Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.