Ace Bannon

See for yourselves…

Last week I announced the rebranding and relaunch of XcoMedia.com. This week we’re bringing you the rebranding of MeccaMen.com — this time the site keeps the existing look and feel (and all that great content!) but gets the Ace Bannon seal of approval.

I’m also taking this opportunity to announce our partnership with MuscleMatt.com, which I’m very excited about. As many of you know, MuscleMatt has been a member here at the Muscle Forums for a while now and always has some hot guy ready to take his clothes off for the camera and show off for you. Well, I’m now bringing you many of the exceptional men that MuscleMatt discovers, exclusively on MeccaMen.com

You’ll find photo galleries and hot, unedited streaming video of each of the new guys on MeccaMen.com thanks to my partnership with MuscleMatt. So if you don’t yet have a membership to MeccaMen.com, get on over there and get signed up!

Got the following in an email today and thought it was interesting (despite the weird spacing, typos, abysmal use of upper case, and various punctuation violations — you should see it in color…):

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU ARE

REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT!
KEEP IT GOING!!!!

2008 Election Issue!!

GET A BILL STARTED TO PLACE ALL POLITICIANS ON SOC. SEC.
This must be an issue in “2008 “. Please! Keep it going.

————— ——————-
SOCIAL SECURITY:
(This is worth reading. It is short and to the point.)!

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during election years.

Our Senators and Congresswomen do not pay into Social Security and, of course, they do not collect from it.

You see, Social Security benefits were not suitable for persons of their rare elevation in society. They felt they should have a special plan for themselves. So, many years ago they voted in their

own benefit plan .

In more recent years, no congressperson has felt the need to change it. After all, it is a great plan.

For all practical purposes their plan works like this:
When they retire, they continue to draw the same pay until they die.

Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments..

This is calculated on an average life span for each of those two Dignitaries. For example, Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may e xpect to draw $7,800,000.00 (that’s Seven Million, Eight-Hundred Thousand Dollars), with their wives drawing $275,000.00 during the last years of their lives.

Younger Dignitaries who retire at an early age, will receive much more during the rest of their lives.

Their cost for this excellent plan is $0.00. NADA….ZILCH..

This little perk they voted for themselves is free to them. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. The funds for this fine retirement plan come directly from the General Funds;

“OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK”!

>From our own Social Security Plan, which you and I pay (or have paid) into,-every payday until we retire (which amount is matched by our employer)-we can expect to get an average of $1,000 per month after retirement.

Or, in other words, we wo uld have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for 68 years and one (1) month to equal Senator! Bill Bradley’s benefits!

Social Security could be very good if only one small change were made.

That change would be to:
Jerk the Golden Fleece Retirement Plan from under the Senators and Congressmen. Put them into the Social Security plan with the rest of us
then sit back….
and watch how fast they would fix it.

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe good changes will evolve.

How many people can YOU send this to? Better yet…..
How many people WILL you send this to??IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU ARE

REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT!
KEEP IT GOING!!!!

2008 Election Issue!!

Driving back to the office from lunch today I saw the following on a bumpersticker:

IncrediBush

Then, skimming NYTimes.com while eating, I see an article about the contents of the presidential iPod, which includes The Knack’s “My Sharona” and some Kenny Chesney. But no Bush, apparently.

Wonder if he’s heard Bowling for Soup’s “Ohio (Come Back to Texas)”?

We recently upgraded the design of and added new content to XcoMedia.com and also rebranded it–it’s now an “Ace Bannon Presents” site.

What that means is I’m putting my personal stamp of approval on the site and its contents. We’ve beefed up customer service and will be announcing more new content with a new video partner later this month. I’m personally overseeing the development of XcoMedia.com into what I believe will be the premiere site on the ‘net for streaming video of musclemen and muscle DVDs and videos.

If you haven’t seen the new XcoMedia.com yet, check it out.

Be sure to see the previews of our latest streaming video content, the two Romanian Muscle Fantasy titles.

A long time regular at the Muscle Forums posted a thread there about “what’s the big deal about blogs” from which I’ve lifted his title to use here on my repost of my reply. He wasn’t specifically targeting me or my blog, just wondering aloud why anyone should care that anyone else is blogging. Here’s what I wrote:

LOL… no, I don’t take it personally at all. And if my starting a blog has led you to formulate this question and ask it, I say it’s a good thing. I’m looking forward to reading other’s opinions on the subject.

The idea of me starting a blog was suggested by one of my business partners late last year. He had listened to me rant and rave for months about the presidential election and thought that fans of MSS and the Forums would be interested in reading longer, more substantial pieces by me than I usually post here. Being the savvy guy he is, he thought it could also be another way to promote some of our products in a less blatant way than slapping banner ads all over a message board.

Frankly, I wasn’t all that interested. It sounded to me like one more thing with a deadline that I would feel bad if I missed. But then something happened–I actually started last week putting the damn thing together and got really excited about work for the first time in a long time. I’m still not totally sure why my attitude about it has changed, but here’s my thinking so far: I started MSS and the Forums out of a need to 1) organize a lot of information I had found on the net and in print about muscle men, escorts, workouts, etc.; 2) connect with other gay men who struggled with issues of self-esteem and masculinity; and 3) explore avenues of growth for myself to get past some personal blocks in my life related to item #2. It was basically a way for me to put my life out on the ‘net and see if anyone could relate.

Kinda like a primitive blog.

Turns out a lot of other guys could relate. So much so that what had started as a hobby pretty quickly turned into something much bigger than my personal musings about my own life. And now it’s all part of my business, which for me means I no longer use MSS or the Forums for self discovery and self fulfillment. And I miss that–that was a big part of why I was doing this in the first place and why it was fun and nurturing for me.

But now I have a sense of that back again in the form of the blog, which is primarily why I’m doing the blog. I’ve changed a lot since 1997 when all this started and I’ve got different things now that interest me and different challenges to work on. Do I expect everyone will want to read about all that stuff? Not on your life. Why would they?

But that’s what I thought back in 1997, too….

I’d love to get other readers’ input on this one, so please feel free to comment.

I know, I know.

I’ve been pretty scarce since the elections. Except for a brief time at Park & Ride during the whole Jeff Gannon/James Guckert spectacle, I’ve been AWOL. Only not exactly AWOL–I was clear back in November that if Bush won reelection I would be taking time to start a new business in a non-adult field so when the administration turns its attention to internet porn I’d be ready.

And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing the past 6 months or so. The new company is doing well, finding clients, and starting to pay for itself. A great bonus to having the new organization going is that the folks who work there are able to also work on projects for Bannon Media. So now my attention is turning back to our little family of sites and the products at XcoMedia.

We’re planning some nice changes and additions to many of the sites, some of which will be announced and launched this month. I’m partnering with some new content providers and taking a much more hands-on role in what product we offer as a result of those new relationships. And, next month I’ll start looking for new models for video and photo shoots as well as doing more shoots for our established group of high-quality star sites like CaesarWorld.com and BigRoger.com. If you’re interested in working with me and are planning to be in Palm Springs for the Bad Boys Pool Party, please send me an email.

And, yes, along with more in-depth features here at the new Ace Bannon blog, I’ll be back on the Muscle Forums, dishing it out like old times.

This is one of the images that will be going up at the next update of BigPJ.com around the 15th of this month. It’s from a shoot we did in NYC last October. PJ is sitting at the desk in my hotel room, which had an amazing view of the Empire State Building. PJ’s looking at the television, which, if I remember correctly, was showing porn…

Yes, this is my new blog. Some of the things I intend to use it for are: posting random thoughts (the kind that don’t really have a place on the Muscle Forums), posting expansions on thoughts or topics found on the Muscle Forums, posting some favorite photos from the shoots I’ve done over the years, looking for new ideas to keep the Bannon Media and XcoMedia sites alive, talking about my travels and work with great guys like Caesar, Roger, PJ, etc., and linking to other sites that interest me.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to leave a comment any time there’s something worth commenting on!