A group that we'll call "Mountain View Legion of Decency" (MVLD) has decided that at least one of the images that was included in our "Shirtless Hunks" gallery was, well... not what they consider decent.

Their decisions on these matters are final and not something that can be appealed. Unfortunately for us, what they think makes a difference because the outfit has something frightfully close to monopoly control over small web sites like ours. It means they can come awfully close to shutting us down.

We doubt that anything we do will make a difference to MVLD, but -- just in case -- we've decided to do our best to satisfy the MVLD by adulterating pictures that might be deemed offensive by the non-governmental censor. We're calling the process of altering the photos "googeying" to call to mind a 1950s architectural style called "googie". MVLD seems to opporate on and seeks to impose upon the web 1950s mores that were common at the same time "googie" architectural style had become common.

It strikes us as appropriate to use the made-up term "googey" to refer to the censorship we're encouraged to undertake because that architectural style developed at a time of significant semi-official censorship, but the style saw itself as forward-looking and ultra modern.

We've so far googied only one of the pictures in the gallery, but there are several others to which we'll give the treatment during the next few weeks.

We will, however, make the original un-googied versions of the montages available in a new gallery. Images in that gallery will, however, be available after next week only to registered members of this site.

We do it that way only to avoid offending MVLD by having them on a fully public page (which MVLD doesn't like).

Membership to the site is free and easy to set up. Click the Join link in the upper right of this or any page. And don't worry about giving out your email address. We won't trade it, sell it, or use it to send ads to you. In fact, we've never yet used one of those addresses for anything at all except to maintain unique set of users.