the evolution of lol cats

This is a clever comic by Tom the Dancing Bug. You'll have to right click to read.

Sometimes lol cats seem indignant at being posed for absurd pictures, like the bread head one below. Lol dogs, however, more often seem oblivious. But then a dog would never hold still to pose with food. It would already have been eaten.

the art of slutty dressing

Ruth Marcus wrote an interesting column last week that could be summed up like this: women should be able to wear what they want in public, particularly famous women. But dressing for an ideal world is not the same as dressing for the real world. "If you want to be taken seriously, dress the part," she wrote.

She was writing specifically about Paula Broadwell's choice to appear on television wearing a frilly black silk halter top. Female readers howled with outrage, calling her a sexist, with some even equating her comments to saying that women with sexy clothes are asking to be raped.

"No woman is responsible for being raped, no matter what’s she’s wearing," Marcus wrote in response. "We are responsible, however, for the way in which we present ourselves publicly. We are asking for sexist treatment when we dress like sex objects."

To me, this makes perfect sense. Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

When you want to be ogled, you dress slutty. But there are times when slutty won't cut it.

people of walmart - the movie

I've posted photos here before from the excellent site People of Walmart, which features shots of some rather unconventional folks shopping at the legendary emporium. So I was doubly excited to learn someone had taken some of the best photos and created this highly amusing mix.

eviction notice

This was not me. I found this on the Internet in a new mothers forum and it made me laugh. Oh do I sympathize!

But maybe I shouldn't complain. Maybe he will be a very mellow child. So far he's a very good baby and doesn't fuss at all. Perhaps being tardy was a good thing.

condom pope

Someone posted this image on Reddit of the pope made entirely from condoms. Not being Catholic, I didn't find it offensive. I don't know how devout Catholics might view this. My husband is a lapsed Catholic and it didn't bother him.

Is this art? Or is it a gag? Maybe both?

The condoms give it a sort of a Van Gogh "Starry Starry Night" effect. And I was struck by the coloring. I don't recall seeing that the Holy Father had the same skin tone as a pizza.

Hopefully the pope won't issue a fatwa about this. After all, it was made with new condoms. It could have been worse.

the misunderstood 1960s

Salon has a very interesting new article about how our culture now misunderstands the 1960s.

The writer argues that the first half of the 1960s was more like the 1950s. All the emblematic elements we now associate with "the Sixties" like sex, drugs, and protest were only dominant in the later part of the decade.

I remember a relative once told me that the early 1970s was more a part of "the Sixties" than the early 1960s. I know from watching movies of the era that the first half of the era seemed much sunnier than the more cynical period late in the decade.

So if you wanted to take a time machine back to the free love days, better to set the dial at 1969 -- the year of Woodstock -- than say at 1964.

(This entry was written to satisfy a bet: I told husband I could write an entire entry without mentioning "the recent development." He didn't think I could, and I won the bet. I'm determined to post on more than just "the recent development.")

poking my nose in

Baby and I are back home and he's napping now. So I'm poking my nose in here for a few moments to check things. Thanks to everyone for your nice messages.

We went with the name we had planned a long time -- Joseph after my husband's dad. We are calling him Joey to distinguish him from his grandfather. He weighed 3.45 kilos at birth, which translates to about 7 pounds, 10 ounces. He measured 52 centimeters or about 20.5 inches.

The whole delivery went pretty much without incident. My water broke sometime after three on Tuesday afternoon. There was utterly no warning and I was actually napping slightly. Thank goodness it happened at home. The dog gave me a dirty look like I had peed the floor. The first contraction came within a few minutes thereafter. It was more intense than the false contractions I had experienced. Husband was not home but grocery shopping nearby, so I called him and he came back at once to drive me to the hospital.

As Dear Husband wrote here the other day, labor lasted about six hours. I was expecting it to be longer, given he's my first child, but I'm not complaining. Childbirth is not something I'd want to experience every day, but all in all, not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The last half hour got pretty intense, but that was to be expected.

Joey absolutely howled with outrage at birth but has been an angel since then. He makes a lot of weird little baby noises but no big crying bouts yet. He wakes up at night to feed but just makes these sort of chirping sounds and no crying. While I'm usually a heavy sleeper, my maternal instinct has definitely kicked in and I'm awake as soon as he is.

Breast feeding is a bit of a strange sensation. It's not like a man sucking on my tits. It's curious how the kid nurses more intensely when he first starts, but then tapers off somewhat as he fills up.

Overall, I'm still sore and tired but, with each day, I feel a lot better. And here I was worrying a year ago that I might never get pregnant.

underwater

This is such a lovely photo. I was sure it was done with Photoshop, but Google image search revealed that it was an outtake from a commercial shoot for hand cream. This must have been quite expensive to stage and photograph. There is something a bit ludicrous about spending so much money for commercials that most people will ignore.

disco station!

I think this is one of those "lost in translation" items. Nevertheless, I can't get this tune out of my head now.

Baby Arrives!

This is Hyper's husband James. Our son was born yesterday gone nine in the evening. Mum was in labour a tad over six hours. The little lad is a perfect angel and has all his necessary parts and accessories. Hyper will be back here in a few days with new entries. Til then she has some material queued up. Happy thanksgiving to you yanks and God Bless.

an enigma

This is one of those tattoos I just don't get. What is the point of slapping a rather large representation of an obsolete technological form on your chest for the rest of your life?

Polaroids never took particularly good photos, so there's no homage to art here. In ten or twenty years, will people even know what that thing is?

pornstar district attorney

When District Attorney Mark Suben ran for re-election in Upstate New York recently, he vehemently denied rumors late in the campaign that he once appeared in porn films. "My response to that is, it is simply not true," Suben said to the media. "I did no such thing."

The story had surfaced after an industrious citizen put a fifteen-minute video on YouTube laying out the evidence. (A still from the video appears below.)

Once he won re-election, he changed his tune. He admitted at a press conference that he had lied. He was, indeed, a one-time pornstar in the 1970s, having appeared in movies like The Lecher, Bedroom Bedlam, and Deep Throat 2. Suben has also insisted he will not step down.

Two issues come to mind for me here. First, will he actually be able to keep his post? If so, does that demonstrate a double standard, considering female teachers with porn pasts were forced out of their jobs?

Second, is the real issue here the lying, not the porn? If a public figure lies repeatedly just before an election and then admits to lying just after he's won, isn't that something of a big deal?

maru marathon

I am ready to be finished with being pregnant for a while. Hurry up baby. Come out, come out, come out wherever you are. I am resorting to watching Maru the cat on YouTube to keep myself distracted because I'm so uncomfortable these days.

I've heard of an old wives tale that seeing a cat can induce labor. Apparently seeing a video does not do the trick.

I once had some anxiety about labor and how it might be painful. Now I don't worry about that because the waiting is turning out to be worse. Hurry up baby. Hurry hurry hurry. I am ready. I am more than ready. Let's go.

sex, tits, pussy, and porn

I've noticed that whenever I post an entry with something like "porn" or "sex" or "tits" in the title, my hits for the day increase like five-fold. So this is a little experiment to see if a post that really has nothing to do with sex garners an increase in hits.

Or should I say tits?

homeland himbo

The husband and I are Homeland fans. Even though I have zero covert or intelligence experience, I regularly spot plot holes and inaccuracies, but that doesn't take away from enjoying the show. The strong characters and performances more than make up for the deficiencies.

I was a Damian Lewis fan before, and he does an exceptional job with Homeland, too. I was never drawn to redheads, but Lewis is an exception -- in his other roles I've seen, he has a subdued raw sexuality about him.

In Homeland, however, he seems to be hiding that sexual allure. For some reason, his Nicholas Brody character comes across as somehow asexual to me. He appears almost childlike at times, and that neutralizes his sexuality. His demeanor and even his clothes make him seem like a ten-year-old boy at times. Was this a conscious decision on Lewis's part to make his character appear harmless when he is, in fact, lethally dangerous?

The intensity of Lewis's performance reminds me of Edward Norton in Primal Fear. You can be so fooled by the facade that the cobra hidden beneath is all but forgotten.

bizarre records

These vintage album covers are all from an amusing website called Bizarre Records, which collects together hundreds of surreal pre-CD/pre-MP3 covers of yesteryear. These were likely all a source of pride at one time, but you have to wonder if the artists now cringe at what they once did.

all up in my snatch

An ABC TV affiliate in Denver found themselves in hot water after running a recent report on the unfolding Pentagon sex scandal. As part of their news piece that appeared on a 5pm broadcast, they showed what they thought was a cover shot of mistress-to-a-general Paula Broadwell's book All In. Someone on their staff had retrieved the photo from the internet.

Turns out the person who downloaded the cover never checked the source nor the artwork itself. If he had, he would've seen it came from a satire blog, where the artwork had been doctored with a new book title of All Up In My Snatch.

Oops.

You can see the actual broadcast here.

tattoo regret

If you need a posterboy who demonstrates the folly of rushing into a tattoo while overlooking the "forever" part, Eric Hartsburg might be an ideal candidate.

A few weeks before the recent US elections, he auctioned off space on the side of his head for a tattoo incorporating the Romney campaign logo.

A week after the election, however, he's now describing himself as "deeply disappointed."

"I’m the guy who has egg all over his face, but instead of egg, it’s a big Romney/Ryan tattoo," he told a reporter. "It’s there for life.”

Well duh.

He is optimistic about his future. "I’m hoping this opens some other doors in the entertainment business," he said.

Uh, no, I doubt that.

CIA sex scandal

Like many people, I've been following the unfolding scandal involving the erstwhile CIA director David Petraeus and his problems with commanding the little general in his pants. The whole thing seems like a plot out of a paperback thriller. Everyone keeps waiting for more shoes to drop.

I can totally understand what Petraeus saw in "the other woman." She has a whole Angelina Jolie's dangerous cousin thing going for her. She's younger, smart, slim, and attractive.

But I have to wonder what she saw in him. He doesn't look like central casting's idea of a general or a CIA director. IMHO he looks more like an accountant, like the sort of guy who would blush and get a puptent in his Dockers when he watched me dance in a club.

Of course, power is an aphrodisiac for many women. And that may explain her attraction to him. If he was an accountant, she wouldn't give him a second glance.

So I wonder if David Estes will be named as David Petraeus's replacement?

10,000-plus followers

I was checking into my Tumblr page and noticed that I now have more than 10,000 followers. Woot!

In contrast, I have only a little over 500 followers for this blog. I guess people like pictures more than words. If you haven't seen my Tumblr, it's primarily a collection of tasteful erotica interwoved with porn.

I have no idea if 10,000 followers is a lot in Tumblr world. I suspect it's not, because I see people reblog images thousands of times on other Tumblrs but only a couple hundred times when I have a particularly choice installment.

So with 10,000 followers, does that qualify me for some kind of cult status? Should I list my occupation on my tax forms as "cult goddess"?

porn with pat robertson

This is a surreal television moment. Old Pat doesn't seem to understand the difference between a racy book and "watching porn." In the beginning of this, he also seems to infer he has watched porn.

I guess this is a terrible thing to say but I thought Pat Robertson had died long ago. I've been gone from the States too long so I don't see these people in the news. When they're out of sight, I sometimes think they've died.

porn meets politics

A ballot measure requiring all male performers to wear condoms during porn shoots passed in Los Angeles County in this week's election. This is a big deal because so much porn is shot in metro LA and consumers don't like porn with condoms.

Porn producers have vowed to fight in court but, if they're not successful, they say they'll simply move their production elsewhere. I'm no lawyer, but the legal fight seems like a longshot to me. Courts have allowed the government to require things like hard-hats and safety masks on the job, so mandating condom use for work safety seems pretty similar.

The possibility that producers will leave LA is a no-brainer. Other counties and states are already making overtures to the porn biz. Considering it generates at least a billion dollars a year in Los Angeles County, and given the sluggish economy, places like Vegas and Ventura County, California, are begging for smut purveyors to shoot condom-free in their communities. If you invite them, they will cum.

You have to wonder if this was the actual reason some people supported this ballot measure -- it was a backdoor way to get porn out of LA. They had to know it would kill the local business. Maybe that's what they wanted all along.

predictions redux

I made some predictions a few days before the election (posted here) which turned out sort of correct; I was right about the outcome but somewhat wrong about the numbers. I was sure Barack Obama would win -- and was right -- but was conservative in my numbers.

Arguably the big loser in this election was negative campaigning. Special interest groups poured hundreds of millions into the pot via political action committees, and that money mostly went toward TV ads. Those ads, in turn, failed to move the dial as the Democrats retained control of the White House and slightly widened their lead in the Senate. The House remained pretty much as it was before.

So they spent hundreds of millions and nothing changed. Priceless.

This only underscores the belief that campaign ads, particularly negative ones, no longer work in a general election. People have conditioned themselves to ignore them, particularly when they hear them twenty times over, day in, day out. A friend who lives in a swing state told me some of the ads were played so many times, her small children could repeat them back nearly word for word.

It seems to me these big money people are campaining with 1990s thinking. Carpetbombing ads once worked but not much any more. So they wasted their hundreds of millions without considering how they might better have invested their funds.

They certainly didn't think outside the box. What if they put a lot of that money into get-out-the-vote efforts and one-on-one contacts? Then maybe they would've seen the results they wanted. At a minimum, they couldn't have done any worse than they did.

megan foxier

I've often thought Megan Fox had a strangely artificial face. She sometimes looks more like a high-end mannequin or prototype android than a real person. Her look made me wonder if she had some plastic surgery to sculpture her face, thus giving her a somewhat artificial look.

I saw the picture below on a gossip website where she appears in public without makeup. Wow, what a difference. She really looks cute and natural. She needs to fire her make-up people ASAP.

naked get-out-the-vote

I had an idea last night about how I could've gotten out the vote for my presidential candidate, even though I'm 10,000 miles away in Sydney -- send me a scan showing your absentee ballot marked for my candidate, and I'll give you a free five-minute naked webcam show.

Of course, this would've worked much better if I wasn't in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Sure, some guys would want to see a naked pregnant lady but probably more would be grossed out.

But then I suspected this might actually be illegal. A quick scan on the internet confirmed that was the case. Any kind of quid pro quo offers tied to voting are a violation of federal law.

But would the US government really try to extradite me from Australia for flashing my tits in exchange for some votes? And is it actually illegal if the tit flashing in question occurs in Australia?

Happy Election Day!

power failure beauty

This is a stunning picture. Right click to see full size.

It's the current New York magazine cover showing the recent power failure in Manhattan. If you haven't followed the story, most of Manhattan below 39th Street lost power for several days following Hurricane Sandy.

The photograph is hauntingly beautiful. It looks like it could be the poster for some artsy horror movie.

I miss New York but I'm glad I wasn't there at a time like this. I rented a room in a nice large apartment with great natural light from big windows, but it could get terribly cold without heat. And it would've been a loooong walk down many flights of fire stairs to get in and out of the building with no power.

sappy crap

A few days ago, I suddenly got the idea to write a series of letters to our soon-to-be-born child. So far, I've written one each for when he turns ten and eighteen, and now I'm working on one for when he turns twenty-five.

I'm trying to capture what he means to me and what kind of mother I hope to be. I'm not having any bad omens that I won't be around when he reads them. I just felt like doing it and will tuck them in a dresser drawer. If I decide they're goofy when he turns the appropriate age, I won't give them to him.

What did strike me about this was a realization about how I've changed since I became pregnant. If someone told me a year ago that she was doing this, I'd think it was sappy crap. But expecting a child has mellowed me so I'm not so cynical.

Plenty of stuff still strikes me as unbelievably corny or manipulative. But it doesn't annoy me in the way it once did.

hypersexual prediction girl

I've written enough posts here about the forthcoming US election that I thought I might as well post my predictions. I check all the poll tracking aggregate sites multiple times every day. I know all the swing states, the house bias for various polls, the cross tabs, yada yada yada. Following this stuff keeps me distracted from the discomforts of advanced pregnancy.

This is my prediction, not necessarily who I'm voting for, to keep the politics here non-partisan.

I believe Obama will win re-election with at least 277 electoral votes. I should note I'm not alone in this prediction. All ten of the leading poll tracking aggregate sites -- some of which are run by Republicans and others by Democrats -- predict that Obama will win.

Of the swing states, I think Obama will carry Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. That puts the total at 277 and over the top. The aggregate of polls are just too strong for him in those key states -- more than 90 percent of polls in each state conducted since the first Denver debate show Obama in the lead.

Of the remaining swing states, I think Romney will carry Florida and North Carolina. I suspect he probably will also carry New Hampshire, Virginia, and Colorado. That would give him 261 electoral votes, which is not enough to win.

With this said, I think some of the states I earmarked for Romney could slide to Obama -- the three "probably" states noted above. That could take Obama's total as high as 303. I don't think any of the states I picked for Obama could slide to Romney.

As for the down-ticket races, the House will stay Republican but they'll shed a few seats. Similarly, the Senate will stay Democrat but shed a seat or two.

So there you have it. Next week will show whether I have any future in political predictions.

peaceful violence

I have been looking at various pictures and stories online about destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in the United States. I lived in the Flatiron District during my time in Manhattan, so if I was there now, I would have been without electricity for four days.

The picture below was the one that intrigued me the most. The cloud pattern, of course, catches your eye first. But if you look at the rest of the visible earth, there really is no sign of humankind, at least to my untrained eye.

The hurricane is a massive disaster for humans, but to the earth itself, it will leave no scars from this distance. In the grand scheme of things, a hurricane is like a little planetary belch.

malware warning!

Several readers here have contacted me about a malware warning that appeared sometimes when attempting to access my blog. After poking around under the hood, I discovered the problem was caused by a link on my blogroll. That has now been removed.

You were never in any danger when visiting my blog. A problem would possibly only have arisen had you clicked through the now-deleted link.

The above notwithstanding, virus software is absolutely essential when surfing the web, particularly in the more adult regions. If you don't have any installed, you must do so sooner than immediately. You wouldn't have unprotected sex with a syphilitic prositute, so don't engage in unprotected surfing, either.