Opines, comments, rants, concerns, imaginings from Neale Sourna, fiction author and more
-- www.Neale-Sourna.com, www.PIE-Percept.com, www.ProjectKeanu.com, www.AuthorsDen.com/nealesourna, www.CafeShops.com/NealeSourna, www.Writing-Naked.com, and www.CuntSinger.com
Monday, September 17, 2012
HESITATION [short story ON SALE!, a Playgirl Forum story expanded]
HESITATION [short story ON SALE!]
A businesswoman's emotional
conflict between overthinking versus her erotic needs is tested when
she's caught in the rain with the man who keeps her mind and emotions
distracted. But, will she overthink a
playful shower together, too?
_3218 words Erotic Romance short story fiction [a shorter version published in Playgirl Magazine / Playgirl Forum]
Plus a Bonus Love Poem: A Lesson in Passion
ISBN: 978-1-938903-10-6 PDF ebook 978-1-938903-11-3 mobi
You’ve seen their hands a million times in glossy magazine ads, in television commercials, and blown-up on billboards. Plenty of corporate ad campaigns use hand models, and the few in the business have been busier than ever since the recent boom in popular handheld electronic devices. Who are these people, and how did they land these gigs? Here’s a quick look at some of the faces behind the hands you know so well.
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Mia Crowe
The most popular e-reader on the market, the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle, is held upright in ads by hand model Mia Crowe. Though she’s posed for Apple (AAPL) products, too, her client base isn’t confined to tech companies. Her Web site says, “Turn on the television right now, and you can see Mia’s talented hands in commercials doing everything from spreading Philadelphia Cream Cheese on a bagel and twisting open Oreo cookies to pouring test tubes of blue dye onto Tampax feminine pads to test for absorbency.”
Credit: Peter Zielinski
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Kimbra Hickey
When part-time model Kimbra Hickey posed for the cover of Twilight in 2004, she had no idea that the book would be popular. Since then, the image of her hands, cradling an apple, have graced the covers of the millions of copies sold around the world. She still attends events promoting the book and signs autographs.
Credit: Flickr user, catharticflux, and John Firman
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James Furino
The Staples (SPLS) “Easy Button” ad campaign was so catchy that the office supplies retailer started selling these buttons in stores. Hand model James Furino didn’t need to buy one to get his hands on an Easy Button. His index finger does the pressing in one of the memorable ads. He feels lucky to have the hands and the “meticulous” personality that hand modeling requires. Yet he’s quick to dispel a common myth about the business. “It is lucrative, but you can’t get rich doing it,” he says.
Credit: Stephanie Klein-Davis
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Elizabeth Barbour
During a photo shoot in 1983, Elizabeth Barbour says she “tilted her hand in such a way” that the photographers captured the perfect shot of her hand grazing a glass. The shot was the basis for the redesign of the Palmolive soap label, which is still around to this day. She was paid $650 for the shoot and calls the experience “one of the funniest things I’ve ever done.”
Credit: David Kaptain
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Ashly Covington
She rips biscuits apart at just the right speed, spreads icing onto cinnamon buns without making a mess, and folds pie crust like a pro. Pillsbury is just one of full-time hand model Ashly Covington’s many clients. She set out to be an actress, not necessarily a hand model. “After college I was trying to get headshots taken,” she says, “The agent was far more interested in my hands.”
Credit: Ad screenshot courtesy of IPhoneSavior.com
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Pamela Moses
Actress Megan Fox is well-known for her good looks, but she also owns a pair of infamously ugly thumbs. When she starred in a Motorola (MOT) commercial that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, Fox’s hands looked surprisingly normal. That’s because they weren’t hers. Model Pamela Moses lent her hands to the commercial. More than a few astute Fox fans noticed the substitution.
Credit: Dylan Cross
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Ellen Sirot
Ellen Sirot has been in the hand-modeling business for 20 years. She has worked on countless campaigns selling just about everything from nail polish to pregnancy tests. Recently, she has jumped on new opportunities in tech advertising, such as this Verizon (VZ) campaign. While some models don't bother to baby their hands, Sirot insists on it. She wears gloves all the time and has even developed her own line of hand cream to keep them moisturized.
Credit: Leslie Hassler
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Ryan Serhant
AT&T’s (T) “hands” campaign won the title of “America’s Favorite Magazine Ad,” a contest sponsored by Magazine Publishers of America. For the campaign, Italian artist Guido Daniele painted hands, holding electronic devices, with imagery from around the world. Ryan Serhant offered up his hands as the canvas. What’s his secret to keeping his hands in perfect form? He explains, “Lots and lots of lotion, gloves when it’s cold, gloves when you work out, and gloves when you sleep.”
Caitlin McDevitt is an editorial assistant at The Big Money.
http://business.avn.com/magazines/online/">AVN Magazine, FOREPLAY, “Lord of The Guys” by Tony Lovett
All pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. ... If you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he's going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I'm pretty sure he'll lose interest. It's the last thing he wants.
—Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to U.S. senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma
Kids say the darnndest things.
—Art Linkletter
pearls of wisdom were abundant at September's Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., but the above statement by Michael Schwartz—chief of staff to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, and a founding member of Operation Rescue—took top honors when it came to non sequitur entertainment value.
Mr. Schwartz was speaking at a breakout forum about something called "The New Masculinism" when he offered up his radical new theory on how to keep our kids away from porn and stop the spread of homosexuality. While he was quick to quote studies by the National Institutes of Health in order to back up his hare-brained hypotheses, he appeared to be getting most of his source material straight from the horses' mouths, i.e., 10- to 12-year-old boys.
Rekindling memories of Liberace, Mr. Schwartz uttered a statement that would have surely been cause for concern in almost any other venue. "It's been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys who are like 10 to 12 years of age," said Mr. Schwartz with nary a hint of irony in his voice. Though he was unclear as to exactly how he was closely associated with these young boys, Schwartz had no doubt that they "have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that's because they don't want to be that way. They don't want to fall into it." What Mr. Schwartz forgot to say, of course, was "except for the homosexual ones."
Maybe it's just me, but I have problem with adopting the intolerance of heterosexual pre-pubescent boys as the blueprint for a utopian society. As anyone who has ever spent time on a playground will attest, boys—especially in this age group—can be astonishingly vicious.
What is it with conservatives and cruelty? If it's not the Old Testament they're thumping, it's Lord of the Flies.
Could it be that these boys "speak badly about homosexuality" because they learned it at home? Kids tend to "speak badly" about all kinds of things they don't understand, because they hear it from mom and dad. The notion that 10- to 12-year-old boys have some innate grasp on The Truth is preposterous. Having been a 10- to 12-year old boy at one time in my life, I speak from experience when I say that homosexuals were just one group in a long list of "enemies" for which neither my peers nor their parents had any tolerance. The only difference was, as adults, their parents were supposed to know better. At least in theory,
The fact of the matter is that nothing—and I do mean nothing—could have stopped us from looking at Playboy. If the possibility of blindness, baldness, impotence, infertility, hairy palms, and eternal fiery damnation didn't frighten us, then the prospect of enjoying show tunes wasn't going to do it either.
"All pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards." This is pure drivel with a tinge of new age sex appeal, but it certainly sounds ominous, doesn't it? Sure, pornography will cause some degree of introspection no matter what your orientation. It's called "getting turned on." If you find yourself digging straight porn, the odds are you're straight. If you prefer gay porn, then you're probably gay or Kathy Griffin. If you eschew both for glory holes in airport restrooms, you're most likely a Republican legislator.
And wasn't it this same group who once claimed that porn turned men's sexual drives outwards until we became uncontrollable rape machines? Now they're saying it turns our sex drives inwards until we morph into Rip Taylor? Well, which is it, gentlemen? In or out?
Obviously, the answer is neither. What this does prove, however, is that these conservative killjoys continue to live in a kind of Leave It to Beaver alternate universe, totally divorced from what most of us refer to as "reality," where a budding lad's fear of turning into a limp-wristed caricature trumps his innate desire to ogle tits. "Gee Wally, Eddie Haskell told me if I looked at that issue of Juggs one more time, I'd end up blowing guys for a nickel out behind Metzger's Field."
Poor Beaver. If there was ever a television persona who embodied the kind of conservative claptrap that Mr. Schwartz is peddling here, it would be Eddie Haskell, Lord of the Guys.
