Above: Marlon Rodgers' prototype machine - from "The Sex Machines" by Timothy Archibald

Monday - Fun With Music Day
Tuesday - Guest Star Day
Wednesday - Anything Can Happen Day
Thursday - Circus Day
Friday - Talent Round-Up Day

- “The Mickey Mouse Club” days

Ah, a warning. For no reason except that’s the way it turned out, today seems to be sex and nudity day on fhb, so if you find graphic imagery and content offensive, better to skip the blog today, okay?

Okay.

First up, found via Boing Boing, is “The Sex Machines – Photographs and Interviews from the New Mechanical Sexual Revolution” by photographer Timothy Archibald.

“While researching a story about garage inventors in the spring of 2002, I came across a small web community for inventors of sex machines. The amateur snapshots of the inventors’ machines posted on the site seemed perfect to me… Often located in tiny suburbs… the inventors led me to meet the lovers and users of the machines.”

As opposed to the imagery on fuckingmachines.com, which has all the eroticism of an industrial accident, and which link I'm not bothering to provide, although you can easily find it, the photographs in “The Sex Machines” are strangely touching and even comforting… a dildo mounted on what appears to be a converted weed whacker, posed in a driveway near a lawn mower… a couple comfortably entwined on the couch, settling in to an evening watching television, with a sex machine called “The Joyrider” in the foreground. Pets wandering into the shot of a sex machine as if the picture were being taken of the family car.

“Eventually I went to the garage and put together our first machine. It was powered by an electric drill. It was clunky and not smooth at all, but Jenny and I got busy, making love together and using the machine like it was another partner and it was dynamite…”

“…I bring Jenny home a cup of coffee and she just lights up, it’s like like it makes her day. And being married, one thing I’ve learned is how to keep the wife happy. Hahahaha. I guess that’s how this whole business started.”

One of my favorite quotes is from JBS Haldane, “The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.” As I get older, I find that sentiment true for many things, love and its many permutations chief among them.

It’s well worth a visit. Note that the site is a 1.5 MB Flash site, so expect a little load time. Although not linked to “Sex Machines”, probably for obvious reasons, Archibald’s home site is also a good tour.