Make love, not porn, because if you live in the Ukraine, you'll get fined and sent to jail. Tuesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko signed a bill into law, making the possession of pornography a criminal offense in the country.

I first heard of the report while watching the Russian news network last night and my immediate reaction was: "WTF?" Thinking the announcement couldn't possibly be true and must have been Russia's unfunny way of mocking my birth country, I hopped onto the Internets, only to find --10 seconds later -- reports of the aforementioned law.

"But what constitutes 'pornography' in the Ukraine?" I wondered. And the only definition I could find was one claimed by XBizNewswire to have been featured in the 2003 legislation, which states, "Pornography is vulgar, candid, cynical, obscene depiction of sexual acts, pursuing no other goal, the explicit demonstration of genitals, unethical elements of the sexual act, sexual perversions, realistic sketches that do not meet moral criteria and offend honor and dignity of the human by inciting low instincts." Hmmm. Not at all subjective.

A new survey out of Indiana University found that 53% of women and nearly half of men have used a vibrator at some point in their lives.

The New York Times reports that "The researchers attribute the widespread use to easier availability and a cultural shift away from the bad ol' boy, Triple-X-rated sex toy industry. Vibrators are now sold at Wal-Mart, 7-Eleven and CVS; new Internet sites for sex products feature middle-aged models and aim at mainstream couples. Several companies market sex toys to women as young as sorority sisters and as old as postmenopausal golden girls through Tupperware-style home parties."

Did they just say Tupperware-style home parties? With the job market in shambles, "business opportunities" are generating strong interest, but as I recently wrote, they tend to be badly overrated and over-sold.

The sex toys party plan companies may be the more legitimate cousins of MLM. If you think it might be something worth looking into, there are actually a bunch of companies: Pure Romance, Passion Parties and Athena's Goddesses, along with a number of other smaller companies.

For things to look out for when evaluating these kinds of opportunities, be sure to check out Jon M. Taylor's 12 Tests For Evaluating a Network Marketing (MLM) "Opportunity". (It's a PDF File, so it may take a minute load.)

It's been a pretty amazing week for snack foods. In addition to delivering nacho cheese and big, crunchy flavor, Frito Lay's Cheetos and Doritos brands have also been offering a hearty helping of domestic warfare and illicit sex.

No, this trend isn't part of a new prize promotion, although it is worth asking what, exactly, the company has been putting into its snacks. In Shelbyville, Tenn., for example, one of Frito Lay's products apparently inspired a couple to go face-to-face in a battle royale. Their weapon of choice? Cheetos.

Yes, Cheetos. The little orange squiggles of corn, oil, and fake cheese are, apparently, a major incitement to violence. According to Cpl. Kevin Roddy of the Bedford County Sheriff's department, 40-year-old James Earl Taylor and 44-year-old Mary S. Childers were involved in "a verbal altercation" that escalated until the two were hurling puffy cheese crunchies at each other.

It hasn't been a fun month, I'd imagine, for anyone with a corner office at Abercrombie & Fitch's rugged New Albany, OH headquarters. The company reported a 22% drop in net sales for May -- and this week, the story of London store employee Riam Dean surfaced.

Dean, 22, was allegedly moved from a sales job to a stockroom post -- away from the eyes of shoppers -- after her managers discovered she had a prosthetic arm.

Yes, it's been the kind of month that might make even the biggest cheerleader of an executive gaze out the window and think, Maybe we should just shut this thing down.

In this case, yeah -- maybe you should.

David Beckham is so 1998. The new face of soccer chic is Cristiano Ronaldo, who like Beckham before him, parlayed a superstar career in English football at Manchester United into a massive contract with Real Madrid. The 24-year-old Ronaldo celebrated his just-signed, $131 million contract by hitting the Los Angeles club scene with Paris Hilton and taking his scantily clad lounge-chair lizard routine, already famous in the European tabloids, into the American press.

Pay close attention. You'll be spending your money on his look next season.

Because the pretty-boy Portuguese striker looks so good in skin-tight, teeny tiny shorts (click here and here for two humiliating images), now you're going to have to learn to wear them as well. That's because after the images of Ronaldo playing at a Beverly Hills pool were published, thereby earning the American stamp of approval, British stores reported that sales of the male hot pants style have more than doubled.

It's a tough time to be a hooker, and I'm not just talking about Ken Lewis.

The Associated Press reports that "Like so many other businesses, Europe's largest legalized prostitution industry is having to adapt to the economic downturn. Customers are fewer or more frugal, competition has increased, and more clubs and brothels are offering discounts to drum up business."

The AP piece focuses on Berlin, where one lady of the night says the prostitutes are sticking with the standard $110 minimum for sex, which could possibly raise concerns about collusion and anti-competitive price-fixing.

In addition, brothels offering the ladies a fixed salary are inundated with applications as once-proud freelancers realize the glory of a possibly smaller but more dependable paycheck.

Bargain basement love shacks are also doing a brisk business -- benefiting from the same trade-down effect that has helped Aeropostale grow at the expense of Abercrombie & Fitch's tanking same-store sales figures.

But if you're out of work and upset that US laws make this profession inaccessible, take some comfort in this: One Berlin prostitute said she was planning to move to the East Coast of the United States where you can make just as much money as a stripper without exposing yourself to the risks associated with prostitution.

I'm familiar with the term "sing for your supper," but the Black Frog Restaurant in Maine offered a deal on a meal that opened my eyes.

According to InventorSpot.com, the restaurant offered a free meal to any patron who took a naked dive off the adjacent dock. The meal? A free Skinny Dip sandwich (Prime rib on a baguette).

Fortunately or unfortunately, as your tastes dictate, the Black Frog is no longer able to offer the deal after the city, reacting to complaints, deemed the activity inappropriate (what a surprise).

I guess the line falls somewhere between the Black Frog and Hooters. I don't see any indication that the Black Frog did any quality control, and I can't get the image of the jacuzzi scene with Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt" out of my mind. In my case, I might have been able to score a free meal by promising to keep my clothes on.

Would you strip for a meal? How good would the meal have to be? Are you aware that every person in America now owns a camera phone?

In Southern California's "Little Saigon," Vietnamese coffee shops are busily developing the next generation of caffeine delivery. Part cafe, part Victoria's secret fashion show, they are doing great business, despite the recession.

Tina Nguyen, a waitress at one establishment, describes the cafe's motif as "Starbucks meets Hooters."

This seems fairly accurate: like Starbucks, the cafes have a narrow menu of coffee, iced tea, and smoothies. Moreover, while it is hard to characterize rich, creamy Vietnamese coffee as a health food, the absence of quesadillas, burgers, and other high-calorie Hooters specialties definitely places the institutions in the context of Starbucks' comparatively health-conscious clientele.

The double entendre is so thick, it's triple.

A threesome? You see, we can't help ourselves. Because Mars' new "Fling" -- the first new chocolate bar the company has introduced in 20 years -- is just dripping with sexual innuendo. What's a word more in-your-face than "innuendo"? Outuendo?

The commentators at NPR go for "creepy." The problem doesn't lie in just in the ads, which seem to depict strangers having sex in a dressing room (they're actually in adjacent dressing rooms and the woman is only eating chocolate). Nor is it wrapped up in the "pleasure yourself" messaging or the "naughty, but not that naughty" tagline. No. It's right there in the description of the candy as "chocolate fingers."

As Lisa Johnson, co-author of a book on marketing to women, says: calling it a "finger" takes your mind somewhere else entirely (for me, 10th grade, when I was horrified to learned what the verb form of the word was in teenage vernacular). She says, it's just like your sweet old uncle who starts asking you weird questions.

I say, it's like being a 10th grade goody-goody and suddenly questioning a bunch of once innocent-seeming phrases uttered by your classmates. I mean, a whole ingredients list worth of double meanings, from "chocolate" to "sugar." And do you know what? That packaging looks to me like a feminine hygiene product. Whoa, pink overload.

This product's marketing is wrong, all wrong, and whoever developed it should be sent back to the 10th grade. We may love chocolate but we don't make love with chocolate. Honestly.

NPR contributor Nancy Goldstein has calculated the "gay tax" -- the amount gay couples must spend to receive the same services that married heterosexual couples can count on everyday. In a column, she writes:

The cost of love isn't an abstract concept in my household: It's precisely $1,820 per year. That's the "gay tax" we shell out for me to be on my wife's health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income.

Goldstein adds that "The media's primary focus on the morality debate around same-sex marriage means that most of the public, gay or straight, knows little about the very real economic costs of inequality."

The largest costs of marriage inequality also tend to be the easiest to quantify: Social Security survivor benefits denied, joint tax returns not filed, and many, many other cost savings that most married couples probably don't even think about.

Once, twice, three times a charm for Greenwich investment-firm chief Stephen Dent. The married heir to the Dupont empire has been extorted three times through the online sugar daddy website SeekingArrangement.com. Dent, 54, whose fortune is estimated at $100 million, lost a mere $200,000 on hotel trysts and web chats with wily women who saw that this was one sugar daddy to milk. The cost of a potential Dupont divorce for marital unfaithfulness? Priceless.

In one case Dent spent $15,000 for sex with a sugar baby he met on the website, a fee which makes Eliot Spitzer's $1,000-an-hour downfall look like a bargain. But unlike Ashley Dupré, who didn't know she was shacking up with the Governor, three separate women involved with Dent sniffed a goldmine and went on to threaten blackmail by exposing his philandering ways unless he kept the checks flowing.

In March 2008, a Queens resident pleaded guilty to extorting $40,000 from Dent, who had committed lewd acts with his girlfriend. Dent went on SeekingArrangement.com again, and was blackmailed by an Ohio couple who took him for $100,000 by threatening to release photos and e-mails of the tryst. And according to court records, a third woman extorted Dent for $9,000.

Forget knives and handguns, slingshots and the atom bomb; the world's most dangerous weapon is still the human libido.

As far back as Homer's Odyssey and the Old Testament, lust was the go-to weapon when arrows and armies failed. Even today, Sirens can still draw men to wreck their boats and Delilahs can easily convince them to get dangerously bad haircuts.

The latest arena for libidinous trickery may well be Facebook. According to a recent article on Consumerist, a debt collector has been posing as a flirty Facebook Lolita in an attempt to keep tabs on some of the site's male users. Excerpting a conversation between Bryan Passifiume, a freelance writer and photographer, and "Jenny Anderson," a woman in Vancouver, BC, the article suggests that Anderson is actually a decoy that was designed to make it possible for skip tracers to observe the movements of some of their debtors.

The effects of the recession have reached all the way to the bottom of the trickle down economy. Brothels in Germany, where such businesses are legal, have been forced to resort to some imaginative marketing to stem the steady withdrawal of its Johns.

According the The Independent (U.K), those in search of a little something something are finding a buyer's market. Some red light establishments are offering free shuttles, discounts, and day passes. A Berlin club has started to offer a flat rate, $90 early-bird special; unlimited food, drink and sex between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Another club manager has so far refused to cut prices, although the standard Sunday and Monday 50% discount for taxi drivers and seniors remains in effect.

A Hanover madam reported that her house's income was a flaccid 70% of pre-recession levels, while other clubs had lost up to half of their clientele. The estimated 400,000 registered ladies of the night bring in around $17.8 billion annually, or $44,500 per worker.

Many German cities depend on the sales tax from prostitution. If the working girls don't start spend more time flat on their backs, the cities might find themselves in just that position.

Robin Hood, if he ever existed, has been dust for centuries. However, his legacy -- the myth of the populist criminal -- continues to thrive. In the 1930's, rural bandits like Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger were folk heroes to poor farmers who felt abused by the banks. A few decades later, marijuana-toking free spirits were the order of the day for 1960's and 1970's anti-establishment types. These, in turn, were replaced by slick, well-educated corporate criminals like Ivan Boesky, Martha Stewart, Michael Milkin and Sam Waksal. Each generation seems to choose its criminal avatar to represent its ideals and desires.

Today, the popular anger at Bernie Madoff, Dick Fuld, Allen Stanford and John Thain suggests that the era of the corporate criminal is coming to an end. Whereas the ability to defraud thousands of investors was once perceived as the prerogative of clever money men, it now smacks of unfair privilege and anti-social abuse. The question is, if the master schemer is out, who is going to replace him?

One likely candidate is the hipster grifter. Young, urban, sophisticated and amoral, the grifter lands somewhere between Charles Bukowski and David Bowie, and seems to view his (or more precisely, her) crimes with ironic attachment.

Woody Allen sued trendy clothier American Apparel for $10 million, alleging that it used his image on a billboard without his permission, thus damaging his reputation.

The case is set to go to trial and American Apparel's defense appears to be to make fun of Woody Allen, suggesting that his image was so compromised by his own sexual misadventures that there was really nothing left to damage.

"Woody Allen expects $10 million for use of his image on billboards that were up and down in less than one week. I think Woody Allen overestimates the value of his image," American Apparel lawyer Stuart Slotnick told The Associated Press. "Certainly, our belief is that after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America's desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is."