The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs. The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43.

The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous.

Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property.

Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? Heat?—start a fire.

Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death. Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators.

Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring.

A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive. Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed.

If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare. Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not.

Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable. Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on) elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours.

In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes—every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down. Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator.

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity.

The elevator is a hybrid, by design. While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. Onscreen, there has been “The Shaft” (“Your next stop.

Is hell”), a movie about a deadly malfunctioning elevator system in a Manhattan tower, which had the misfortune of coming out the Friday before September 11th, and a scattering of inaccurate set pieces in action movies, such as “Speed.” (There are no ladders or lights in most shafts.) Movies and television programs, such as “Boston Legal” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” often rely on the elevator to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life. When filmmakers want to shoot an elevator scene, they will spin the elevator around, like a lazy Susan, so that the character can disembark into a different set. This trick captures something about an elevator ride—the way that it can feel like teleportation. You go in here and come out there, and you hardly consider that you have just raced up or down a vertiginous, pitch-black shaft.

When you’re waiting for a ride, you don’t think that what lurks behind the outer doors is emptiness. Every so often, a door opens when it shouldn’t and someone steps into the void.

This is worth keeping in mind. People don’t like to ride in elevators or wait for them. Many people can’t even get in one, or would really rather not. “They’re not psychotic,” Jerilyn Ross, a cognitive-behavioral therapist in Washington and the president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, said recently. “It’s just a misfiring of the fight-or-flight response.” Elevator phobia is a kind of claustrophobia, and as such the fear is as much of experiencing fear—of having a panic attack, in an enclosed space—as it is of the thing itself.

One of Ross’s board members is David Hoberman, who produced the television series “Monk,” several episodes of which have touched on Detective Monk’s elevator phobia. “I have it,” Hoberman said recently. “It’s for real. I avoid elevators at all costs.” His least favorite are the ones in small doctors’-office buildings, in the Valley. Hoberman has been undergoing behavioral elevator therapy for six months. His therapist began by taking him to the U.C.L.A. Psychology department and locking him in a black box about the size of a phone booth.

The first time, Hoberman lasted just five seconds. After four or five sessions, he could handle ten minutes. Before long, he and his therapist were riding elevators together, all over campus.

He just built a house in Los Angeles, and it has an elevator, because his parents insisted that it will be useful to him when he grows old. “I will never ride in it,” Hoberman said. “I don’t have a fear of dying in an elevator, or of the elevator losing control—I have a fear of being stuck with my mind.”. Nicholas White wasn’t phobic, but he wasn’t exactly fond of elevators. When he was a boy, he and some other kids were trapped in one on their way down from a birthday party in an apartment building on Riverside Drive.

After about twenty minutes, the Fire Department pulled the kids out, one at a time. In his recollection, he was the only person to ask the firemen whether the cables might snap. White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.) After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette.

It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach.

Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes. At a certain point, he decided to open the doors.

He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black.

It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down.

(Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft. He started to call out.

“Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. Is there anybody there?

I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while. Until recently, one of New York City’s most notoriously dysfunctional elevator banks could be found at the Marriott Marquis hotel, a forty-nine-story convention mill in Times Square, built in the early eighties, where glass elevators are arrayed like petals around a stalk of concrete, in the center of a vast atrium. For years, visitors complained of waits of as much as twenty minutes. One morning not long ago, I met James Fortune, the man who designed that elevator system, in the lobby of the Marriott. Fortune, an affable industrial engineer originally from Pasadena, can reasonably disavow responsibility for the hotel’s elevator failings; a decision to put the lobby on the eighth floor essentially doubled the amount of work the elevators had to do to get guests to their rooms.

(“The building’s underelevatored,” he told me, with a grimace. “We did the best we could.”) Fortune is probably the world’s busiest and best-known elevator consultant, especially in the category of super-tall towers—buildings of more than a hundred stories—which are proliferating around the world, owing in large part to elevator solutions provided by men like Fortune. Elevator consultants come in various guises. Some make the bulk of their living by testifying in court in accident lawsuits. Others collaborate with architects and developers to handle the human traffic in big buildings.

Fortune is one of those. Four years ago, Fortune, who is sixty-six, retired as president of the pioneering elevator consulting firm Lerch Bates, but his retirement lasted just two weeks. He couldn’t resist the call of the elevator. He started a new firm, with headquarters in the relatively horizontal and un-elevatored city of Galveston, Texas—the majority of his work is overseas, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and the Houston airport is relatively central. In China alone, there are dozens of cities with a population of more than two million and, Fortune noted, “every city wants an iconic tower.” Persian Gulf cities like Doha and Dubai are a blizzard of elevator jobs. Fortune has done the elevators, as they say, in five of the world’s ten tallest buildings.

While at Lerch Bates, he did the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 Tower, which has the fastest elevators in the world—rising at more than fifty-five feet per second, or about thirty-five miles an hour. The cars are pressurized, to prevent ear damage. He also did Burj Dubai, which, when it is completed, next year, will be the new tallest building, at least until it is supplanted by another one he is working on in the region. Burj Dubai will have forty-six elevators, including two double-deckers that will go straight to the top. (“I love double-decks,” Fortune said.) Adrian Smith, the building’s architect, has grand designs for towers reaching hundreds of stories—vertical cities—which would require a sophistication of conveyance not yet available. Two weeks ago, a Saudi prince announced a plan for a mile-high tower in a new city being built near Jidda—more than twice as tall as Burj Dubai.

Fortune is bidding on that one, too. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high, five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower, called the Mile-High Illinois, in 1956, a kind of architectural manifesto of density. Wright allowed for seventy-six elevators—atomic-powered quintuple-deckers, rising at sixty miles an hour. “I ran the studies once,” Fortune said.

“He wasn’t even close. He should’ve had two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and twenty-five elevators.” While the Marriott’s capsule-like elevators sped up and down, Fortune explained some of the rudiments of elevatoring.

The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business.

It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory. In elevatoring, as in life, the essential variables are time and space. A well-elevatored building gets you up and down quickly, without giving up too much square footage to elevator banks.

Especially with super-tall towers, the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible. This limitation served to stunt the height of skyscrapers until, in 1973, the designers of the World Trade Center introduced the idea of sky lobbies.

A sky lobby is like a transfer station: an express takes you there, and then you switch to a local. (As it happens, Fortune was working on a project to upgrade the Trade Center elevators when the towers were destroyed.) There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it.

Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored. Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops.

Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster.

It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator. An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts. In extreme cases, when the wait becomes actually long, instead of merely perceptibly long, things fall apart. The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife. Fortune took me elevator riding.

Riding elevators, even when you are supposed to be paying attention, for the purpose of writing about them, is a pretty banal enterprise. So it was hard to focus on the matter at hand—not to just ride, expressionless and empty-brained, per usual, noting nothing, except that on the Captivate screen the word of the day was “sitzmark.” Otis has conducted research to find out whether people might better enjoy their time in elevators if it were more of an experience—if it would somehow help to emphasize that they’re in an elevator, hurtling up and down a shaft. Otis found, to little surprise, that people would rather be distracted from that fact.

Even elevator music, designed to put passengers at ease, is now so closely associated with elevators that it is no longer widely used. But there were a few attention-getting features at the Marriott. One was that the glass cabs allow you to see the elevator’s various components, and also how fast you’re going—a thrill or a trial, depending on your temperament or, according to Fortune, your gender. In his experience, most women face the door, away from the glass, to avoid the sight of the mezzanines flying.

The other was the “destination dispatch” system that the Marriott introduced, a few years ago, becoming the first hotel in North America to do so. Such “smart elevators” have now been installed in a dozen buildings in New York, among them the headquarters of the Times, of Hearst, and of the News Corporation. Destination dispatch assigns passengers to an elevator according to which floors they’re going to, in an attempt to send each car to as few floors as possible. You enter your floor number at a central control panel in the lobby and are told which elevator to take. With destination dispatch, the wait in the lobby may be longer, but the trip is shorter.

And the waiting may not grate as much, because you know which car is yours. In Japan, the light over your prospective elevator lights up (“arrival immediate prediction lantern,” in the vulgate of vertical transportation), even if the elevator isn’t there yet, to account for what the Japanese call “psychological waiting time.” It’s like a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender. #unhandledshortcode Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going.

People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button.

That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command. The biggest drawback of destination dispatch, besides the anxiety of novelty, is that once you are in an elevator you cannot change your mind. To amend your floor choice, you must disembark, and start again.

Elevator mind-changing—the sudden lunge for the unlit button—is rare enough; still, the option is nice. Also, when you get used to this system, you get into an elevator with buttons and forget to press one. But sometimes that happens anyway.

Destination dispatch, strictly speaking, was introduced eighteen years ago, by Schindler, the Swiss conglomerate, but a version of it was developed in the thirties, by the A. See Elevator Company, founded by the noted anti-feminist A.

See (“If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains”). Without the microprocessor, however, it was hard to implement. Schindler’s version, the Miconic 10, was developed by an engineer named Joris Schroeder, who has written dense essays about his “passenger-second minimizing cost-of-service algorithm.” Schindler claims that its system is up to thirty per cent more efficient than standard elevators.

The other big manufacturers have come out with similar systems and make similar claims. In each, every bank of elevators has its own group-dispatch logic—which elevator picks up whom, and so on. “They have to talk to each other,” Fortune said. We have to trust that they are reasonable.

The first American building to use smart elevators, the Ameritech building, in Indianapolis, hired mimes to help people navigate the system. They are still rare enough so that the Marriott has an attendant on hand to assist bewildered guests. “It’s tricky putting this system into a building where people are always unfamiliar with it,” Fortune said. “By the time they know it, they leave.” Fortune suggested that we go see 7 World Trade Center, a two-year-old building, of unspectacular height (fifty-two stories, seven hundred and fifty feet), because, he said, “it is the most advanced system going.” The elevators were Otis—Larry Silverstein, the building’s developer, is a longtime Otis man—and their destination-dispatch system is integrated with the security system; it reads your I.D. Card at a turnstile and assigns you to an elevator. “The next phase of this is face-recognition biometrics,” Fortune said. Otis had a full-time mechanic on site at 7 World Trade.

His name was Sean Moran. He was hanging out by the turnstiles when we walked in, and Fortune asked how it was going with the dispatch system.

“People are sheep,” Moran said. “They look, they go.” We rode up to Floor 38, on Elevator D1. Facing down the urge to press a button in a buttonless elevator felt a little like quitting smoking. Fortune explained that, newfangled as destination dispatch may seem, it is in many respects a reversion to the old ways. “This is going to sound crazy, but we’re coming full circle,” Fortune said.

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In the early days, you’d have an operator in each car and a licensed attendant, or dispatcher, in the lobby, who would tell people where to go. The operator typically was a woman and the dispatcher a man, and he tended to know the name, face, and status of each tenant. He could assign elevators to contiguous floors and tell the gals when to leave and direct the boss to an empty, momentarily private elevator. “He was the logic,” Fortune said. When systems converted to automatic, in the middle of the last century, and operators and dispatchers disappeared, that central logician was lost, and lobbies descended into randomness. Fortune and I changed elevators and went to one of the top floors, a vacant expanse with views in every direction: a forest of elevator shafts. The elevator professional sees the city with a kind of X-ray vision, revealing a hidden array of elevator genera—an Otis gearless, a Schindler, a Fujitec.

For him, buildings are mere ornaments disguising the elevators that serve them. Below us was the pit where the Freedom Tower would go, but to Fortune it was ThyssenKrupp, which had recently underbid Otis for the job. Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces.

The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World.

(Its January issue came with 3-D glasses, for viewing its best-new-elevator-of-the-year layout, of the Dexia BIL Banking Center, in Luxembourg.) Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S.

Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.” The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness. The book contains a pair of overhead photographs, part of an experiment conducted by Otis, of elevators loaded to capacity (by design, cabs are nearly impossible to overweight, unless the passengers are extremely tall). In one, a car is full of women, each of whom has 1.5 square feet of space. In the other, there are men as well as women, and each passenger gets 1.8 square feet per person: men are larger, and women, in their presence, try to claim more space, often by crossing their arms.

It is worth noting that, in experiments with prisoners, researchers found that violent or schizophrenic inmates preferred more than fifteen times this area. There’s a higher tolerance in Asia than in the United States for tight rides and long waits. “In China, you’ll get twenty-five people in a four-thousand-pound car,” Rick Pulling, the head of high-rise operations at Otis, told me.

“That’s unheard of here.” Pulling said that at the Otis headquarters in Hong Kong people wait patiently in line for the elevators, behind a velvet rope overseen by an attendant, and cram in. “New Yorkers wouldn’t stand for it,” Pulling said. “He’d have two broken legs.”.

Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day.

To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall.

Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus.

It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp.

Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering.

The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more.

He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall. At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft.

He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up.

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The hatch was locked. A vertical-transportation axiom states that if an elevator is in trouble the safest place to be is inside the elevator.

This holds even if the elevator is not in trouble. Elevator surfing—riding on top of the cab, for kicks—is dangerous. This is why the escape hatch is always locked. By law, it’s bolted shut, from the outside.

It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out. You can get a fair sense of the perils of an elevator shaft by watching an elevator rush up and down one, its counterweight flying by, like the blade on a guillotine. The elevator companies I talked to wouldn’t let me ride on top of a car or get into a hoistway; just to see a machine room, I was required to sign a release and don a hard hat, safety glasses, and steel-toed boots. For a good look at the innards, I had to leave New York, city of elevators, and drive up to Otis’s testing center, in Bristol, Connecticut. The Otis test tower rises twenty-eight stories above an office park, at the base of a wooded ridge.

It’s the only tall building for miles around. Its hazy-day gray color and near-windowlessness suggest a top-secret military installation, a bat tower, or the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one way, it’s the most over-elevatored building in the world; all it is, really, is elevators—twelve test hoistways, plus a regular elevator. That one gets busy. The wait can be as long as thirteen minutes. At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal.

He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.

And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor. A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?” “Yes.” “What are you doing in there?” White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked.

Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer. Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours. He felt a change in the breeze, which suggested that the elevator was moving.

When he felt it slow again, he wrenched the door open, and there was the lobby. In his memory, he had to climb up onto the landing, but the video does not corroborate this. When he emerged from the elevator, he saw his friends, with a couple of security guards, and a maintenance man, waiting, with an empty chair. His friends turned to see him and were appalled at the sight; he looked like a ghost, one of them said later.

The security guard handed him an open Heineken. He took one sip but found the beer repellent, like Hans Castorp with his Maria Mancini cigar. White told a guard, “Somebody could’ve died in there.” “I know,” the guard said. White had to go upstairs to get his jacket. He demanded that the guards come with him, and so they rode together on the service elevator, with the elevator operator. The presence of others with radios put him at ease. In his office he found that his co-worker, in a fit of pique over his disappearance, had written an angry screed, and taped it to his computer screen, for all their colleagues to see.

He went home, and then headed to a bar. He woke up to a reel of phone messages and a horde of reporters colonizing his stoop. He barely left his apartment in the ensuing days, deputizing his friends to talk to reporters through a crack in the door.

White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures.

He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed. Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work.

If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator. ♦.

Come one, come all, to this mutant mutated thingymabob. Okay, I guess I can’t do hyperbolic circus announcer. But, in a sense, this Story of the Month, the thing which I am talking about in this blog, really is a mutant.

Maybe not in the bad, scary, horror genre way that you’d expect. No, I’m talking in an intriguing way that is rarely found within JK. I can recall only one other story in which it was done. I am talking about Fucktoy by Molly. And it’s a poem, actually, not a story. So I guess I should call it Poem of the Month.

Okay, it seems we don’t have a tag for that, so we’ll stick to Story of the Month, and say it in a very excited and excitable way that will hopefully confound and thrill people so much that they won’t notice the difference! Have you forgotten yet? Don’t scroll back up the page! And don’t run away in fright!

This is a professional blog – or so I’ve been told – and we actually will get round to what it’s supposedly about. And I’ve forgotten what it’s about.Scrolls back up. Oh! The poem itself is in an odd form, which may confuse those, like me, who are not avid poem-readers. It’s formed, in the usual way, of stanzas, and in those stanzas are lines, and in those lines are words (Oh yeah, Bebbie, I’m rocking this smart image!).

While most poems rhyme at the end of each line, this one doesn’t – that’s because each line is made up of two, and the rhyme is in the middle, at the end of the first line. Confusing, at first, though if you hear it said out loud, it does help quite a bit. And about thatwait.

I’m getting too far ahead of myself. The content is quite simple – so simple, in fact, that even my brain and I can’t possibly mess it up. I think that sounds like a challenge! It may not seem like good business sense to completely confuse my reader base but, bugger it, I’m committed to this now! The poem is a dazzling, stupendous array, a list as long as my arm – yes, I do have short arms, but still – of things a sub wants her Dom to do to her. She wants to be ‘used and abused’.

Something which wasn’t altogether clear to me at first, but as soon as I realised that that phrase was in every single line (about the fourth read-through) it started to seep into my consciousness. So she likes to be used and abused. Luckily, she provides a list – as long as my arm, in fact.

What a coincidence! – of the things that she wants to be done. Unfortunately, cleaning up my kitchen was not one of them. But she does make up for it in the other bits of the other list.

All of which are sexual. Which was quite a surprise. I was not expecting a fetish poem on an erotica site to discuss sexual activities! It had me all a-flutter. I believe I’ve covered the basics.

I do hope so. Because my food’s getting cold, and I don’t want to do a rewrite! But anyway, I want to move on to the main attraction of the poem.

No, it is not Molly’s buttocks, even though it’s a close call – though you can view said buttocks by going to the JK homepage ( link provided) scrolling down to the roughly the middle of the page, and upon finding E-Quorum’s Choice, look at the picture on the left. If I’m recognizing those legs correctly, then those belong to Molly.

Or, perhaps more accurately, belong to Molly’s Sir. You can then click on the photo to be taken to the poem. Or you can spend five minutes having fun with the hand-cursor, roaming it over the picture. I might have done so The main attraction is not so much the poem, or anything in it. Rather, it is the audio recording of the poem. Performed – unless, again, I am very much mistaken – by Molly.

I couldn’t believe it, when I saw it! As I’ve said, I’ve only seen it on one other story, one of the Kiwi’s, Aphrodite. You’re probably used to that sort of thing, but I’m most definitely not, and as such I was quite tickled pink by it! Really, it’s worth it just for that one bit. Sure, I do have one quibble with it, though it’s a personal thing, and has no bearing on your own enjoyment of it.

The voice sounded exactly like my aunt’s! As soon as I hear that voice I felt myself deflate like a poked balloon. No offence to dear Molly intended, of course, it’s merely that it was so uncanny that it put the frighteners on me!

But, again, that’s a me thing, not something you should have a problem with. Unless we all have the same aunt. One last thing, before I’m put back into my padded cell, the vocal version has a very interesting twist, done right at the very end. The Dom in question – known as Signs – makes an appearance, himself! Granted, for a second I thought that Molly had simply developed a throat infection, which deepened her voice, but as I played it back, there was an American inflection that could not be missed.

Ample evidence that this was another person. But if not, then Molly really should give some thought into becoming a voice actress. But the thing that really excited me? He sounds just like Kiefer Sutherland! Signs is Kiefer Sutherland. I don’t care what you say, he is Kiefer Sutherland!

Here is the link to the poem:. This is JV – signing off. Good morning, my kinky miscreants! Today, like Sam Becket, I set right what once was wrong. You see, this blog is here to provide updates for the site,.

Now, I like to think I do a pretty good job in keeping you all informed. As we’re a very sociable site, we host many activities in the Chat Kingdom. And I feel I have done admirably well in cataloguing them all and highlighting them here.

However, the other week, as I was writing up one blog post while practising my orgasm face, I realised that one had slipped through the cracks (well, haven’t we all slipped through the crack at least once?). Yes, I come here to inform you all of Cornish TUSHIE Pasty. Of Tushie’s Chat event. I could inform you all of Tushie, if you want It was a cold and desolate day in Cornwall – as they all are – when a man was born. He was, literally, born a man. That is the power of Cornish pasties, they can make the gestation period of women last far longer. 18 years longer, to be exact.

And so, on his 18th birthday, Cornish TUSHIE Pasty was ejaculated from his mother’s stomach – much like those weird things in the Alien movies – butt first and amid all the ingredients that make up a Cornish pasty: beef, diced potato, assorted leftover vegetables, swede, onion and ears. And so it was thus that Tushie (variations of his nicknames are ‘Cornish’ and ‘Pasty’ (sometimes with the suffix ‘man’. Imaginative lot, aren’t we?!) was born – into a world of butt plugs, anal vibrators and gimp masks. After his mother left him for a sausage maker, he was rescued by several members of the Cornish Pasty Appreciation Society. Where they all made a pact to raise him as their own.

It was in this most august and secretive society (headquarters can be found in the back of the pub, named ‘Cornish Pasty Lovers Secret Meeting Place’ – or ‘CouPLeS Make Pasties’ for short) that he realised that he only had one love. He wanted to head out into the world, and realise this love. ‘Yes,’ he said, crumbs from the pasty crust falling from his mouth, ‘I shall go forth and realise my love of social events and quizzes.’ And so it became that he joined Just-Kinky, and made the event of ‘I Have Never’.

But it was a very roundabout way of coming into existence. The game ‘I Have Never’ first saw day-light (on the JK, at least) during the Valentines Day ball, and a few weeks later Tushie decided to make it all official, and make it into a weekly event.

The rules are quite simple – and if you’ve ever played this, go right ahead and skip this bit – everyone says something they’ve done, in turn, and everyone else who has done said thing types in:yep (That’s not a typo, but the code-phrase for a specific smilie). Tushie will keep score, and each month participants can find their scores in the corresponding thread. The most innocent kinksters have lower numbers, and the naughtier ones have higher ones. You can also, if you want, make it into a drinking game!

Every time you type:yep you have a shot of the beverage of your choice. Welcome back to all those who skipped the last paragraph.

Now, the particulars. I Have Never is played in the Chat Kingdom (found in the sidebar to the left) every Saturday night at 9pm UK time.

And there you have it! Now, in related news, the Murrican himself, Signs, will be hosting this week’s (Friday 24th June, regular time) JK & Sex Trivia Quiz! That’s it for this week.

I hope you have a great time, and join us in the Chat! Good evening my kinky readers! Yes, I’m back, and first of all I’d like to apologise to my adoring jailers for not posting a blog last week. That was sadly because my laptop died of suspicious circumstances. It was later determined that it was Professor Plum in the Lounge with a Candlestick. If we could all take a minute’s silence in memorial of my old laptop.

I really do expect you to take a minute out of your day and weep in silence. Now that’s over let me tell you about my new laptop! It’s fantastic! It’s got a keyboard that goes pop with every letter I tpye, a Face Recognition program that allows you to log in without the hassle of a password-but no webcam to actually recognise your face with.

But other than that it’s just fine and dandy! It’s that time of year again where we get to play my favourite game. You get two people in a car. No, I’m not talking about dogging. You take a long, long road trip. One person counts the number of Christmas trees on the top of other cars, and the other counts how many car wrecks there are beside the road.

This year, I counted the wrecks. Yes, it’s Christmas time, where young couples and old get to play Mr and Mrs Santa, where you compare who has the bigger bush, Mrs Santa or Santa’s beard. Be afraid, be very afraid if the Mrs wins.

It’s that time of year where you get loved ones presents, and the kids get a puppy. Just make sure you don’t make the mistake I made in actually wrapping up the dog. We had to pretend it was a stuffed cuddly toy. Getting burnt by gravy so that you run around the house with your stained trousers and undies around your ankles yelling at the top of your voice as your sisters beat each other over the head with crackers. Dressing the baby up in a little Santa outfit so that she’s covered in so much fur she looks like the dog in the missing poster up on the tree in our street. It’s a brown and white Yorkshire Terrier that answers to the name of Scampie. If you see this dog please call the owners at 04 However, inspired by, I shall regail you with my own tale of snow drama.

It began last night. My mother was stuck, miles from home in a strange and frightening land that we call ‘Midhurst’. Truly frightening.

It had snowed quite a bit, and the car was sliding to and fro so much (about six inches left and right) that she was left shaking, so she parked, on double yellow lines, no less, and stood there, calling everyone, my sister, me, my dad, her boss, everyone, asking people for a lift and to sort it out for her. When we suggested she go into a shop and ask the locals for numbers for taxi firms, as we had been having trouble finding any, she refused, saying she didn’t want to move! I pointed it out to her that she had to, and she did. After much complaining, but by that time I had muted the phone. Eventually she found a hotel and settled in for the night. The next morning, however, we, my dad and I (for we are the kings of fixing things) got up early and trudged up to the bus stop, so early it was still dark, and waited. After a while, we grew bored of simply waiting, so we decided that, since the incoming cars were driving slowly, we’d go out in to the road and pretend to slip up on imaginary black ice!

That was fun, although I do have a slightly bruised tush. After we became bored of that, we just stared off into the distance, waiting for the telltale orange light bar to appear that would denote a bus was incoming, but eventually we grew so annoyed with every car that had no orange light that we’d start to heckle these cars for no apparent reason other than not being a bus. I wonder what these drivers thought as they came across two men swearing at them, yelling at them, mooning them? Nothing good, I hope.

For an hour and a half we stood, in the freezing wind, for a bus that didn’t come. Because there was a crash on the road to Midhurst. Except, it turned out, there was no crash! But we persevered, with high spirits, for it was quite amusing imagining getting out tennis bats and putting them on our shoes. Eventually we caught a bus to the bus station, which was quite difficult in itself because the bus driver apparently thought I looked quite shady. Because I was wearing an odd hat. It was a Tetley’s Tea hat!

It had a sock monkey on the front! But take us he did, where on the way we encountered several snowmen, who sat at a bus shelter, patiently waiting for the bus! One had a sign on it saying ‘hurry up, next time.’ Whoever wrote that is my hero.

The bus station was a no go. Luckily, there was a taxi nearby, who gladly agreed to take us.

So we heroically braved the journey. Rather, the driver heroically drove, and we heroically acted like passengers, while heroically listened to the taxi driver talk. At the end of it all, after all the talking, the dodgy driving, the talking on his phone, I turned to him and said, ‘You’re a maverick, but I like your style.’ And winked at him. For no apparent reason. I’ve regretted it ever since! Do you know the one thing that we discovered?

It was that the entire road, from home to Midhurst, was entirely passable! Not a speck of snow, slush, sleet or ice. She could have driven herself! But luckily I did not despair. No, that came later. It came when I told my mother about the photos I had taken on the way there. When she said she wanted to see them.

Wanted to see the photos on the same camera that currently stored naughty photos of me. Oh dear Now, my faithfully kinky readers, I bring gifts, juicy gossip, more succulent than the juiciest turkey, more delectable than the roundest breast! For I bring out of my big red stocking, which is currently filled by the beautiful legs JK’s SJ, to bring you such Christmas crackers of gossip and news. First up, it is my delighted pleasure to announce the nuptials of our own!

From the bottom of mine, and the JK team’s hearts, we say congratulations, and wish a very happy ever after! Next up, is the! Yes, it’s that time of year where you’re paired up with someone of the (hopefully) opposite sex and exchange gifts. This year, I have been paired up, thanks to Molly, with Jules.

And because she works so tirelessly, I have given her a slave. Don’t worry, they’re only virtual presents, not real, so no need to get up in arms. Unless you want to be Jules’ slave, that is? I was thinking of getting her a gag to wear, but I doubt she’d get much pleasure out of it. I’d get some peace and quiet!

Anyone have any other ideas what our fine leader should get? (If you do, please email me your thoughts and suggestions). Our dear Signs has very thoughtfully gotten Angie a Caribbean Fetish Fest, featuring tons, literally tons, of black cock. Would they make good gags? I have a feeling Angie would have fun finding out. Sorry, I got distracted.

In other news, LustyLady got Birdy and Kajira a Pulsatron 2 vibrator andandI’m sorry, I must move on from this segment. I can’t concentrate! Our fearless leader, Jules, or Smoochiewoochiepumpkinpie as some often call her, urges me to inform you of our, which, I am reliably informed, is hotting up with frequent visitors.

One visitor, especially, I must illuminate, with one romantic yet sultry post. Signs (who was gifted by Angie a BDSM Holiday in the Secret Santa), wrote: lips ripe and full slighty parted. The tip of her tongue peeks out for just a second to lick the corner of her mouth. I put my hand on the back of her neck and bring her face to mine. And kiss the woman that I love and own so fully and compeletly that she forgets everything but the moment we inhabit. Needless to say, if there is someone you wish to kiss and wants the excuse of mistletoe, I suggest you hop on over to this thread. And should anyone wish to kiss me, well, I wouldn’t say no.

It’s been a while and, to be honest, at this point I’d sleep with a teletubby. Smoochie also informs me that we have a special thread where very considerate people (that explains why I didn’t see it) leave little presents underneath the. For you, dear readers, I leave, not a little snowman, but a puddle with a suicide note written in snowmanish! Because I’m evil that way! I guess that answers my next question on whether I’m on the Phew! I’m tired just from typing all that! But this is the last set, I swear!

Molly, our dear own Molly, Mistress of the quiz, is doing a big Christmas eve quiz friday at 10pm UK time, a reminder that we only have a few more days for members to vote on the 12 stories to see which will be JK’s Story of the Year for 2011, where we take each Story of the Month and stack ’em up, nice and prettified, where you have to throw slingshots at the three you most want to win. Or you could just do the poll thing on the.

My one’s more fun though Lastly, we have the thread, where you still able to nominate people! Don’t even put any thought into it! Just pick and choose people at random. Write the names down, close your eyes and let you hand drop wherever it will. That’s what I did.

It’s just a complete coincidence that it always landed on my name. The categories are, in no particular order: 1. Chat typo of the year 2. Best Avi of the year 3. Most amusing forum poster 4. Most prolific forum poster 5.

Best tag line of the year 6. Best blog of the year 7.

Best/Favourite Story of the year 8. Best/favourite poetry of the year 9. Your favourite writer of the year 10. The thread of the year 11. The funniest thread of the year 12.

Best photo gallery of the year 13. Most thought provoking poster of the year 14. Member you are most likely to turn to for advice 15. Your JK BFF (s) (Best Friends Forever) 16. Most perverse thread 17.

Most insane JK’er 18. Romance of the year 19.

JK member you would most like to meet in person 20. Most missed JK member That’s it for this week. I leave you now with glad tidings and wishes for you all to have a very Merry Christmas. Oh, and Jules and Molls want to say something, too! I bring a very loving Christmas message from our one and only Jules. There, I said it, Jules. When will the whippings end?.Shoves fig higher.

“It’s been quite a year in the kinkdom of JK, this time last year we had just reached over a 100 members, now we stand at 532. We had no internet ranking, then got our first one in April of 12 million, now we stand at just over 180, 000.

More people have come on board to help the running of JK & we get over 300 visitors a day, literally from all over the world. More stories than ever are being submitted to the Erotic Pen & more & more blogs are coming on board the JK blogs roll.

All in all it’s been a great year for Just-Kinky. Of course none of this would have been possible with out the help of the Kinksters. Most importantly my right hand girl MollsI really have no idea why she puts up with me, I’m a mad, grumpy, argumentative perfectionist of a Scouse who never admits to being wrong (well I never am anyways:P) She takes all my flak & personal crap too & yet is still here, for me & for JK. I am not an easy person to live with or deal with I know, So I owe her a huge Thank You, she knows I love her loads too (urghh I will suffer for that last comment) Also a huge Thank You to the Murrican (Signs) who has also put up with a lot from me & whose invaluable help & contribution on JK (especially chat & proof reading stories) I am forever grateful for.

(Please note this does not mean I’ve gone soft on you now Murrican:P) Another significant JK’er who has helped us loads this year is Kinky Kiwi herself Aphrodite, it’s not been easy having meetings when we all live in different countries but we get there in the end. Other special thanks goes to Pasty Man, China, Silky Sam, Angie, Chezza, SJ, Wrathy, Moon & all the Hubsters & E-Quorum Members for keeping the story of the week/month bandwagon going, & of course our very own JV for this JK blog keeping you all up to date with the JK gossip in his own unique way. Looking forward to 2011, it will be an exciting year as the JK Kinkdom expands with 6 sites in one.

I have my own virtual server now & am building just- kinky from the ground up with all our regular features plus a whole stack of new onesalong with JK.we also will have a new story site just-eroticstories.com, a new exclusive online shop just-sinful.com, our blogs will have their very own site just-blogs.com & we will have a personals/dating site just-adate.com. For all those not into the kink or fetish we will also have a vanilla site just-aroused.com. You sign into the main site just-erotica.com and you’re signed into all of the sites, so it really will be the ultimate erotic playground for everyone. In the meantime I will sign off with a Christmas Wish for you allHave A Very Kinky, Sexy, Christmas & A Very Naughty New Year. Anyone want a kiss under the Mistletoe, you know where to find me (wink) xxx Keep up the good work JVthis blog is now yours again lol.

Thank you for letting us take over it for a bit xxx”.Mutters could’ve tidied the place up a bit though. Thank you, Smoochie, and yes, you will suffer!

That brought a tear to my eye, it did. The message was nice, too!

And now, from our Molly, who is a lot nicer, and a lot less rough: So JV is demanding some sort of Christmas message from me to post on the JK blog, so my comment is, when are you going to leave me alone?I don’t have time for Christmas messages or well wishes, I have to get ready, he will be here on Sunday, do you have any idea how much time and effort it takes to get ready for him, well do you? I have to make scones, and shave my legs, and find suitable sexy lingerie to wear. I have to wash my dressing gown (don’t ask, it’s just me being weird) and all whilst organising The Hub and the JK story review team, posting secret Santa’s and writing a Christmas quiz, making sure story of the week goes up and don’t lets for forget Jules, I have to manage her too. Anyway, here goes, Happy Christmas all you sexy kinksters, it’s been a great year at JK, I have made so many wonderful friends and laughed so hard that I nearly peed my pants on a number of occasions. I love you all, even the silent lurkers amongst you. Without you, ALL of you, JK would not be the site it is and Jules and I would just have to spend our days being nice to each other.

Thank you to all of you, for saving me from that. Happy Christmas to you all, and may the New Year bring you as much kinky sex as you can manage. Mollyxxx Thank you, Molly. Here’s a tip: Don’t bother shaving! It’s winter, it’s cold. You’d be forgiven! I end this post (finally) on a carol, Twas The Night Before Christmas, and a sort of soliloquy, which I believe was written by one of my favourite writers, Matthew Stover.

Twas the Night before Christmas Poem Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads. And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap, Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a miniature sleigh, and eight tinny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St Nick. More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, on Donner and Blitzen! To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!

Now dash away! Dash away all!” As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too. And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof The prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head, and was turning around, Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound. He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot. A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow. The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.

He had a broad face and a little round belly, That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly! He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself! A wink of his eye and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.

And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose! The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skin, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truth of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know. Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day’s harsh light.

But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because is day that is temporary. Day is the illusion. Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the centre of its own self. With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins. The dark is generous, and it is patient.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt. The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout. The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light. The dark’s patience is infinite.

Eventually, even stars burn out. The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the mid-day sun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow. The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins-but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars. And, in the words of a very wise man: Christmas is a magical occasion. A special time that should be celebrated in the bosom of one’s family. Or the nearest bosom.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good hump!