Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - May 2000
A hard man is good to beat
Spring is in full swing now, the daffodils are rioting all over the place, and the bluebells are just beginning their turn. Traditionally in England, April is the month of showers, but I haven't noticed it rain any more than usual. Or less, for that matter.
Galleries added this month.
MC has his own Bookshelf now.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
There's some confusion in the English language, which is a delightfully ambiguous thing. The word "free" has two meanings that are very commonly used. The difference is often explained as being the difference between "free" as in "free beer" and "free" as in "free speech". On the internet, the confusion is worse than usual, because so many people believe that "The internet should be free". Um - should it? And if so, should it be free as in free beer, or free as in free speech?
Free beer is a great idea. Ditto free chocolate. I think that choocolate should be free. I should just be able to walk into a supermarket and help myself to as much free chocolate as I can carry (you want to hear about the World Chocolate Carrying Contest?). Sadly, I don't think it will happen. Sure, occasionally I get given a small morsel as a free sample, designed to persuade me to buy. But I don't think I'll ever be told "Sure, fill your boots, it's all free". Why is this, when so many people clearly want it?
Because it costs money to make chocolate. Someone grows the beans, someone grinds the beans, someone adds the milk and sugar, someone moulds it into bars. All these people would go find something else to do if they weren't paid. They need to put bread on the table too (or even chocolate).
Same with the internet. It costs someone money to make the internet. There's computers (have a look at my picture of Vanessa, who runs the newsthumbs). When IBM start giving away computers for free, I'll be there with my supermarket trolley already filled with chocolate. But it isn't just computers. Look at the picture again, you'll see all the drives that store the text, picture and video. And look harder, you'll see the cables (if you go round the back, it looks like an explosion in a spaghetti factory) which connect to the telephone system.
Ah, the telephone system. That's what carries the internet from me to you, and no-one told Bell Atlantic, Nynex, British Telecom, and all the other phone companies that they should be providing their services for free. Anyone who has run a large (or even medium sized) web site will tell you that's the main cost (we call it "bandwidth", or BW for short).
No, the internet isn't free (as in "free beer") and never will be. You'll pay for it in cash, or you'll pay for it in some other currency (by having to endure annoying adverts, or via your phone bill, or somehow).
So, what about free (as in "free speech")?
The first thing to understand, is that the internet runs under the law of the UK. And of France. And Germany, Italy, USA, Japan, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia ... er, hang on. How can it run under all those sets of laws? Surely the internet is located at ... er ... where?
It's everywhere, and nowhere. There is no "thing" called the internet. There is my computer in New York, USA, and Hans's computer in Dusseldorf, Germany, and my computer in the Bucks, UK, and Joe's computer in Hackensack, USA, and my computer in Maryland, USA, and Guido's computer in Milan, Italy, and Mr Tanaka's computer in Kyoto, Japan, and Pierre's computer in Marseilles, France. Each of these is connected to at least one other computer (my computer in New York is connected to a thing called Mae East, my computer in the UK is connected to Telehouse, London). We collectively call all these computers and connections "the internet", but the person who owns my computer is *me* and the person who owns your computer is you. And if you and your computer are in Italy, then you're bound by the laws of Italy. Actually, it doesn't matter where your computer is; if you're in Italy, your bound by Italian law. Computers don't have to obey the law, only people have to obey the law. Computers have the same legal status as pencils and typewriters. Until Clepsy's campaign for equal rights for non-meat people gathers support, it will stay that way.
So, now we know that the law of the internet is the law of a couple of hundred different countries, you can see why it is that whenever someone talks about "The Constitution", I usually ask "of which country"? Most countries have a Constitution - some written as a single document, some as a collection of documents and laws. Many people, when they talk about "The Constitution" are referring to that of the USA, because it's a handy single written document (well, it is if you include the umpteen amendments in that). But sadly, the USA Constitution is irrelevant here, for two reasons. The first reason is that it only applies in the USA, it doesn't apply in most of the world (for which many people were very grateful during the years when the Constitution forbade the drinking of beer, and we were expecting any minute that chocolate would join the list of forbidden edibles). The other reason is more important. The constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...". This is a limitation on Congress, and not on anyone else. It's been argued that this also limits the US States legislatures, also. But it is not a law that affects individuals, or companies, or other organisations. If a company wishes to have a company rule that restricts employees free speech, then they can. Indeed, you'll find that most companies have exactly this rule (for example, employees shouldn't tell about company confidential market plans).
In the US, most of the computers that connect to the internet, and most of the routers, switches, computer rooms, phone lines and other infrastructure, is privately owned. And so the Constitution is irrelevant to them, too.
The US Constitution is irrelevant to this question. So, should the internet be free (as in free speech)?
Well, then we come to the difficult question of "What is free speech"? Can a spammer sending their advert for a fraudulent make-money-fast scheme claim the right to send you junk emails as part of his right to free speech, or can you claim that your right to live in a noise-free environment overrides that? (The spammer says, in effect, "If you don't like that jet plane flying just over your house, just ignore it." Oh yeah?). Or, a more difficult case - what about someone's right to discuss and explain political ideas that you disagree with. That's free speech isn't it? Which is good? But at what point does it become "hate speech", which is bad? In Germany and France, advocacy of the Hitlerian political system is illegal. Is this a good idea or not? In the UK and the USA, advocacy of the Hitlerian political system is regarded as free speech, and not illegal. But the internet covers all these countries, and if a web site in the UK contains material that is illegal in Germany, it is very difficult, probably impossible, to block it.
Digression - there was a recent court case in the UK, in which historian David Irving lost a libel case. He was accused of being a Holocaust denier, read more about that here. Well, this is annoying, but freedom of speech says that if he wants to say that, then he can, no-one is required to listen. So why the court case? Because a book was published recently which, in effect, accused Irving of suppressing and distorting relevant information (i.e., lying) in his books, writings and public talks. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin Books, the author and publisher of the book that attacked him, and lost the court case when the court found that he had indeed been in the wrong. By bringing that libel suit, Irving cost himself millions of pounds. The interesting thing here is that if Irving had not brought the libel suit, there would have been no court case, because Irving's book was regarded as free speech. The Canadian Globe and Mail sums it up well, saying"Mr. Irving has hanged himself".
Prostitution is legal in most countries; not in most states of the USA. So, what is the status of a web site designed to be a "Good Prostitutes Guide"? Legal and useful in Denmark, but regarded as sinful in Saudi. Cannabis usage is legal in Holland, not in the UK. So what about a "Guide to Amsterdam Coffeeshops"? Legal in Holland, but an incitement to break the law in the UK. The concept of "legal" on the internet, is always relative. You can't say that something is "illegal", you can only say it is "illegal in Sweden".
The internet is designed to be resilient. If a router is down, then your access that used to go via that router, is automatically re-routed, and you reach the web site you're aiming for, via a different route. Like water, if you block one channel, the flow of data packets will find the easiest route, and if one route is blocked, it will find the next easiest route. And there are a lot of possible routes.
Peter Deutsch once said "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." So, if you can't access the information one way, there's usually another way. An excellent example is with the PGP crypto system. This is strong cryptography, and is classified as a munition of war, so you can't export it from the USA. But the source code, printed on paper, wasn't classified as a munition. So, someone exported the paper, typed it in, compiled it, and if you're outside the USA and want a copy, you download it from a server that isn't in the USA. No laws were broken, you're breaking no law. This is a good example of censorship being routed around.
So, should the internet be free, as in "free speech"? In my view, it is free, and I can't see how, technically, that could change.
People send me greetings cards. And I guess people must be sending each other greetings cards a lot on the internet, because there's lots of sites to do it.
I recently went to one such site, which had no adverts. "No banners or ads, no cookies" they proudly proclaimed. Which got me interested. "How are they making money?" I wondered. "We're doing it for totally altruistic reasons" is the summary of their explanation. Uh huh. And spamming the newsgroups via a professional spamming operation, including the use of a "hashbuster" (that's random text in each copy of the advert, so that automated programs looking for identical messages are fooled into thinking that each one is different, and so the spam doesn't get spotted). Doing a spam like that costs money - not much, but some. So I had a look around, and noticed that they were saying, on just about every page, "Other card places sell your email address, and you get lots of junk email. We would never do that."
Well, you know, until I read that, it hadn't occurred to me that a greetings card site would do that. Every time you send a greeting card, they get two email addresses which are pretty much guaranteed to be actively being read. So, if they are correct, and other card places do sell your email address, then next time you send a card via one of these other card sites, you should get ready for a flurry of junk email (and so should the person you sent the card to). Or, alternatively, don't send a card, just send your thoughts direct by email to the person you want to talk to. What, exactly, is added by the cute card? Nothing.
Oh, and would anyone like to guess how this card site gets revenue? Here's a clue. "Other card places sell your email address, and you get lots of junk email. We would never do that."
By Wessex Man
The Valkyrie's ever widening panorama of female muscle generates mega-voltage impacts, unique in the world's bodybuilding media. But the ladies in these pictures also have much more to tell than photos and brief biographies can reveal or even suggest. There's a whole world of fact and fantasy which has still to come to light.
"You can't really find out about these girls -- just pics, contest info and body measurements....The muscle magazines don't give you the real background stories," comments a senior British heavy-weight bodybuilder (male) who trains in London. His views are widely shared.
The Valkyrie is offering sharper and more exotic coverage all the time. So are the other internet pages. But there's no doubt that most muscular women still enjoy anonymity in their personal lives.
Most people know something of the romantic careers of say Madonna or famous female tennis players but even dedicated weight trainers usually know precious little about the top women bodybuilders.
So here I'll explore the case histories of some ultra-muscular females, including a couple of sportswomen, with a close eye on their personal orientations. I relate what several of them have told me. A few names and details have been changed for understandable reasons, but the underlying scenarios are historically intact.
Ilona Catherine Nordberg is a remarkable Scandinavian bodybuilder and extensive writer on the subject. Her vivid essays conjure elaborate literature from wild experience and imagination. She's one of the most eloquent and compulsive enthusiasts that I've known. Her discerning eye, her mouth and questing posture reveal her mind and virile sensuality.
Nordberg recounts that in early life she would distress her mother by constantly putting a forefinger in the penis position. Now in her 30s she divides her passions between feminine older men and muscular weight trained females. And she has plenty to offer, though her development doesn't compare with very top competitors. You can sense she's a bodybuilder before she removes her shirt.
Nordberg's orientation takes here immediately to a man's rear end. With women she goes for classic muscularity, again seeking that nether region. She's always regretting the shortage of seriously muscled women in her part of the world.
She prefers a free thinking Bohemian partner to the sanitised images shown in the glossy muscle magazines. She feels for instance that Bev Francis looks physically superb but probably suffers from dull politically correct points of view. (This may not be fair comment on Bev).
Nordberg hasn't found paradise as yet. She cruises, sometimes despondently, through major European cities -- Rome, Berlin -- with her bare arms and shoulders proclaiming her potent personality. But what she wants is a new gender.
Kitty Harrison, now early 40s, has been a strength athlete since her teens, reaching U.S. national level in the late 1980s. She's managed to combine bodybuilding with track, swimming and wrestling. She's squatted over 450 pounds. Her wrestling videos are on sale worldwide.
Harrison, of both Irish and Armenian descent, is drawn to the exceptionally muscular male. She's in the minority of women who've ended up with a really heavy-weight bodybuilder. The massively defined muscleman with big arms and matching equipment is the guy she's sought. And her fame as a photogenic champion in her own right has given her some choice in the matter.
But Harrison hates what she deems to be unnatural sex and has known the miseries of long-term physical abuse. Of all her nightmares she cites her time with a celebrity black bodybuilder who required sex most days but had to be aroused from limp inertia before getting going. Then the trouble would start. He'd usually end up the wrong way round while she was sobbing face down into a pillow.
Harrison is now considering a quieter life with a third husband. A considerably older professional man who seems to be in a position to pay bills and love her properly.
Cressida Morgan is a Welsh-born ex-prize winner from an academic background who reached bodybuilding fame in the 1980s/early 90s. Her light boned physique became increasingly conspicuous in British gyms during those years, albeit her development was slow to mature.
A stunning smile and brainy reputation added to her lustre. So perhaps did the authoritarian way in which she would approach a male weight trainer in the gym and praise his quads or his biceps. And she was not always seeking a date -- as she'd quickly make clear.
Morgan, now nearly 50, worked hard, took no steroids and knew the game was an uphill struggle for a woman. "Muscle growth is so slow," she commented while chatting in a gym at the peak of her career. Sadly her ripe vascular muscularity smoothed over in her 40s, but not without a fierce rearguard action.
Her personal life took her through divorce from an older man, a well-known judge in the criminal courts, into a series of relationships with athletic men from the gyms. She also responded to her female personal training clients. Young women would watch spellbound at her theatrical biceps demonstration on the preacher bench. While curling the bar Morgan could create a silent moment of acute sensuality. The cocked contouring of her honey-tanned biceps would stun the beholder.
Instead of a handbag she often carried a short riding crop to match smart tightly tailored breeches.
The first sightings of Martina Navratilova on the world's tennis courts drove shots of astonished adrenalin into spectator sensibilities. But sadly she failed to create a host of female converts to muscular good looks.
Men who watched the young androgynous Amazon in her early international matches seemed lost for words. Women were often reluctant to express their real thoughts, apart from praising her tennis brilliance. But there was certainly a wild sensual thrill over Martina. Her private life was known to everyone, adding to the excitement.
It was soon heard that she kept racks of weights in her various American homes. She was also reported to walk around naked while indoors, rejoicing in her physical splendour and supreme self-confidence.
To this day Martina presents a painfully frustrating challenge to her many lustful admirers.
Jarmila Kratochvilova, the Czech runner who dominated 400-800 metre races in the 1980s, has faded from the scene. But her exceptional physique and inscrutable personality still fascinate those who remember her.
Born in 1951 she achieved world record timings after a long celibate regime of track, hill running and heavy weights.
However the international Press were persistently sceptical. Could this ultra-muscular female Hercules expect to bear children ? This was the question put to her by ill-natured sports journalists who couldn't cope with the spectacle of her powerful race horse sinews and steely expression.
Very little of her private life has emerged. Today she's reportedly an athletics coach in a small community south of Prague, Czech Republic. Her achievements and address are listed in the International Who's Who. She could have gained wider fame had she chose. No female has strode the Olympic track with more muscular legs.
Vanessa is running fine. I added a load of newsgroups, and by 30th April, the picture count was 2.3 million (Mary still has 1.9 million, but now is really just there as a backup in case of severe problems with Vanessa, Vanessa has about ten times the capacity of Mary). The two million figure was passed on April 24, and the numbers are building fast.
You've been reading about Vanessa; now you can see her. She's about six feet tall, and weighs around 500 pounds.
At the top, you can see the IBM that runs the NewsThumbs web site. Under that, there's a bunch of white boxes, each of those is a 47 gigabyte drive. Then there's one of the computers that manage the data and create the thumbnails, the Silver Surfer box is the machine that goes out to the internet to collect the Usenet news, and then below that are two more machines to manage data and create thumbnails.
Altogether, there's five computers, and about 1,200,000 megabytes.
Another part of my Big Newsgroups project is up and running. You can now access about 30,000 newsgroups, both the text and the pictures, via this web site. Of those 30,000, many aren't of much interest (do you speak Chinese? Russian?), but because different people have different interests, you have to choose which ones will be your favourites.
For about 500 of them, Greta makes the NewsThumbs that we've had for quite a long time. For the others, I've put up access that means that you just point your browser at the 30,000 Newsgroups
The Collector's set of stories are on sale.
We're sponsoring two women to go to to the world powerlifting finals, Sandra Mobley and Suzanne Hartwig. I hope they both do very well, and they'll be bringing back lots of pictures for the web site.
The Ms Olympia will be in Vegas this year; they're including the Mr O in the same event, which should help its popularity. Check out BA's Bashes Message Board, he'll have the latest info there.
Congratulations to MC, who became one of the very few people who know the source of Clepsydra's name.
The big news here, is ... Voice Chat! Yes, you can speak and be heard, and hear the other chatters. You'll need a microphone and speakers on your computer, of course, and the sound quality is atrocious, but I was able to hear Troy's Australian accent, Gaily's dulcet Chicago voice, Andrulla's London vowels, Duke's Southern USA drawl, Boomer's Flatbush accent and others. People kept asking "Who's the one with the British accent", and of course we Brits don't have any accent whatsoever, so I couldn't answer. Grin.
Voice chat is courtesy of Roger Wilco, which is free. I've explained all about it. You go get it, get it working, then while you're in the chatroom you can also chat voice.
Will it replace good old-fashioned typing? I don't think so, because the quality is poor, people can't all talk at once (they can, but then you can't hear anyone), and there's no record of what people said afterwards. But it's noice to hear what chatroom folks sound like.
Would you like to know what people say in the chatroom when you're not there? Would you like to know when people talk about you "behind your back"? You can read and search the Archives, of course, but that can be a time-consuming daily job. Or you can give Clepsydra a list of keywords to scan for, and a couple of hours after the end of each day, she'll send you an email. That email will contain all mentions of your chosen keywords, with a couple of lines before and after to give you the context.
Keywords can be whatever you like, and can include spaces. You can have several keywords if you like. I would suggest that you shouldn't have very short keywords, because if you do, you'll get a *very* long email each day! And if you give your won name as a keyword, then you'll get emailed back everything you said, too.
Member | Posts |
| gaily304 | 4246 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 4017 |
| mike1965 | 3235 |
| boomer444 | 3091 |
| jabb6328 | 2446 |
| tre1313 | 1932 |
| dgt321 | 1646 |
| TomNine | 1602 |
| stretch412 | 1360 |
| jon666 | 1317 |
| tex666 | 1283 |
| 1568pjr | 1257 |
| mit19237 | 1224 |
| dragon321 | 1216 |
| rainer0000 | 1033 |
| cp999dv | 978 |
| jmcst107 | 976 |
| stone001 | 934 |
| Grog | 875 |
| pan314 | 843 |
Gaily is top chatter this month, but Diana the Valkyrie is very close behind, with Mad Scientist in third place.
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| TomNine racked up a remarkable score here, of the on-topic boards. Scooby's popularity has fallen *way* below that. Even the "Session Economics" and "Low cost session" boards, which are pretty much on very similar topics, have a combined total which is greater. | Of the on-topic posters, Tre is the most prolific, with TomNine's board forcing Tom to become pretty garrulous too. |
I'm pretty pleased about the voice chat. I got the idea after I visited a Yahoo Club and saw the chatroom there, with voice as an extra, and it sounded like a pretty cool idea, so I scouted around, found Roger Wilco, and the rest is history.
Quite a few people have noticed that it's a bit like making long distance phone calls for free. And they're right.
A few people commented on my "Internet Spring Clean" April Fool joke. Well yes, of course I know that it's really all done in August while so many people are on holiday.
If you had any difficulty with the "Internet Spring Clean", you might be missing an important plug-in, in which case you should go here
Is Vanessa the biggest web server on the internet? With 1200 gigabytes, there's space for maybe 20 million pictures (there's 2.3 million today). If you've heard of a bigger server, please let me know.
I checked the site statistics. that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of April 2000, there were about 270,000 pictures (13.5 gigabytes), 18.4 gigabytes of video, 3700 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 32 gigabytes.
On Vanessa, the new Newsthumbs server, there's the NewsThumbs, which is another 2.3 million pictures in 166 gigabytes and 2.9 million text files, a total of 173 gigabytes. So Vanessa has got more files than Mary already - that's because Vanessa is carrying more newsgroups.
In addition, on the old Newsthumbs server, there's the old NewsThumbs, which is another 2 million pictures in 155 gigabytes and 2.2 million text files, a total of 161 gigabytes.
