week. We are currently averaging about 289 unique visits a day. That’s not too shabby. To give you all a frame of reference, in March of this year, Nakedvillainy was averaging about 50 unique visits a day. In celebration, your Maximum Leader must will stand on the balcony of the Villainschloss and give his many readers, and all those fellow bloggers who link to this site, a royal wave.

Well… Here is where it gets interesting…

In October this blog had about 7100 visitors. (7122 unique visitors to be precise.) In November this blog had 10,292 visitors. Your Maximum Leader thought that a jump of over 3000 visitors in a month was pretty impressive. Then he checked out the daily numbers. On reviewing the numbers, it seems as though we had over 1000 visitors on November 30th.

Was this a little Instalanche? A Jawa-lanche? Or a strange confluence where the Big Hominid, Kilgore, Sadie, Bill, the Llamas, Jeff, Brian, Gordon, JohnL, the Tall Dog, and others all on the blogroll linked to some post at the same time?

Well, it was none of the above.

It seems that 1821 visitors on November 30, 2004 came to Nakedvillainy from sex3k.com (Don’t think for a moment that the sex3k link is safe for work.)

Yes, minions. It’s finally happened. After all the posts talking about “cutlering” and strategic use of provocative keywords (like nude, naked, sex, and all); Nakedvillainy.com was linked to by a real honest porn site.

Talk about a quick way to start burning up your bandwidth. Get linked to by a porn site. We had about 3000 visits yesterday, all but 300 or so were from the porn site. (Don’t fear about burning up the bandwidth and not getting your Maximum Leader/Smallholder fix - even yesterday we only used up about 10% of our daily traffic allowance.)

Of course your Maximum Leader had to find the link to Nakedvillainy fro sex3k. But alas, he couldn’t find it on the site. But it must be there somewhere; because the visitors are still coming. (Heh.)

So, if you came here for porn, your Maximum Leader aims to please. You may click here, here, or here to get some porn out of your Maximum Leader’s private stash.

If you didn’t come here looking for porn - thanks again.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is happy. Somewhere out there Alexander himself is having some fun (and perhaps even a ménege à trois with Hephaistion and Roxanne) laughing at all of us who are so concerned about his sexuality.

First off, your Maximum Leader exhorts all his minions to read Eric’s recent post: Alexander takes a bath. It is one of the best posts your Maximum Leader has read in a long long time. It starts with religious freedom in ancient Persia. Moves on to Alexander’s sexuality. Then meanders its way through to the culture wars in the US caused by the conflict between our Greco-Roman vs. Judeo-Christian heritage. It is fabulous. Go and read. (Then come back.)

Now on to Alexander…

Minion “Powermfn” wrote your Maximum Leader on this subject. Her message:

[re:Alexander] and his proclivities (ahem), which seems to be totally stressing out the current Greek government, are really rather well explained in “The Persian Boy” by Mary Renault. It seems that in ancient Greece life was way past dangerous. A man’s strength was not necessarily and totally wedded (???) to his material wealth but to the coterie of powerful men around him. Powerful and totally devoted men. Committed enough to go to war for him with or without good reason. The development of the ability to gather such a coterie was begun very early on, usually by the lad’s father or whatever male was titular head of the family. The first rule was these “friends” came first, last and always. The family - also a necessity (wife, assorted kiddies, relatives) - would have to win his attention in some other fashion. Inasmuch as a lot of these ancient families were nt the Mayberry RFD type, a man could need as much protection from them as any other harmful source.

As to how such a coterie was gathered and maintained, tactfully speaking, simple charisma might not be enough. This book is a really good read. Renault really does her research and knows her stuff.

Your Maximum Leader has not read Renault’s book, and thus feels he cannot really comment on her assertions. Although he will caution all of his minions not to derive too many historial facts from a work of historical fiction. While some fiction authors go to great lengths to assure their work is accurate historically (and your Maximum Leader is thinking of the O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin novels here); their work remains fiction.

(NB: Your Maximum Leader should note that Greek lawyers are ending their fight to stop movie distribution in Greece.)

What your Maximum Leader feels he can comment on is what he does know about sexuality in ancient Greece. In his most recent post he alluded to the concept of “love” requiring equal status. And since men and women didn’t have equal status in ancient Greece, men often “loved” other men. This perhaps wasn’t a terribly clear exposition of what your Maximum Leader wanted to state. In this context, physical love wasn’t the only aspect of “love” about which he was speaking. Indeed, physical love wasn’t the major component of true “love.”

In discussing the physical love between men in ancient Greece your Maximum Leader would direct you to a good take on Alexander’s bisexuality from Victor Davis Hanson. (The specific passages to which your Maximum Leader would like to cite are not individually linked. Just scroll down to the second response.) Your Maximum Leader will quote a salient portion for you:

In a word, Alexander was probably not that different from either his father or most Macedonian horse lords in their approach to sex: an interest in the feminine, whether that be women or young boys and girlish adults who served as female surrogates. The key would have been insistence of the male role in all such encounters - and eventual marriage with children.

You might also want to check out Hanson’s review of the movie.

Also in the spirit of movie reviews, you should read over Wretchard at the Belmont Club follow-on to Hanson’s review. There is a particularly interesting part of that post about Darius’ nature. Your Maximum Leader sometimes thinks of Darius as an ancient version of Nicholas II of Russia. A nice man just overwhelmed by events. Hummm… That is probably a bad analogy. Nicholas II was a pretty useless autocrat, and Darius - while not the equal of Alexander - wasn’t a lousy autocrat.

Your Maximum Leader thinks this might just about do it for the discussion of the Alexander movie. Well, perhaps there may be one more post in this topic. Mrs. Villain and your Maximum Leader may go out this weekend and see a movie. Alexander is on the short list.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over reading Norm Geras’ blog and he noticed this piece: Attlee wins.

What the hell? A group of British Profs got together and ranked the British PMs of the 20th Century. According to the list, Clement “A sheep in wolf’s clothing” Attlee was number one. Attlee attainted the number 1 ranking by edging out WINSTON CHURCHILL.

At first your Maximum Leader thought, “Oh. How droll.” But then it dawned on him. These profs were serious. They gave more weight to the establishment of the National Health Service and all the other socialist institutions in Britain than to the salvation of Britain itself! It is as if to say, “You know, a Nazi takeover of our nation wouldn’t be that bad; provided we had mediocre free health care and the Trade Unions were taken care of.”

Great Jeezey Chreesey. Your Maximum Leader can take heart from these findings. When the eventual MWO takeover of Britain occurs, so long as your Maximum Leader keeps up the free health care he’ll be in like Flynt.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads off the news wire that Germans think they’re well-hung - but they’re not.

Perhaps this explains why they presist in their schemes to invade and conquer France?

Carry on.

IT ‘S ON!

Sadie v. The Maximum Leader in the grudge match of the century.

Perhaps Sadie is jealous that Miss Hewitt is the true apple of Mike’s eye.

Or Sadie realizes that the acting talents of Miss Pressly far surpass the balloon-smuggling hack’s.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader likes lava lamps. They are sort of fun in a kitsch-ey type of way. Indeed, he had one once. (Well technically he still “has” it, but the Villainettes hijacked it.)

Imaging his surprise when he read that Lava Lamp Left on Stove Explodes, Kills Man.

What the hell?

Why was it on the stove?

And how did your Maximum Leader know that incident would take place in a trailer home?

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader asks you if you happen to remember that whole “romance” between the Marine and the Bahraini princess? The one made into a TV movie (which your Maximum Leader somehow missed…). It seems the dashing couple are now divorced.

How could we have seen this coming? Really now. Bahraini princess meets clean cut Mormon Marine. They fall in love. Exchange messages through mall employees. She flees with him to the US wearing a Yankees cap and bearing some false documents. They marry. She seeks assylum. They move to Vegas. She parties on “the Strip” like its 1999… He parks cars… Well, you know how that story has to end.

Your Maximum Leader now asks… Should the US deport the Princess back to Bahrain? Your Maximum Leader would posit that she used the young, innocent, Mormon Marine to further her claim for assylum in the US. She should be sent back now. Your Maximum Leader would love to see how warmly she would be greeted by her family and countrymen. Heh.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader anxiously awaits the changing of the SciFi Babes polls on TexasBestGrok. Although the last poll didn’t do much for him, this week’s is much more intriguing. Check it out: TexasBestGrok: SF Babes Poll (Vulcan Edition)

Like the Llamabutchers, your Maximum Leader wonders how adding Kim Catrall to the list would influence the skank factor in voting. Your Maximum Leader however is urging your support for T’Pol. She is definately the hottest one of the three. And just think about that “decontamination” scene from a few seasons back. (Right about the time Enterprise’s ratings took a serious nosedive.) After you’ve thought about that scene - then vote.

No contest.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader saw this news headline on the wire: Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies. Your Maximum Leader was, appropriately enough from the lead, horrified to read the article. He wanted to do a longish post on this subject, but he was o.b.e. yesterday and couldn’t get to it. Instead your Maximum Leader recommends you go to Bill’s site and read his post entitled, “More Attacks On Life.” Bill and your Maximum Leader share the view that there is a great moral difference between withdrawl of life support and actively administering life-ending drugs. Perhaps there will be more on this later.

Carry on.

UPDATE: Minions also may want to check out a post from Paul on Wizbang on this subject.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wondered if any of his minions saw the interview of Matthew Sheppard’s killers mentioned in this Washington Post article. In the article, the killers say money and drugs were their motive and not homophobia. Your Maximum Leader would have liked to see them say it and try and judge if they were lying.

The Sheppard case is particularly sad. Indeed your Maximum Leader hopes his killers are anally raped by some large angry convict until they bleed to death. And frankly that is too good for them.

But what your Maximum Leader wants to point out is how troubling “Hate Crimes” prosecutions are. In the Sheppard case, the defence and prosecution both stated that “hate” was surely not the only motive. And in the Post article both sides seem to step away and are sounding like it wasn’t even a primary motive.

Your Maximum Leader has never been a fan of “Hate Crimes” legislation or prosecutions. In the Sheppard case there was a brutal murder. Part of the motive of the murder may have been homophobia. Your Maximum Leader understand prosecuting and holding someone accountable for a criminal act. And he is also in favour of added punishments for particularly vile motives - if they can be proved. But isn’t the net result of “Hate Crime” prosecutions that the state is punishing someone for their state of mind? Their thoughts?

Your Maximum Leader believes the state should stick to prosecuting actions.

Carry on.