"The Electrovaginogram: Study of the Vaginal Electric Activity and Its Role in the Sexual Act and Disorders." In this paper, the authors investigated the hypothesis that the vagina generates electric waves, which affect vaginal contraction during penile thrusting. They found electric waves could be recorded from the vagina. They also postulated that there was a vaginal pacemaker that seems to represent the G-spot, which is claimed to be a small area of erotic sensitivity in the vagina.Also covered: Whether or not you can break your penis, what causes "shrinkage," kegel exercises, and female ejaculation.
Good news, losers: It's cool to be uncool. With the upcoming releases of two new movies, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "The Baxter," and the recent success of "Napoleon Dynamite," Hollywood has gleefully embraced dorkdom.I'm so uncool I'm almost cool again! That's so totally boss!!!
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Throughout pop culture history, protagonists were required to have ripped abs or bulging biceps. Now in these films and TV shows like "Beauty and the Geek" they simply need a "Hello! My name is Myron" name tag. It seems that, more and more, the ladies love Geek Chic.
"Women find sex appeal in male geek movie characters," notes Gitesh Pandya, editor of www.boxofficeguru.com. "Geeks have charm in their awkwardness. The personality of a geek makes him sexy, partially because he can be pitied and partially because they are good-natured people."
(snip)
"When people see these characters, they feel good about themselves," says Pandya. "If a geek can succeed, then there is hope. It gives the audience confidence."
"They're always putting their foot in their mouth," says Showalter. "There's something cringe-worthy about them that makes us laugh, but while we're laughing at them, we're also rooting for them."
(snip)
"Superhero films are more about escapism," notes Pandya. "Films about geeks are about realism."
So is Geek Chic here to stay? "Who knows what's cool anymore?" says Carell. "It's not cool to be uncool, but it is also not cool to be cool. It's cool to be somewhere in between. There is this gray area that is most all of us."
Forget waxed chests and rock-hard abs. A new survey finds ladies like their men scruffy, a wee bit chubby - and definitely not a metrosexual.Well, two outta three ain't bad...Playgirl asked 2,000 of its readers what they find sexy in a man and the answers were surprising: 42% said they thought love handles were kind of sexy and 47% approved of chest hair.
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[O]nly 4% of women said the size of a man's wallet mattered. Metrosexuals are also out: 73% want a guy who is "rough around the edges."
"This survey shows that the guy who's most attractive to our readers is not your average Hollywood hunk," said Playgirl editrix Jill Sieracki. "It's the average Joe who came up on top. Women are practical about their choices, and they're smart."
Sheehan lost her son Casey in Iraq and now the President is paying the piper. He is a hostage to Sheehan's little band of protesters camped near his ranch in Crawford, Tex. This is not how the President wanted to spend his vacation. He has only himself to blame. Bush's decision to spend a full month in Texas was stunningly stupid. With Americans turning solidly against the war - a Newsweek poll reported a mere 34% now approve of his handling of Iraq - the President looks callous when the nation needs reassuring. And he could be losing his last bit of leverage over public opinion. Put it this way: no support, no war.
Now he's stuck in Texas with Sheehan. If he meets with her, as she demands, she wins. If he cuts his visit short and scurries back to Washington, she wins. If he stays, she also wins, as she did yesterday.
(snip)
Bush can't win against a grieving, articulate, angry mother who's willing to spend August in a roadside ditch publicizing her cause. Each new casualty in Iraq adds to her power and subtracts from his.
There is a chance that Sheehan is just the media flavor of the month. But I wouldn't bet on it. This feels like a turning point. It's happened before.
He does take a bunch of cheap shots at the usual targets like Michael Moore and Howard Dean and the liberal anti-war media, but still. Whoa.
LIMBAUGH: I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real. It's nothing more than an attempt. It's the latest effort made by the coordinated left.You're in the right ballpark grammatically, Rush. But Casey Sheehan's death wasn't a lie - it was for a lie. I really hope Cindy asks Rush just what exactly he meant by this.
And this was necessary why???In the immortal words of Yoko Ono, "Aieeeee!" A fierce primal scream - of the kind Ms. Ono is famous for as a performance and recording artist - is surely the healthiest response to the agony of "Lennon," the jerry-built musical shrine that opened last night at the Broadhurst Theater.
(snip)
This drippy version of his life, written and directed with equal clunkiness by Don Scardino and featuring a Muzak-alized assortment of Lennon's non-"Beatles" songs, suggests that he was just a little lost boy looking for love in all the wrong places until he found Ms. Ono and discovered his inner adult. When his adoring fans and a hitherto tame press turned on him in the late-1960's, Lennon told a journalist that his public had never seen him clearly to begin with, that even when he was a schoolboy, those who actually knew him never "thought of me as cuddly."
Yet cuddly is how Lennon (who is portrayed by five actors) emerges here, like a pocket-size elf doll who delivers encouraging mantras of self-help and good will when you scratch his tummy. "We're all one," "Love is the answer," "Be real" - these and other Lennonisms are projected in repeated succession on a screen before the show begins. Little that follows goes beyond such fortune-cookie wisdom.
Wow, I missed this one. Too bad we have a president who wants to save his veto power for stem cell research bills.
Despite widespread opposition - from the Bush administration, a majority of the Senate, leaders of the House Energy Committee, and nuclear regulators from the five preceding presidential administrations - Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the Energy Committee, included an amendment that guts restrictions on the export of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
(snip)
The new law increases the likelihood of that nightmare scenario by allowing exports of bomb-grade uranium to foreign companies to rise to more than 100 pounds annually, thereby multiplying the odds that terrorists could steal enough for a bomb while the uranium is in transit to, or in storage at, foreign facilities.
(snip)
The ill-advised amendment actually failed the only vote ever
held specifically on it by either house of Congress, in the Senate on June 23, 2005, by 52-46. The House of Representatives had slipped the provision into the energy bill without a vote, but once its ramifications became clear, both the House Energy Committee's chairman, Republican Joe Barton from Texas, and its ranking Democrat, John Dingell from Michigan, came to oppose it. They offered Senator Domenici a compromise to neuter the provision in deference to the Senate's vote against it.This is where Mr. Domenici abused his power as Senate committee chair. He successfully pushed all of the Republicans he appointed to the House-Senate conference on the bill to vote for his provision - against the expressed will of the Senate. He then rejected the House's offer to eliminate the provision, thereby strong-arming the provision into law over the bipartisan opposition of executive and legislative branch officials.
So let us all take a moment to recognize Senator Domeneci's heroic efforts in the Global War On Terror - it's just too bad he's not on our side of it.
I still don't entirely trust Richard Cohen, and certainly not John Roberts, but Cohen did have an interesting piece about him in today's WaPo. Seems Roberts did some very effective pro bono work for a gay anti-discrimination group back in the pre-Florida 2000 good ol' days, and instead of enthusiastically embracing this as evidence of his moderation and balance, the right-wingers backing Roberts are trying to dismiss it as an aberration:
The White House and its allies, understandably alarmed at implications of moderation and enlightenment, were quick to suggest that Roberts was not, as some might slander him, a reasonable man. Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, pointed out that Roberts had spent less than 10 hours working on the gay rights case. She made it sound like a one-night stand, a youthful indiscretion for which no adult should be held accountable. Hell, we've all been young.
Jay Sekulow, a leader in the movement to make the high court intellectually indistinguishable from the Inquisition, rushed to explain Roberts to his constituency. This was something lawyers did. "A lot of people are commenting who don't know about Supreme Court practice," Sekulow said. "There's a high degree of collegiality." In other words, it meant nothing. Still, maybe Roberts could prove himself by beating up some gays.
(snip)
As for Focus on the Family, possibly the premier organization in such matters, it portrayed Roberts as a mindless puppet of his law firm. "That's what lawyers do -- represent their firm's clients, whether they agree with what those clients stand for or not," it said in a statement. Of course, that's not the case at all. "Anyone who didn't want to work on a case for whatever matter, they didn't have to," said Walter A. Smith Jr., the Hogan & Hartson partner who ran the pro bono program. Oh.
The spectacle of conservative groups and the White House rushing to assure their constituencies that Roberts is not -- really and truly -- a tolerant man is both repulsive and absurd. In the end, this tethering of conservatism to the lost cause of homophobia will earn the rebuke of history. In the meantime, though, it puts Roberts on the spot. He might assert that he has been cruelly mischaracterized and, for benefit of career, renounce the work he had once done. But more likely his pro bono work speaks for itself. Until he says otherwise, on gay rights, he's out of the closet.
Again, I remain unconvinced that Roberts is not a right-wing tool (although I do harbor some faint, naive hopes that he may turn out to be a Stealth Reasonable Human Being like Souter), but how creepy is it that the Right views even the slightest whiff of tolerance as toxic? Except when it comes to Great American Patriots like Condi Rice, Michelle Malkin and "Bulldog" Gannon, of course...
Y'all are familiar with the moonwalk, right? The legs look like they're walking forward, but in reality they're sliding backward? It's an apt description of Bush and the Republican party's approach to democracy (not to mention the Global War On Whatever They're Calling It These Days, but I digress): Talk a good game about how important it is and how committed you are to it, and then proceed to undermine it at every turn.
Most glaringly, consider the self-professed Johnny Democracyseed's willingness to cozy up to dictators from Vladimir "Oh, for the good old days" Putin to Islam "Boils well that ends well" Karimov so long as they provide us a tiny crumb of nominal, half-assed support. Consider the Republican party's eagerness to trample civil rights in the name of morality and national security. Consider the Republican battle against campaign finance reform, and their growing mastery of election-tampering. This last item is the one I want to focus on a little more here.
I was at Pittsburgh Drinking Liberally last night to meet Chuck Penacchio, an honorable and progressive Senate candidate that the PA democratic party would like to wish into the cornfield, and he brought up election reform as one of the issues that he would push for if elected. Along with media reform, this is one of my biggest hot-button issues, because without free and fair elections, we are not a democracy.
What mystifies me is that election reform is not a bigger deal. There was some kicking and screaming after 2000, which ultimately made things worse by opening the door for Diebold and their brilliant innovation of 100% paperless electronic voting. But despite the sizable pall of suspicion cast over the 2004 election, there doesn't seem to be any urgency for verifiable voting, or fair deployment of voting machines, or for an end to purges of voter rolls. I know there are some bills in the works, but I never hear anything about them.
Why IS that? Why are Democrats not pushing election reform hard? Why are they not speaking out about it? My suspicion is that they're afraid of being perpetually cast as the sore loser party, but I think they have an issue that is both important and powerful here, and they're foolish and negligent not to play it up. First off, as I said before, free and fair elections are the foundation of democracy, and they need to emphasize that, preferably juxtaposed with Bush's claims about his commitment to spreading democracy. Second off, how can anyone reasonably oppose election reform? I've heard the arguments against it, and they're incredibly weak, transparent rationalizations. Democrats are forgoing the opportunity to identify themselves as the pro-Democracy party, and to force the Republicans to either cave or admit that they oppose democracy. That's about as win-win as it gets.
I know the Democrats have a lot of other juicy targets in their sights, but most of those are symptoms of what happens when your democracy is broken. With a fair and aggressive media and a level electoral playing field, we can cut off politicians like Bush and Frist and DeLay at the source. Or, to put it a bit more colloquially, we won't have to swat flies if we drain the swamp.
UPDATE: I just wanted to append one additional thought. I honestly don't know for sure if the Republicans used electronic voting to steal votes from Kerry or anyone else, and I certainly have no way to prove it. What's scary is that there's no way to prove they didn't.
