For those of you who didn’t realize that Philadelphia was the sexual technology Mecca of the East coast, check out this msnbc story about two women who were arrested for running a “sex dungeon” out of their residential “computer solutions” storefront. This local flavour story was brought to national spotlight [sic] by my local NBC affiliate, who didn’t even bother to blur out the number on the store’s sign. Good job, guys.

Philadelphia’s NBC10 news crew is the largest local collection of yellow journalists and hyperbole artists that i’ve ever had the opportunity to witness in action, and their newscast tends to be aimed directly at people who circle Access Hollywood and Wheel of Fortune in their teevee listing every week (which is a double whammy, because not only are those two syndicated gems typically aimed at the lowest possible denominator possible, they tend to be on at the same time every night and thus don’t generally require circling). Lead stories on their news teasers feature (in this order) (without fail) death, fire, breaking news on weightloss, & NBC-centric entertainment news. This station followed each NBA Championship game with a half-hour of local coverage featuring reporters standing in every sports bar in the Greater Philadelphia Area rather than run the normal nightly news or the NBC post-game show. They break into soap operas to report a dusting of snow that had been forecasted the night before. Their anchors are local glamourpusses who marry local politicians and are in-turn reported on by local gossip columns. In other words, it’s a quality all-American news organization that focuses on the subject-matter that an alarming number of Philadelphians actually care about.

Please don’t fail to take note of the wholly unspecific and incidental (though ironically written) reporting on this story by Lu Ann Cahn, who recently reported on a “Flash Fire” at Drexel that was really a small propane tank explosion. Aside from her tantalizing lead-in mention of the women possessing a “large knife,” there’s the explicit name-dropping of “medical bondage.” Unless Lu Ann has mistaken “bondage” for the ever popular “masochism” angle of S&M, i can’t imagine what she meant by “medical bondage” other than maybe wrapping ace bandages around unusual body parts. My favourite part of of the article was, without a doubt, friends and neighbors who didn’t mind the (apparently) openly operated sex shop as long as “they would be dressed real nice” and that their customers were “guys in Mercedes.”

B&D, S&M, E&P, and the shocking news about your favourite Friends star’s personal life, tonight on NBC10 at 11! And, for more unsual explorations of sex and computers, head over to Ernie at LYD, who blogged the article all the way from California.