Yesterday I posted a link to an NPR segment on MetaFilter. It’s some kind of quiz shtick called “Not My Job” and features, hilariously, Neko Case talking about Necco wafers. I read about it on Kennedy’s blog. I figured that Ms. Case was, as one commenter put it, “precisely calibrated for the MetaFilter demographics.”
I learned that this “Not My Job” segment, on a show called “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, is quite popular, and has featured all sorts of celebrities. Another MetaFilter commenter remarked on a previous piece with sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, where she remarked that, in her youth, she’d been a sniper in the Israeli army. Could that be true? Apparently.
“When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.”
I recently read this fascinating article in The New Yorker about religion and teen pregnancy and sexuality trends in the US:
Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescentsâ€â€seventy-four per centâ€â€say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.)
A few interesting factoids that I took away from the piece: the states with the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates in the country are all red states, and the ones with the lowest are mostly blue. It might be useful to map those states to per-capita income, to reflect how teen pregnancy pertains to income, not just political allegiance.
Even more interesting was that there’s a kind of tipping point for celibacy pacts in high school populations:
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
There’s a useful marketing lesson in there somewhere, about tribes and passionate users (or non-users, as the case may be).
Via Digg and Cracked, here’s the first safe-for-work minute of “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin”. The acting (and setup, and set for that matter) is hilariously awful:
Here’s another PG-rated clip. It features a hot-and-bothered Hillary Clinton uttering the classic line, “I’m so tired of bipartisanship. Why can’t we just be bi?”
The film is produced by Hustler, which, of course, is owned the creepy and politically-active Larry Flynt. Given Mr. Flynt’s leftward leaning, I’d imagine that this production doesn’t, you know, flatter Governor Palin.
These pieces reminded me of this more amusing take on bad porn acting starring Nathan Fillion. Also entirely work-safe.
Note: This website is habitually G-rated when it comes to language (okay, maybe 14 Years). By necessity, this post features use of the F-bomb. If that troubles you, skip ahead.
Yesterday I saw Young People Fucking (here’s the trailer), a charming Canadian sex comedy. It’s a highly-structured movie, following five couples through five stages of an evening of sex (from ‘prelude’ to ‘afterglow’). The couples represent a variety of typical relationships–the first date, the exes, the friends, the couple and the roommates.
So, we end up with a movie in 25 short scenes exploring and poking (heh) gentle fun at the foibles, morays and politics of sex. It’s a reasonably witty film, with enough laughs to sustain the formal structure. Despite the title, there’s actually very little nudity in the film–you’d see as much on an average episode of The L-Word. Roger Ebert sums up the film nicely:
No great lessons are learned. There is little high drama. As it stands, the screenplay could supply fodder for countless theatrical companies. It’s…engaging, that’s what it is. These are all essentially nice people. Canadians, you know.
The ensemble cast is generally good, with Callum Blue (previously seen in the excellent and gone-too-soon “Dead Like Me”) and Carly Pope (previously seen in “Popular”) standing out. I think Ms. Pope has gotten a bit of a short shrift from Hollywood, she can punch well above her current weight class. Plus, she has terrific eye brows. I did have a trivial complaint about the title. Nearly everyone in the cast is on the wrong side of 30, so I’m not sure it’s fair to go with ‘Young People’. I rather like the shorter title People Fucking.
It’s no great masterpiece, and it’s a bit risque for a first date movie, but I recommend it. The movie had a ridiculously short run here in Victoria, and probably won’t last in other cinemas across the country in the busy summer season. Seek it out or rent Young People Fucking. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Over dinner, Julie and I were musing about setting up a mutual friend. We scanned our brains for other friends and acquaintances who are single.
Recognizing the shortcomings of my brain, I figured Facebook might do a good job of standing in. I poked around a bit, but didn’t immediately find what I was looking for.
I turned to Google, and discovered the Facebook app Most Eligible Singles. It looks pretty silly, but once you add it, there’s an option on the app page to show your single friends. I have shockingly few, particularly of the female variety. Of the 465 Facebook ‘friends’ (take that term with a Dead Sea’s worth of salt) there are only 17 females who are declared as ‘single’. And only six of those are in Vancouver.
After a little more looking, I eventually found the Facebook profile search, where you can filter on any profile variable. However, the results don’t seem to easily discriminate between your immediate friends, and friends of friends. So, it’s sub-optimal.
I noticed something interesting. There seems to be a strong correlation between a young age of consent (12 to 15 years old) and Catholic countries. I created this little graphic to illustrate.
This image shows the age of consent. The blue countries have an age of consent between 12 to 15 (disgustingly, the age of consent in Yemen is nine, but forgo that for this experiment).
Hover your mouse over the image. It should switch to a shrunken version of this image, which shows various flavours of Christianity by colour. The Catholic countries are yellow.
Every single booth seemed to have the same thing – if you were in the market for lube, vibrators, lube, a sexy Catholic school girl outfit or lube, you were in luck. But how many vibrator-lube-sexyCatholicschoolgirloutfit-and-lube booths can one person really look at in an afternoon?
Seventeen or eighteen, maybe? Anyhow, one product she does remark on is the awkwardly named OhMiBod (safeness-for-work may vary), a vibrator that plugs into your iPod and “to the rhythm and intensity of the music”. If you think that name is bad, read about the ‘Acsexories’ you can get for your fancy new sex toy. Meh.
Clever idea, but I immediately had several questions:
How much battery power does it need? A lot, I would guess. Ah, hang on. Just found the product info page, and the device itself takes two AA batteries.
How does it handle classical music? Will, uh, ‘listening’ to Bach make you late for work (I see they have some recommended music).
Does it only come in Apple White?
Still, it’s probably just the thing to eliminate that pre-MacWorld anxiety.
Speaking of stuff that plugs into your iPod, I feel obligated to remark on the nightmare that is the iPod’s backward-compatibility problems. I recently tried to plug in Julie’s old (as in, 18 months old) iPod Shuffle into my MacBook. The device is too wide, and covers both USB ports when you plug it in.
It’s a taser with a built-in MP3 player, and it comes with a fashionable leopard-print grip. It’s apparently for the woman who wants to go jogging with the tunes, but not wear a utility belt to accommodate all her accessories. Besides, didn’t you hear that tasers are the new tupperware?
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the newest plastic surgery on the market is a, uh, shot to your g-spot. Somewhat mundanely, they call it the ‘g-shot’:
By 4 p.m. she sat inside Dr. Justin Salerno’s office, readying to become the surgeon’s first patient to receive an injection called a G-Shot, also known as G-spot Amplification. With a 3 1/2-inch needle, Salerno would pump a small dose of collagen into his patient’s Grafenberg Spot and make it swell to the size of a quarter…
The procedure, which has been performed on approximately 250 women nationally in the past two years at a cost of $1,850 each, appealed to Roberts because she felt life’s rigmarole had left her fatigued by the end of the day, hardly in an amorous mood. Even when she felt the surge of excitement, reaching an orgasm was a time-consuming endeavor that took more effort and energy than she and her husband had to offer.
Well, that’s a bit of a sad commentary on one’s work-life balance, isn’t it? And the subject of the article is only 22 years old. The, uh, climax of the article reports that things went well when she took her new collagen injection for a test run:
Just as she hoped, she could reach climax within a few minutes, and with little effort.
“Just like a man,” she said.
I really wanted to come up with a great, punny title for this post, but I failed miserably. Who can do better?
