Dear Jetlag,

You bitch. I thought we understood each other. I spent no time sleeping on the plane over here just so you and I would get along. I understand you have a job to do, but come on. I’m tooling along, minding my own business, sitting behind the glass typing away taking notes, and suddenly BAM I’m a narcoleptic parrot slumped over in my chair. No warning head bob, nothing just BAM and my face is in the soup. Is that any way to behave in front of the Japanese? I ask you. Fucker. And then I come to, like an amnesia victim in some daytime drama, and I look down and I’ve been typing during at least part of that unconsciousness. I’m Edgar Cayce! What the fuck? Of course most of it looks like this I()NFPAJ [‘sf slkjdfbbbb, like a ham-fisted cat just took a quick hop across the home row.

Oh look, someone took a picture of me.


Happy now, Jetlag? Twat. Leave me alone. Next time I’m just going to pop some melatonin and you can just wait in the wings and hope my brain chemistry doesn’t get all regulated and you can still get a table in the front row.

love,
CM.


posted by MT at 5:16 PM |

I laughed so hard my face came out my nose


I shouldn't laugh at anything related to pregnancy because THE HUSBAND SHOULDN'T JOKE ABOUT THESE THINGS but this was too much.


For nine months I grew a human being inside my belly and then I pushed it out my vagina and now I’m feeding it with my boob. Biology is so fucking weird.

I just really needed to point that out.

posted by MT at 5:19 PM |

"What a day, eh Milhouse? The sun is out, birds are singing, bees are trying to have sex with them - as is my understanding...." Bart Simpson

More sex-related hilarity.

Drivers Spot X-Rated Films in Other Cars

DETROIT - Andrea Carlton hadn't planned on telling her daughter about the birds and bees until she was 8 or 9. But that changed the night 4-year-old Catherine spotted a porno movie flickering on a screen in a minivan nearby.

Just like there's no windows in a strip club, you shouldn't be able to see inside windows in a car when they're watching X-rated movies," said Carlton, a 26-year-old from Gurnee, Ill.

More and more Americans are buying vehicles with DVD players, usually to keep the kids entertained. But an increasing number of other people on the road are catching a glimpse through the windows of more than just "Finding Nemo" and "SpongeBob SquarePants."

Depending on where they are driving or parked, motorists could face fines and even jail time for screening X-rated stuff. But where the law may not be clear, some are calling for tighter regulation.

"Residents should not be subjected to those obscenities," said Flint City Councilwoman Carolyn Sims, who is examining whether an ordinance packing a $500 fine is needed. "They do have a right to have peace and tranquility and not to have this exposure to sex in their face."

[--Insert joke here --]

What's also funny is that this article is listed under Yahoo's "Technology" banner.


posted by MT at 3:01 PM |

You can't just say "no"...you have to keep saying "no," apparently...

From the "privileged glimpses of the bleeding obvious" files (NYT ) Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept:

PHILADELPHIA, March 9 — Among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage, a majority did not live up to their vows, according to a national study reported here on Tuesday. The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not made such pledges.

But a pledge to refrain from premarital sex, the researchers found, did tend to delay the start of sexual intercourse by 18 months. The adolescents who took virginity pledges also married earlier and had fewer sexual partners than the other teenagers surveyed, said Dr. Peter Bearman, the chairman of the sociology department at Columbia University and the lead author of the study.

Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the federal study, 88 percent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Dr. Bearman said at a scientific meeting in Philadelphia on preventing sexually transmitted diseases. [emphasis added]

The researchers tested the participants for three common sexually transmitted infections — chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — and found that the rates were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not.

[here's the alarming part] Yet the teenagers who had taken pledges were less likely to know they had an infection, raising the risk of their transmitting it to other people, said Dr. Bearman and Hannah Brückner of Yale University, the other author of the report.

Dr. Bearman said that telling teenagers "to `just say no,' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of sexually transmitted diseases.

----- snip -----

Jimmy Hester, a spokesman for True Love Waits, a campaign begun in 1993 by the Southern Baptist Convention, said, "Signing a pledge card does not mean you are magically protected."

Of course not, Jimmy, but let's face it: the only people who seem to believe in this magic are the ones pushing the abstinence-only programs in the first place. Let's get a bunch of horny teenagers to promise they won't have sex. They'll write it down! It's a contract! We all know how valuable promises are that are made in the teen years. Want a hint into the hormone-laden teenage mind? Wander over to Livejournal sometime and take a look at some of teen diaries. This kind of approach, if it's going to work, requires a much deeper level of commitment by these agencies than they are obviously willing to give. The failure of this program is a good case in point.

Of course, the most disturbing aspect of all of this is that when the floodgates open, they open big time. These sheltered and uninformed kids, armed with their magic pledge cards and happy thoughts, are less likely to use condoms to protect themselves, and less likely to seek medical treatment when they become infected with an STD (quite probably because they are unclear about what to look for and how important early treatment often is).

Lack of condom use was an important factor in the higher-than-expected rates of sexually transmitted diseases among the pledgers, the study found. Only 40 percent reported having used condoms in the most recent year of the study, compared with 60 percent of the teenagers who had not pledged.

Also, the adolescents who had made pledges were less likely to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Among the boys, 5.2 percent had been tested, compared with 9.1 percent of the boys who had not pledged. Among the girls, 14 percent of pledgers had been tested, compared with 28 percent of girls who had not pledged.

It will be interesting to see what the Bushco spin on this will be, if anything. They will no doubt point to the early marriage rates as a positive outcome and worth the effort (since we all know that marriage is the potent magical panacea for all of society's ills...unless you are gay, of course). However, I'm not convinced this is necessarily positive, and this finding should undergo a good deal more scrutiny. Were the kids who agreed to sign the pledge card already more predisposed to marrying young? Seems like a safe bet to me. And are they getting married just to have some sex without shame? Probably a likely outcome too. Will be interesting to see what these marriages look like in five years, in terms of divorce rate, domestic violence, and so on.

My peeve with all of this is the sheer hypocrisy (how many of those pushing these programs through our legislature were abstinent youths?) and the fundamental philosophical issue about human sexuality it stomps on. What is the benefit of denying such an important aspect of human experience until the early twenties, or later? Where is the long-term effect of this self-denial 'wedded' to the message of "purity" and "chastity" that fosters it, coupled with the equally strong countermessage of how vile and despicable and shameful sexual activity is? So yesterday it was a hideous, horrible, sinful thing, and tomorrow, because I'm married it's beautiful and pure and blessed? Huh? What reasonable person can make this sort of switch without recalling the dark prohibition and scolding voice in the head that says NO!. See that monkey at the top of the page? He had a crippling stunted early life, and later interventions didn't do much to reverse that. Abstinence per se may not be the same thing, but the way it is packaged by the religiosi is certainly close.

Don't know the data well enough to comment on outcomes like these, but I bet someone out there does and can offer further insights.


posted by MT at 12:24 PM |

Picture, 1000 words, etc.

Gotta give a big shout out to the graffiti artist who stenciled this minimalist little number on a stairwell in Old City, Philly.


Oh these kids with their hip-hop and their stark political commentary. Word, homey.

Ahem.

In other unrelated news, go find Mimi Smartypants giving a soliloquy on her new book on BBC Scotland. Click on Arts Show for Monday to get the pop-up window. Bemoan your slow dial-up access. Download the appropriate codecs and whatnot. Then fast forward to about 27 minutes into the broadcast. If you hear the Beatles doing "Paperback Writer," you're there.

I know, I am just a big shill for Mimi. Maybe she'll notice me one day and then I can hang out with the popular kids and drink and ride the El...


posted by MT at 5:54 PM |

Junk science redux

Found this link via La Di Da: The American Anthropological Association has issued a press release denouncing the supposed ubiquity of the one woman/one man family as the basis of civilization. As usual, Bushco has it wrong:

"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."

No surprises there. It's been fun watching the spin on this one. I have been full of opinion, but better writers than me (especially Scalzi) have done a fine job, so I'm content to linky linky and hang back.

Except for this: It is virtually impossible for these wacky family preservationists to mount a credible argument in opposition to anything related to gay marriage without falling back to safe religious ground. There exists now no sociological, economic or other secular argument that holds any water. The "for centuries it's been this way" argument was the last shot, and that was thin on the face of it. The idea that all heterosexual marriages are somehow identical is just silly. The idea that marriage is intended for procreation and child rearing insults all those who are unwilling or unable to have children while married, or who marry past child-rearing age. So finally, to argue against the right for anyone to marry anyone means retreating to religious precedent and doctrine, and even in this there is no solid agreement, even among Christian or quasi-Christian groups.

Because, I think at the heart of it this has never been about marriage per se. What others do in their marriage has no bearing on mine, and the way that I view it, so challenging the sanctity of the institution is a false ploy. Rather, this has always been about the societal normalization of homosexuality, and how uncomfortable some people are with this idea. To grant homosexual couples any legal standing brings this minority group that much closer to becoming just regular folks, and some people won't have it.

I suspect, however, that in the coming months this issue will become less central, just a bit...especially as Dubya starts dancing on the graves of the 9/11 victims in his political advertising. His handlers should know better.



posted by MT at 4:03 PM |