Godless Professors and the Subversion of American Youth

Did you know that universities are subverting the minds of America’s young people by turning them into godless socialists? Dr. Mike S. Adams, a professor at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is dispensing advice at Townhall to a father who is distraught about his daughter coming home with scary new leftist ideas. Jeff Fecke [...]

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Sexting TMI Tuesday

Uff da. Back in my premarital days when I was ethically eligible for a booty call, there was something called the “mobile car phone.” It was anchored to your car with a 500-pound weight. It did not allow for texting. It barely permitted talking. I think if you tried to do anything sexy with it, [...]

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Love as an Act of Inference

My bedtime reading these days is a novel by Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface. I’m only a few chapters into it so far, but it’s making me wonder how well we can ever really know the people we love. The book’s premise is that the husband of the protagonist, Sarah, disappears without a trace at [...]

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Shaking the Sausage

My penis spam junk mail box has had some marvelous subject lines this week:
Your sausage will be reputable
Women will beg you to walk naked and shake it
Combine those two images and you get a visual that … well, maybe you’d better not go there. I sort of wish I hadn’t.
I’ll try to get back to [...]

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The Poetics of Heirloom Tomatoes

My Sungolds, August 2008.
Now that I’ve put my winter quarter grades to bed, I finally had a chance this week to start my tomatoes, a week or two later than I’d prefer. I grow them from seed for two reasons. You can’t get most of these varieties from nurseries, and I am just endlessly fascinated [...]

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Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and "Getting the Milk for Free"

Are men really from Mars after all? I kinda doubt it, but last night I got a comment that seemed to come straight from outer space. It appeared on a post I wrote last month on a study that suggests kissing alleviates stress for men and women. Amy wrote:
Sunglold, I don’t know what rock you [...]

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Feline GPS?

I am so totally stealing this from Badtux. This is Maru. If you’ve never encountered him ’til now, he lives in Japan and has his own blog, along with oodles of YouTube videos.
Watch closely and tell me if you see any holes in that bag. I couldn’t see any. Which leads me to conclude that [...]

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When Slut-Shaming Is Not Enough …

… then it’s time for a legal crackdown!
According to the Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio legislator has proposed a bill that would define “sexting” by teenagers as a first-degree misdemeanor:
Rep. Ronald Maag, R-Lebanon, said he will soon introduce a bill making the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors – commonly known as “sexting,” [...]

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In Which I Apologize to the Wombat

Wombat photo by Flickr user Fifila, used under a Creative Commons license.
Following up on yesterday’s post about the disappearance of the beaver, I was asked (offline) why I omitted the wombat from my list of alternative critters that could metaphorically refer to ladyparts. Since I can’t see any reason to discriminate, I hereby apologize to [...]

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The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.
Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term “beaver” comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early [...]

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The Abnormality of "Normal" Childbirth

Jaded as I am about medicine and medicalization, the assumptions behind this new study in Obstetrics and Gynecology still left me flummoxed:
OBJECTIVE: To assess the prognosis for vaginal delivery in women with entirely normal pregnancies who began spontaneous labor at term.
METHODS: Between January 1, 1988, and October 31, 2006, a total of 278,164 women delivered [...]

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Caturday Theology: Or, The Ceiling Cat Is Watching Me

Sistine kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?
No, I’m not hallucinating – or seeing visions of angels – from too much grading. (Though I am still buried under heaps of term papers and exams.)
Verily, the Ceiling Cat has cast his beatific feline glance upon me.
He really does see everything. At least, he saw this post about [...]

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Springing into Cognitive Dissonance

Am I the only one who thinks it’s jarring that the first day of spring coincides with the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War? As if the war itself weren’t appalling enough, the timing just seems like an affront to all that’s good in the universe.
In a different register, but also distressing: Ohio’s unemployment rate [...]

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Sungold, Superathlete

Jock kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?
So I’ve decided I need to take a yoga class to help deal with some of my remaining symptoms – the fatigue and freaky muscle tension. My university’s employee gym offers yoga classes for a very affordable membership price. This morning I hauled my sedentary butt to the gym [...]

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Sex, Schools, and the Politics of Distraction

The superintendent of Westfall School District in south-central Ohio is being pilloried for accessing racy websites from work, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Okay, he shouldn’t have done that. But is he really all that different from millions of other American employees who’ve done the same while at work? Don’t millions more use work computers for [...]

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Marx Was Wrong

Zombie bank kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

The proletariat isn’t killing capitalism. The banks are.
This is not an economics blog, but I thought Robert Reich really nailed it in his commentary on the big bonuses AIG is paying to the guys who orchestrated the failure of our economy:
This sordid story of government helplessness in the [...]

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The Politics of Attraction

Bouncing off a hysterically funny post by Aunt B about the penis of one of Tennessee’s douchiest state legislators, I’ve been thinking about how political convictions serve as a filter for who and what we find attractive. The legislator in question, Stacey Campfield, definitely fails to pass Aunt B’s filter – and mine, too, now [...]

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Seeds, Sentiment, Magic

Sorry to illustrate a post about seeds with a flower I grew from a bulb, but hey, this is what’s blooming in my garden today. The photo shows my little rock iris.
Today I started to plant my garden. Well, that’s the truth if you don’t mind a little embroidery. My garden is entirely indoors, so [...]

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Medical Abortion under Pressure in Ohio

Ohio’s Democratic, pro-choice Attorney General, Richard Cordray, is sticking up for a state law that restricts the use of medical abortion (RU-486, aka mifepristone or the “abortion pill”) to a narrower window of time than good medical practice currently requires.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, a 2004 Ohio law limits the use of RU-486 to the [...]

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Letting Kids Be Kids (Even When They’re Parents)

I’m still on my soapbox about leaving Bristol Palin alone, and so all I’ve got to say on the announcement of her canceled engagement to Levi Johnston is that I’m glad if they’re following their hearts, and I wish them both the best.
But all the angst-y right-wing commentary on the non-wedding of the season is [...]

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