A busy week for members of Birmingham's Licensing Committee.
Not only did they refuse to allow the advertising of whips and skimpy knickers on the side of a city taxi, they also banned the use of four-poster beds in Brum brothels.
In fact, the use of any beds designed for the purpose of sleeping has been outlawed in what the committee likes to call Massage and Special Treatment Establishments.
Only massage tables are to be permitted, you see.
Officially, councillors stick to the quaint line that there's nothing iffy about Birmingham's 152 massage parlours.
The sort of place where you might go to have a bad back soothed or to get a vigorous rub-down after a bruising rugger match. Not too vigorous, obviously.
Discussions about massage parlours are inevitably littered with Carry On-type innuendo and plenty of nudge-nudge, wink-wink asides.
Why on earth would you need a four poster bed to get a massage?, councillors are prone to ask.
Of course, there's a disingenuous element here.
The committee's re-writing of the licensing conditions for massage establishments grandly states that premises shall not be used for any immoral purposes and there shall be no "erotic element" in the treatment. But who is going to enforce this rule? And who is going to define "immoral"?
Certainly not the police, who have shown little interest in closing down the city's sex industry unless there is any evidence of trafficking or violence. A well-run brothel is unlikely to attract the attention of the West Midlands Police, not officially anyway, even if it is littered with four-poster beds.
If the Licensing Committee is serious about prohibiting immoral activity, it will have to appoint its own inspection team for the purposes of wheedling out naughty goings-on. Inspectors who make their excuses and leave, as it were.
A mucky job, yes. But someone's got to do it.
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I am accused by the chief executive of Birmingham City Council of being unnecessarily gloomy over last week's exciting news about building a £193 million library in Centenary Square.
Hands up. Yes, I am gloomy. I am known for being gloomy, but on this occasion with good reason.
Leaving aside the matter of whether you can believe anything the council says, when two years ago we were invited to celebrate the announcement of a split-site library, I am prepared to accept that the politicians are serious this time about delivering what's now billed a West Midlands Cultural Centre.
The problem is, they're gambling everything on doing so.
A £39 million funding gap will be underwritten by the council, if necessary, while it has emerged that the local authority is prepared to sell as much land as it takes in order to raise enough cash to get the library built. The cost of meeting a £99 million loan will be about £7.5 million a year, which will have to come out of the council's revenue budget (that is, out of the money for delivering services). That in itself should give the perennially over-spending leisure department something to think about.
The other side of coin is the impact on the council's capital budget. I anticipate keenly the rows that are bound to erupt when cabinet members for housing, social care and education realise that all of the dosh from land sales over the next three or four years will have to head towards Centenary Square to pay for a library that, it has been written in stone, will be open for business in 2013.
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The annual Birmingham Council handbook is a chunky affair this year, containing for the first time pen-portraits of councillors.
You could be forgiven for thinking the council benches are occupied by the cream of the city's youth.
Leisure cabinet member Ray Hassall appears to have lost about 20 years in age, while his colleague Alan Rudge gives the impression of over-indulging in monkey-gland treatment.
But the prize for the best makeover goes to Public Protection Committee Chairman Neil Eustace, whose picture is so ancient that it must surely have been taken on his last day at school.