Okay, okay, I know that my newspaper is no longer under the rule of Creative Loafing. But I’m certain that our former owners would have just eaten up “Shark With A Shark Penis In Its Mouth.” It’s got it all: shark, penis, shark penis. Come to think of it, this video is kind of like the time that Creative Loafing bought the Washington City Paper. At first, we weren’t sure what the shark had in store for us. By the time we caught sight of the turgid, red shark penis clutched in the shark’s mouth, we realized: the shark had come bearing the gift of The Shaft. Too bad about that $40 million hook in your mouth, buddy.

[via Lindsayism]

Tampa’s Creative Loafing Recruits More Bloggers from roblimo on Vimeo.

Last month, TampaBay.com posted this video of a blogger meet-up inside the Tampa Creative Loafing offices. Among the attendees at the City Paper parent-company shindig—I spy red solo cups—was Shawn Alff, CL Tampa’s “Sex and Love Editor” —me, but more Florida-y. Alff, who has written on bothstrong vaginas, and huge penises—and I got all that just by searching “Shawn Alff vagina penis” on Google—appears around the one-minute mark. “What do I expect from the bloggers? I expect a lot of full frontal, to be honest,” he says. “If they want to write for us, they basically have gotta go balls to the wall, have gotta show me what they’re working with. It’s really, it’s part of the job description.”

I guess that explains this?

(Having trouble with the video? Click the “HD” button).

Tomorrow, the fate of our alt-weekly’s ownership may finally be decided, again.  While Creative Loafing brass are hugging it out in Atlanta bankruptcy court, CP staff will be busy proving that we still deserve our paychecks. We’re spending the whole day writing about fucking.

On the Sexist tomorrow: explore D.C.’s massage parlors, porn shops, courthouse weddings, clinics, and pick-up bars with the city’s finest romantics, stalkers, bartenders, activists, and queens.

All sex. All day. Eat it, Tampa.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

The cover of the August 22, 2007 issue of Creative Loafing Tampa was a doozy. Under the guise of a “newbies” guide to Tampa Bay, the alt-weekly fronts a nude photo of editorial interns Ted Scheinman and Brian Reed. The interns stand in the sparkling depths of a man-made waterfall, their hands posed jauntily on their hips. They wear no clothes. Covering their genitals are two triumphantly checked boxes that, to the untrained eye, could appear to be representations of erect penises. Observe:

After finishing their tenure at Creative Loafing Tampa and graduating from Yale, Scheinman and Reed came to work at the Washington City Paper (Scheinman remains as CP’s Online Producer; Reed has since moved on to a Croc Fellowship at NPR). Before my new coworkers even arrived in the District, I heard tell of their cover-boy exploits down South, but I hadn’t actually set my eyes the cover until last week. When the newspaper was unceremoniously dumped in my cubicle, I approached the cover as I would the site of a terrible collision: Not knowing what else to do, I simply stared, wondering why the tears were not coming.

As with any unexplained tragedy, the image piqued my curiosity; I needed to know how and why this had happened. In an interview, Scheinman detailed the genesis of the cover. “It was [Editor-in-Chief] David Warner’s idea. There were a bunch of half-assed ideas being kicked around about the cover, and then [Warner] asked us if we would do this,” says Scheinman. “He clearly was not joking.”

Scheinman and Reed—who had penned an essay for the issue on the “Caliente” nudist resort and community of Land O’Lakes, Fla.—were interested. “We thought about it for a moment, and no one could think of any reason not to,” says Scheinman. Though Reed admits he was nervous the night before the photo shoot—”like the night before the first day of school”—he was comfortable with the idea. According to Scheinman, the pair had become accustomed to lounging together naked while undergrads at Yale. “Oh, yeah, yeah. There’s a seedy subculture In the Ivy leagues of naked, Dionysian revelry,” he says. “There were naked parties.”

Scheinman clearly was not joking.

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