OBLIVION—You've got to hand it to the banks. Accused of the most heinous behavior, under siege from both the right and the left, they continue to steadfastly know their mind when it comes to credit cards and the efficiency with which they've been squeezing people into bloody pulp. At first, I thought they had lost their collective mind because it didn't make sense to me that they would want to make it impossible for customers to continue making payments on card balances, especially when it came to longstanding fools such as myself.

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—In just the past month two of the largest (remaining) adult studios announced their Fall, Winter and, in one case, 2010 lineup of parody productions. The land rush is on and about to get really serious. Expect other studios to fall in line, pronto. There is a limited amount of territory remaining to be staked out and planting a flag in the ground is exactly what those recent, and any future, announcements is all about.

BRISBANE, Australia – We can now declare the global economic downturn a bona-fide depression: Erotic Airways, the three-year-old airline formed expressly for the purpose of providing the adventurous a lift into the exclusive ranks of Mile High Club members, has mothballed its sole plane due to economic hard times.

PORTLAND, Ore. – Blackbox Republic, a new company focused on reinventing the online relationship market, emerged from stealth-mode Wednesday with $1 million in seed funding. The company claims it has created an all-new community exchange platform that combines social networking, event planning, e-commerce and mobile.

The first Blackbox Republic offering will be tailored for members of the world’s sex-positive movement, a large and growing community that is not served by public social networks or transactional dating sites, a spokesman said.

BEIJING - In its continuing campaign to snuff out China-bound pornography on the Internet, the Chinese government has warned companies that provide third party billing that they should cease providing such services to companies that sell pornography and other lewd material online.

The warning, via the police, came on the heels of an investigation into a case in north China's Hebei Province in which people were charged for selling memberships to porn sites using third-party payment services, according to the Shanghai Daily.

TOKYO - The good news is that the user-base for mobile porn is expanding rapidly, and will continue to grow at ever-escalating rates for the foreseeable future; the bad news is that the explosion in porn downloads is overloading mobile networks.

Case in point, Japan, a leader in mobile network infrastructure and investment, which is itself at the breaking point, capacity-wise, due to the 91 million Japanese who now surf the Internet using mobile devices to download movies, music, games and, increasingly, porn.

According to Bloomberg, despite very healthy profits, mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. have been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the country's $74 billion network feels the strain.