The Daily Newds

• Five years ago an application was approved to convert a UK nursery into a "leisure" facility. Turns out that it's actually a resort for naturists, and when someone saw a "naked bloke being chased by a woman with a stick", a few eyebrows were raised. Although the locals are not happy that the proposed use of the facility was somewhat misrepresented, the license will not likely be challenged because "it is difficult to argue that the description of the site as a leisure park is incorrect."
• The battle against unrealistic body image goes on. Artist Amanda Koster photographs normal nude human beings in an attempt to get beyond the skin and reveal the true person.

  I don’t see the nudity anymore. I see a person who has boldly gone where she has never been before. She is naked, with strangers, in front of my camera. Naked, nervous and free. The only other time a professional photographer may have taken her picture was at her wedding, or in high school in front of a lame backdrop. Calculated and predictable. Controlled.

• The University of Vermont newspaper has an article on the recent Naked Bike Ride here.

  The participants of UVM's nude bike race were lacking little in the creativity department helmets, bikes and bodies alike were decorated in everything from banana-hammocks to war paint. Luckily, from what I saw, everyone had decided that wearing shoes would not violate the act of being completely naked.

• Are you an Aries? If so, you have nudity in your future.
• Lots of nudity related aspects to this year's Academy Award nominees. Helen Mirren is nominated for Best Actress, and although she is always fully covered as "The Queen" she has a history of not being shy in front of the camera, and is living proof that sixty is still sexy. Kate Winslet, also nominated for Best Actress, is nude in "Little Children". "Babel" is nominated for Best Picture, and its young actress Rinko Kikuchi is nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Kikuchi appears completely naked in the film, symbolic of her need to get attention and to shed the dark secret she holds within. It's a very brave performance. Peter O'Toole could finally win an Oscar for his performance in "Venus", where he plays an aging womanizer who falls for a girl fifty years his junior, and talks her into posing nude for a life-drawing class. And finally, "Borat" is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, but there should have been a special Oscar awarded for the nude wrestling scene that is gross, gratuitous, and excessive, but rolling-in-the-aisles hilarious.
• Julie Atlas Muz takes her exhibitionism to the extreme, whether as a burlesque queen, a dancer, or a visual artist. One time she attended a museum show wearing only some glitter.

  "I literally didn't know what to wear," she says. "I just wanted to feel comfortable. I wanted to one-up everyone, feel on top of my game. When you exist in a subculture, you don't really realize how shocking you are. I've been hanging out in a nightclub with heels and a G-string for years. Why not a museum? It seemed perfectly normal to me." She marvels that naked ladies in public spaces can shock so much: "It's still pretty much as radical as it was in the 1400s."

• The Collegiate Times has a good editorial on the unconstitutionality of censorship here.

  Censorship should not trump the first amendment as the law of the airwaves. Censoring swearing, nudity and violence won't make them go away. The vast majority of the population can do without the bleeps and blurs. The first amendment gives the gift of speech. To surrender that gift is a failure in the principles of freedom.

• All the brouhaha over the Dakota Fanning rape scene is apparently much ado about nothing.
• An Australian club allows women in with bare midriffs, but not men. "Certain things are acceptable and certain things aren't acceptable" said a spokesperson.
• Your tax dollars at work. Officials in Escondido, California, are putting the hammer down on adult businesses such as nude dancing clubs. 1500 letters were sent out to local residents, but only one person came to speak against "seedy businesses", although "several" people called or wrote in support of stricter guidelines. The only problem with this scenario is that there are no adult businesses in Escondido, and no businesses have applied to locate there. "But we have to operate in the theater of the possible", said Commissioner Guy Winton.
• The New Hampshire state legislature is strengthing the language of the breastfeeding law in order to make it more clear that the act is not indecent exposure, public nudity , a nuisance, or disorderly conduct.

  "Lots of people still get freaked out by it, and I don't know why," said Rep. Christopher Serlin, a Portsmouth Democrat who is the prime sponsor of the bill. "Nobody would ask a woman bottle-feeding to go do it in the bathroom."

• Nude snowshoeing is an activity that never occured to me.
• The Terra Cotta Inn received a glowing e-mail from a couple of first-time nudists, who asked that their names be withheld.

  Word of mouth in the nudist industry is still terrible. Where else do you find people who have one of the best vacations of their lives and are too terrified to tell anyone else about it?

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