The Daily Newds 2/28/09

• I've always said that when it comes to nudity, there's safety in numbers. In a recent sexting incident at a Connecticut junior high school, charges are not being filed in part because "so many people were involved in disseminating the photo."
• Southwest Airlines is taking heat from some passengers because they are offended by flying on a Boeing 737 painted with the image of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Don't these people ever go to the beach?

  "Does anyone else find this kind of trashy for Southwest?" asked one customer on the carrier’s blog. "Having a woman in a bikini on the side of the plane hardly seems like the epitome of the friendly, down-home airline I’ve grown accustomed to."

• Organizers of the Bay to Breakers event have backed down on banning floats, nudity and booze because of an effective opposition campaign.

  Ed Sharpless of the group Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers said they got everything they wanted. “We’re pleased with the outcome. I think it’s a victory,” he told the Guardian. “When you have over 20,000 people join your group in two weeks, it’s means something.”

• Has it really come to this? A columnist instructing people on how to shoot better photos equates innocent childhood nudity with porn.

  Photo labs will report any photos to the police that might be of a questionable nature. Questionable photos that people may take of children are particularly scrutinized these days. Under no circumstances should you either take, or circulate photos that might, in any way, be interpreted as pornographic or suggestive. I would think that would certainly include any and all nude photos of minors. The days of those baby-in-a-bathtub shots are long past!

• What's it like lying naked for a Jack Gescheidt TreeSpirit project?

  My friend Maria Tonione from the East Bay was on her stomach next to me, her head on my calves and one hand between someone’s legs. The pebbles dug into my hip and I shifted onto my stomach. Toes wiggled against my leg. “I feel the wind,” Maria whispered. Knowing what part of her body she felt the wind with, I laughed and it hurt a little.

• Naked female breasts are causing way too much commotion in Vassalboro, Maine.
• Robin Weiss is obsessed with pubic hair.

  Weiss visited zoos to peer at the groins of our closest relatives. He noticed that in other great apes, hair in the pubic region was if anything much finer and shorter than elsewhere on the body - the opposite of the human situation. It supported his argument that human pubic hair is different and probably unique, both in its evolution and in its physical appearance and purpose.

• "Skin tax" proposals are increasing as politicians seek new ways to pad their revenue coffers, but the First Amendment protections of free expression have stalled legislation.