The line between "porn star" and "prostitute" is actually less blurry than you think, and Playboy would like to keep it that way. Not that Playboy wants to call their Playmates 'porn stars', either, but a lawsuit filed proves they won't stand by Playmates being called prostitutes. A Canadian escort website is using the word "playmate" to describe their staff, and Hef wants to make sure that 'playmate' only applies to his nude models, and they're much too wholesome to be associated with prostitution. His claim is that calling the escorts 'playmates' sullies the character of his trademark - yes, 'playmate' is trademarked, despite kindergarten teachers using it as a gender-neutral descriptor of friendship for decades - and wants the escort service to stop. No word yet on whether the Canadian hookers have a resonse, but I'm betting that response will be polite.

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Canada is suffering a lack of homemade porn, and the National Post wonders why don't porn makers move to Toronto? Given the anti-porn status of California's lawmaking, Toronto would love to lure some porn makers away from Las Vegas and the other cities benefitting from porn studios on the move.

One problem, though: unlike the film industry's love for Vancouver, I don't know that the porn industry will find the same benefits. Toronto has long, cold winters, a lack of outdoor swimming pools, and lacks the 'cool' factor of Vegas and the California coast. And the biggest drawback: you gotta film porn where the porn stars are. Chicago has its own porn industry, but if you want to work with talent, you go to the talent, not the reverse (unless you make it worth their while, which means a bigger budget). Everything grows slowly, Toronto, but you'll make it: start cultivating your porn stars now, and someday, some way, you'll become a porn capital yourself!

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Remember how Canada requires more home-made porn? Well, that's kinda hard unless you have the pornstars to film. Pegas Productions, a Quebecian...Quebecer? Quebecois, I guess -- anyhow, a Q-town Canadian porn studio was short on male stars, so they set up "Male Porn Star School" and manufactured some stars of their own. For $149, candidates where put through basic training on what the porn job entails, beyond "stick your penis here." Because, as the dozens of rejected candidates learned, being a porn actor is a business, you don't just jump in unprepared.

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A while back I posted about a TV channel in Canada broadcasting 50% Canadian porn, but today I learned that it's not much higher than the normal requirement. Canada's CRTC requires at least 35% Canadian content -- even on the porn channels -- and some of the erotic video isn't meeting the minimum requirements. The porn channels claim it was a mathematical error (it sounds like they were aiming for 33.3%) but they'll do better next time. The other complaint was that there wasn't enough closed-captioning and audio description of the performance for the hearing impaired, which is a job I wholeheartedly volunteer for, if in lieu of pay I get Canadian citizenship, where I can watch all the Canadian porn they broadcast.

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Late-breaking news, just in time for Christmas: Canada's Supreme Court has struck down their anti-prostitution laws. As I understand it, the votes were strictly divided along species lines, 8 polar bears to 11 caribou, with the penguins abstaining because penguins are not native to Canada, god damn it. But, anyhow, if you find yourself in Winnipeg, your whores are now legal, so you can avoid the troubles this guy finds himself in:

Wait - those still exist? In a time of private video booths, online porn, and DVDs by mail, pornographic movie houses still exist. Well, at least in Canada, but the article doesn't delve into south-of-the-border facilities. The best part of the article are the proprietors: "It's porn which has kept the most beautiful theatres open," says L'Amour's owner, Steve Koltai. After decades, telling people he runs a sex cinema is still awkward. Koltai says the question he hears most is, "Who cleans up?" "Everything evaporates," he replies. If you drop a Jujubee, let it go, man, because it's gone.

The Sexapalooza people would like you to know that they're making Hamilton Ontario a naughtier place today and tomorrow, hopefully producing the same sort of erotic assault that they did in London last month. Still to fucking far away for me to attend, but you horny bastards in Buffalo can grab your passports and head for the border.

No, you don't get to touch them. No, you don't get to make them clean the toilet. But for $125 Canadian (or $500 US), a naughty maid will come dust and clean your house. I think this is asking for a lot of cute maids to end up sexually assaulted, so I hope they have some safeguards in place - because this is the awesomest cleaning service ever.