I like your humor. Well,..............it is a diversion,....but for me, it gave me a ton of ideas for some fiction and humor pieces.

I feel a little bit of your pain......

While I enjoyed photos of naked younger men I wondered how female posters would feel if male writers posted similar photos of naked younger women. I can see why it might have been a real irritating day for many male hetero posters over the age of say 25 lacking washboard abs.

“ ... scarcely qualifies as information ...” ? Wow, I hadn't noticed that shred of informational content you're referring to. I'll have to watch for that. So far it has eluded me.

Personally, what I like is the eerily psychic way in which the forum's organizers just somehow knew, even without me saying it, that although I came to this forum rather than others because it had a paucity of such fluff, the thing I would secretly most like to see added was all that stuff I'd deliberately left behind.

My abs are minus flab thank you............

Admittedly I was being sarcastic. I should mention that by no means did I want to direct that sarcasm at every post on the "Open Call". On balance, though... hrmm.

As a dead ringer for Karl Rove, I was certainly chuffed to see him nominated!

Forget being the sexiest, at my age I'm lucky be alive.

I will point out that the Open Call did allow for the spreading of Lonnie's butt.

:)

That was back in the hey day. Now I've got an actual "middle age spread" which I reserve the right to broadcast from time to time on Lonnie Cam.

Sometimes there's cake.

Dorinda, don't worry about it. To mangle a great cartoon caption: On the Internet, nobody knows that your not a tanned 23 year-old with tousled blond hair, rippling muscles, washboard abs, and a Porsche.

Besides, it's fascinating, I think our choices say far more about us than we're aware.

I think you make a good point, Dorinda. I think the dialogue would be much difrent if we were lookin for the world's sexiest woman. NTL let me say that I'm not threatened at all, but then you haven't seen me naked.......yet.

Well, I got a few private messages (all nice ones, whether they agreed with me or not, I should add). And someone even wrote a whole post called "In Defense of Telling Everybody How, Why, When, and for Whom I Get Erections and Assuming They're Interested" (or something like that), so I thought I might clarify what I was getting at.

I sincerely enjoyed the posts that came from the open call that were illuminating, and I always enjoy the lighthearted stuff too, especially when it's clever as it often is on OS. The posts that challenged conventional notions of sexiness were great reads, as were those touching tributes that opened a window on some remarkable, unsung men.

But there was also a lot of drivel, and when I wrote the post above, the site feed was full of it. I guess I do have some expectations from Open Salon. I expect it to be a fair-sized intellectual cut above a youtube comments thread or a general discussion forum. I expect that it will aspire, most of the time, to be of the kind of quality of Salon.com itself - nearly all the time, those expectations are met or exceeded.

I am all for discussing sex, sexuality, arousal, lack of arousal, nudity, you name it. These are big and important topics in most lives, and learning something new about them - great!

But come on. "He's hot, he's not, he arouses me, he doesn't" stuff is inane at best and puerile (and sometimes strangely narcissistic) at worst, and it's below par for this site.

It just is and I'm not sorry for saying so. An Open Call topic like "Coolest Man Living" or "Most Admirable Man Living" wouldn't have elicited that nonsense.

BTW, I am not claiming that my opinion on this is important or that anyone should care what I think! I was just expressing personal disappointment, is all.

I guess I'm not making any friends here... no more editors' picks for me!

I just now added you as a friend for this one, Jason—making you a liar instead. :)