a new year cometh

I've written here before about how I don't do new year's resolutions. Resolutions seem to be more about regrets, and I'm a goal girl. So I usually start to make a list in early December of some goals I'd like to accomplish in the following year.

I did this last year but I had to make two sets. One was a set of goals if I didn't become pregnant, and the other set was for the opposite.

As a result, I accomplished nothing on the first list except "get pregnant." So my 2013 goal list will be rather easy -- I'll simply use most of the goals from the "in case I don't get pregnant" list.

I'm not disappointed I didn't meet most of those goals, because the biggest one of all was to become a mother. What's interesting to me is how, five years ago, I wasn't even thinking about marriage and parenthood. But I like how my life has gone in a radically different direction.

I hope your new year is filled with exciting new challenges, too. See you back here in 2013!

BDSM clubs on college campuses

The New York Observer, an alternative newspaper of sorts, recently ran an article about the rising popularity of BDSM clubs on Ivy League and other college campuses, a possible result of the 50 Shades of Gray popularity.

The piece ends up largely covering another issue, which is the line between consensual and sexual assault in BDSM play. That aside, I saw this commented upon at a public forum, and some people seemed to think that BDSM clubs have no place on college campuses. "College used to be about learning," commented one stern

IMHO, this is a non-issue. College students for generations have consummed incalculable volumes of liquor and drugs, which certainly isn't on the cirriculum, either. My grandfather used to tell me stories of his wild times as an undergraduate.

Yes, BDSM should always be consensul. But if college students want to have fun with it, who cares?

elephant eats cell phone

I don't know whether I buy this. Elephants are smart and very tactile with their trunks, so why would it eat the cell phone? And how long would it take to work its way through its system -- I'd think several days.

More than that, though, the women's reactions seem too arch and over the top. I think the poop is real, but suspect someone just poked the phone in the turd before the shot was taken.

new pet peeve

I'm not a germ freak. I always wash thoroughly but I'm not trying to channel Joan Crawford when it comes to personal hygiene. With a baby now in the house, I'm more scrupulous than I once was about surfaces where he might come into contact.

When Joey goes out in public, he's all tucked comfortably into his nice little carrier. But it's summer here now, so he's not all bundled up like the proverbial bug in a rug; otherwise, he'd become overheated.

Some people -- notably old women -- just can't seem to keep their hands off a baby. Now if it's someone I know, I don't mind. But when it's a perfect stranger, I find it annoying when she'll reach into his carrier and start touching him, holding his hand or caressing his head.

I have no idea who she is or where she's been. So that's kind of rude, in my book. People tend to do some nasty things in the course of their day, and some of them are not into washing their hands after they've done whatever that is. I don't want your hands on my baby, thank you.

I had a sheer scarf in my drawer, so I had the brainstorm the other day to drape that over his carrier when we're in public somewhere. If anyone tries to lift it up, I'll say he he's recovering from something communicable so they better not. Yes, it's a little white lie, but I'd rather say that then bark "get your hands off my kid."

a bad time

On a Tumblr site that collects exotic tattoos, their owners often describe the reason for their ink with something like the following: "I was going through a bad time in my life so I got this tattoo to remind me to [fill in the blank about something positive]."

To me this doesn't quite seem logical. If you're having a bad time, that hopefully is a temporary situation. So how does a permanent tattoo remedy a temporary problem?

And if your experience was negative, don't you think you'd remember the bad time and what you took away from it that was positive? You need a tattoo to remind you?

The image below was posted by somehow who said much the same thing. "I was going through a hard time in my life," she explains, "so I got this tattoo to remind me that no matter what life brings I have to overcome the bad things and go on with my life."

How can a tattoo in the middle of your back, which you can't even see, remind you of anything?

She also says that the tattoo was very painful. So she endured a painful experience to remind her of another painful experience.

Okay. Well, it's your back, and your life. I'm commenting because you chose to put yourself on the Internet.

the devil's pool

I've written here before about how I don't like heights without a barrier that prevents you from plunging to your death. If you watch the short videos below, you'll see people cavorting at the lip of 350-foot-high Victoria Falls in what's known as The Devil's Pool.

According to some news articles I found online, people have slipped out of the pool and plunged to their death. The only barrier between the swimmer and tragedy is "a slippery, submerged lip of rock."

I found the shot of adults with children to be deeply troubling. Now that I'm a parent, I can't help but be bothered by what I see is adult carelessness with a child. If you're over 18 and want to plummet to your death, that's your business. When you take a child in with you, that's a whole different story.

merry christmas!

Happy holiday to all who celebrate Christmas today. We will be spending a quiet day with my husband's family, where everyone will have a chance to see Joey. A few have seen him but not the whole clan.

This is also our fourth anniversary! I don't expect James has anything planned because baby child limits our opportunities for later-night adventures outside the home for the time being.

I have never been able to get around the fact that Santa dresses funny here, with a red dunce cap and a coat that looks like a bathrobe.

Merry, merry to all!

deathly orgasm?

I've seen this quote reposted several times on Tumblr in the last few days: "Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty -- you think of nothing for that second -- it’s a tiny taste of death."

It's attributed to Jeff Buckley, who is conceivably the musician who drowned when he was thirty under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

This is a variation on the French idea of the orgasm -- which they call la petite mort, "the little death."

I don't agree with Buckley. My mind doesn't become completely empty at the moment of orgasm. The moment is a zenith, a sort of explosion, where my mind feels incredibly full but not in a painful way. It's like being jolted with a spirtual electric power. It's a true high.

I think the French are more on the money. "The little death" refers to the moments immediately after orgasm, where your mind returns to normal from the supernatural explosion it just experienced.

it's legal to fire hot chicks

A dentist acted legally when he fired a hot-looking assistant because he and his wife saw her as a threat to their marriage, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week.

The court said that firing someone like this was okay, even if the employee never flirted or did anything wrong or said she would never "consider touching her employer with a 10-foot pole."

The court did not find fault with the dentist's behavior, however. For example, he told his assistant that her tight clothing was distracting and added, if his pants were bulging, that was a sign her clothes were too revealing. He also remarked about her infrequent sex life: "that's like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it."

After the ruling, the dentist's lawyer said it was "a victory for family values because Knight fired Melissa Nelson in the interest of saving his marriage."

Excuse me while I go throw up in the wastebasket.

the seductive hour

The husband and I have another DVD recommendation. It's a new BBC show called The Hour. It is, as the Brits would say, bloody fantastic. It aired a few weeks ago here on ABC1 but I was busy having a baby and did not see it.

Think of Good Night, and Good Luck if written by John Le Carre, and then add a dollop each of Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and even a dash of The X-Files. The result is The Hour, an engrossing thriller blending sex, conspiracy, betrayal, murder, intrigue, espionage, adultery, treason, and then some. It stars Dominic West from The Wire (who is actually British) and the lovely Romola Garai.

We watched the first season, which consists of six one-hour episodes, in two sittings. I suspect it works a little better if you watch the episodes close together because there are lots of hooks and twists to follow.

A second season has aired in some countries but is not yet on DVD. I don't know how good that is, but if you like spy thrillers, you won't want to miss Season One.

end of the world today!

Today, the world is supposed to end. Centuries ago, Mayans predicted that 12.21.12 would be the end of a 5,125-year cycle when the word would end. We're supposed to believe that.

Mayans ripped the living hearts out of people as a sacrifice to the gods. They believed the earth was the center of the universe and never bothered to invent the wheel.

Yet we're supposed to believe they had this all-knowing power to determine when the world will end?

I don't think so.

Hopefully, when today comes and goes, and then tomorrow comes and goes, we'll have heard the last of these "end of the world" crackpots. Remember last year when that old fart preacher insisted the world would end on May 21, 2011? When it didn't, he adjusted the date to October 21, 2011, and it still didn't end.

Enough already.

one month old

Baby Joey is one month old today. But my pre-baby life and my pregnancy seem like so long ago, much more than a month. I can't imagine my life now without our son. He has caused such a profound change in my self identity.

I'm happy to say that motherhood, so far, has turned out to be much different than I thought it would be. I once thought babies were very demanding and cried a lot. Joey is an angel. In fact, I actually worry a bit that he's too mellow. Is he autistic? Brain damaged? Then I tell myself to shut up.

It's amazing how much he has developed in a month. As is typical for the first weeks, he hasn't grown all that much yet. But he seems more aware of his world. His eyes move toward me or my husband when we first speak but not for strangers. The few times he fusses, when I talk to him, he'll settle down. He does seem to recognize color or movement or something, because when I move a dayglow-pink stuffed bunny near him, he sort of follows it with his eyes.

I've also become an "old hand" at handling him, as has James. When baby first arrived, we handled him like he was an egg carton filled with crystal eggs. Now it's all second nature for us.

I think he's a keeper.

quant girl

I've written before about the giveaway box at our library where discarded books and unwanted donations are free for patrons. I've actually found some good stuff in there, particularly American magazines.

For whatever reason, I picked up a statistics textbook out of the box. It seemed to be calling to me. While much of math was always opaque for me, certain aspects aren't. Anything with theoretical stuff I don't understand at all, but basic numbers, particularly dollars and cents, is very clear to me. I understand the stock market pretty well, for example, and all the election polls.

Strange as it might seem, I'm actually enjoying the statistics book. Much of this makes sense to me. It has real-world examples and doesn't get lost in the theoretical clouds. I have a feeling I'm understanding a lot more by reading a book like this than if I were to take a class in it.

call girl contretemps

The Daily Beast has an interesting piece up by a woman who was a stripper and sex worker for a while before she became an elementary school teacher. When her past became public knowledge, she was fired.

She was a popular teacher who loved her students. Undoubtedly they missed her and didn't really understand what had happened.

Now we could stamp our collective feet with outrage about how Puritanical thinking drove a dedicated teacher out of her classroom. Her past should stay in her past and all that good stuff.

I agree that her private history is irrelevant to her skills as a teacher. But, as it turns out, she was the one who knifed herself in the back.

She was discovered after she openly blogged on a major website, under her own name, about her sex worker past.

Well d'oh.

Honesty is a great policy but so is discretion, too. If no one asks about your past, you don't have to tell them every sordid detail, in print, for all the world to see.

It's no secret here that I worked as an exotic dancer and stripper. I fully realize I probably will never be able to work in certain jobs. But if I did happen to get one of those jobs, I wouldn't tell everybody what I once did when I was younger. I was also a model during the same period, and that's what they'll be told I did.

Sometimes people really are their own worst enemies.

pussy flash fashion

The usually demure actress Anne Hathaway caused a minor scandal last week when she flashed her snatch while climbing out of a car at a movie premiere. She was furious at the photographers when she saw the published pictures, but apparently Anne has not learned the axiom that the camera does not lie. If you don't want beaver flash pictures, you wear panties.

That incident garnered so much press that the media hardly bothered to comment on the Tom Ford dress that she wore, which in my opinion is one of the ugliest outfits I've seen in a while. The sandal boots are interesting and would work if the dress was very simple. The cape is just God awful and looks like she has a garbage bag stuck to her back.

It's easy to see in the picture how the dress is sloppily made with bunched seams and a poorly designed construction. It looks like it was designed by someone who had no real sense of how to construct a garment to fit well.

The hairstyle doesn't help, either -- it looks like she adopted her Great Uncle Earl's combover. And Jack Nicholson called -- he wants his Joker lips back.

The sum effect is that it's far too over designed IMHO. Maybe that's why she flashed her quim -- she realized the dress was a disaster so she needed attention focused elsewhere. If that was what she intended, she succeeded masterfully. And now maybe the dog would like to sleep on that rag she's wearing.

dog and penguin show

Whoever posted this on YouTube titled it "dog wants to play with penguin." I'm not so sure. I think the dog wants to mix it up in a bad way with the penguin. When I was a kid, our dog used to dig at the front window just like this whenever his neighborhood enemies were walked down the sidewalk outside.

sickening

I have been watching the news from Connecticut about the mass shooting, and it just leaves me at a loss for words. I just feel so angry and powerless at the senselessness of this.

Twenty innocent little children mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood. Their parents must be in agony.

the politics of a chinese orgy

I stumbled on an interesting New Yorker item about several orgy scandals in China. The most recent one involves leaked online photos of five Communist Party officials getting their group freak on.

(I've posted one of the tamer ones below simply because it's much better quality than the explicit ones. Thanks to Google, I found a more explicit one where the men were grabbing the women's tits, and the women had their hands on the men's cocks, but the quality was so crappy, I didn't use it.)

When ordinary mortals engage in orgies, the Chinese government has cracked down hard, with participants ending up in prison. When government officials are involved, however, the state has engaged in a variety of propaganda backflips to pretend the photos are fake or to deny the people depicted are actually the people who they are.

I can understand why a theocracy can get its panties in a wad over group sex because they're enforcing a prudish religious dogma about sex. But China is not a theocracy but, instead, a secular dictatorship. Why should they care if people want to have some group fun. Collective farms are okay but collective sex is not?

I'm guessing that the earlier prosecutions were the brainchild of some party functionary who wasn't getting any. But now the proverbial shoe is off the other foot and the state cannot justify its massive hypocrisy. Their solution is to try to censor the whole thing out of existence.

The Internet, however, is not cooperating. Hooray for the Internet, bane of dictators and totalitarians everywhere.

beach blowjob

I posted this photo on my Tumblr page because it's a curious mystery. The exif data within the photo reveals it was taken in March of 2007 but I couldn't find any more information using Google's image search.

They're not on a nude beach, as evidenced by all the clothed people behind them (right clicking will show a larger version of the image). It doesn't appear to be any kind of porn shoot, because there's nothing blocking the explicit nature of what's happening.

Did anyone see? Did anyone complain? Did anyone call the police? I'll almost certainly never know, but it's a curious enigma nonetheless.

red letter day

One of my husband's cousins gave us a baby book as shower gift. It has places for photos and entries for landmark days, like baby's first smile and first step and all that sort of thing. Certain pages have printed titles in the first-person like "My First Word" and "My First Friend."

Conspicuously missing were some other memorable baby firsts. Yesterday was "my first pee while mommy changes my diaper and hitting her new dress" day. Another one I couldn't find in the book was "my first day puking on mommy's tit while feeding" day.

I should keep a list and make my own satirical baby book. Maybe I could have them printed and sell them so other parents could mark such monumental occasions like Baby's First Projectile Vomit and Baby's First Tantrum.

ikea monkey

This story is sad and cute and funny all at once: someone's pet monkey, dressed in a shearling coat and diaper, was found wandering an Ikea parking lot in Toronto over the weekend. The primate escaped from a closed pen inside a closed car.

The critter was understandably pretty stressed but fortunately was captured before it came to any harm. The owners were found and cited for keeping an illegal animal. The monkey in question, named Darwin, will now live in a primate rescue center.

The big mystery in this whole tale is the coat (see below). If it is real shearling, it had to cost a bundle. That aside, it's like something straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon.

my libido's vacation

As I wrote here several weeks ago, my libido took a holiday shortly before Baby Joey was born. I'm not sure where she went, and she didn't send any postcards saying when she would return.

Last night, after I put Joey down to sleep, I got out my sewing box to do some much-needed mending. Husband went outside for a while to do something with the car.

About an hour later, he came back in with his shirt off. Deeply tanned, he was sweaty and glistening.

Bang. My libido was back. No call from the airport saying she had returned and when to expect her. She just showed up. So the couch was put to good use. It wasn't chandelier sex but it did the trick.

I'm glad my libido came home where she belongs. I didn't realize how much I missed her.

kate middleton prank

I've been following the Kate Middleton hospital prank scandal in the news, as I'm sure a lot of people are. It's a huge story here down under because the call originated from an Australian radio show.

I think you can divide the news coverage and reaction into two phases as the story developed: first, after the prank itself, and second, after one of the nurses involved committed suicide.

I didn't hear much negative reaction after the prank itself. There was some tsk-tsk from royalists in the media but not a public outcry. When the nurse committed suicide, however, the outrage was palpable.

I find that odd, but perhaps because I was recently pregnant. To me, the attempt to call a sick pregnant woman and prank her on the air while she's in hospital is a simply terrible thing to do. It makes no matter that she's a celebrity. For all anyone knew, Kate could've been in the hospital for something much worse.

She may be a public figure but her privacy doesn't belong to the public.

In contrast, I don't think a reasonable person could expect a prank like this would lead to the suicide of someone involved. The nurse who handled most of the call and gave out all the information was not the one who killed herself. It was the woman in the beginning who simply patched the call through.

That was a freak thing that happened but I honestly don't think the pranksters can be blamed for that. Almost certainly the woman had other issues and this was simply the proverbial needle that broke the camel's back.

So it's curious to me how the outrage is more related to the suicide than to the pranking of a potentially sick and grieving hospital patient. The latter, in my opinion, is inexcusible. I think had anyone done something like that to me, my husband would've enlarged the perpetrator's nostrils with a prybar.

a recommendation

The husband and I finished a DVD set last night that we both thought was one of the best thrillers we'd ever seen. Titled State of Play, it originally ran about ten years ago in the UK as a limited run six-hour television series.

It has everything you could hope for in a top-notch thriller -- complex plot, fascinating characters, crackling dialog, shocking twists, and more. Packed into six hours is more corruption, sex, deception, crime, triple-crossing, adultery, scandal, cover-up, bloodshed, and lust than you can possibly imagine.

We definitely recommend it highly. If you check it out, be sure you get the six-hour series State of Play, not the movie of the same name.

lifting the mental fog

I regularly noticed in the last month or so of my pregnancy that my brain was not firing on all cylinders. I easily forgot things or mixed up one word for another. I'm not yet thirty but I felt like I somehow had acquired the brain of an eighty-year-old woman.

One day I couldn't remember the right word for a cauliflower. Car keys disappeared into the twilight zone. I can't tell you the number of bizarre misused words I found in this blog after I had written entries.

A foggy brain like this is not uncommon toward the end of pregnancy. Sometimes it's a result of fatigue and other times just a chemical thing.

The mental inclemency lingered a few days after Joey was born, but thankfully now that's all in the past. It just sort of vaporized within a day or two. It's nice not feeling so stupidly dull-witted all of the time.

the elephant at the beach

My image host is back, but they're still ironing out some problems caused by their hacking problem. That's a relief because I didn't want missing photos in years worth of this blog. My goal is to try for intriguing pictures, so if my post is dull, at least people will have something to look at.

I don't know who is responsible for the humor in this image but it slights virtually every male human, no matter how well endowed. It probably started out as an art photograph, but Google image search has not helped me find any further information.

hacked photo host

I use PimpAndHost for many of my adult-themed photos, and now I see they've been hacked. Some of my photos hosted on their site are loading without issue, while others load very slowly and still others not at all.

Fortunately, I have every photo I've ever posted backed up, but I don't exactly have time to go back and repost them all. So for now if you notice images not loading, that's why.

In the meantime, I'll have to hunt down another adult-themed hosting site. There are many image hosting sites out there, but most have PG-rated limitations.

knocked up princess

So the news is out that Kate Middleton is pregnant. The proverbial cat was sprung from the bag when she checked into hospital because of morning sickness.

I feel for her. I never had it bad enough to check into hospital. Maybe this means she's having a boy, because there is some scientific correlation between carrying a male child and morning sickness -- it has something to do with hormones.

I do not envy what her life will be like now. If she was an ordinary mortal like me, she could spend a few hours vomiting and then drag around the rest of the day in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Alas, not for Kate.

The limelight will be turned up even brighter for her. Every step she takes in public will be magnified ten-fold, now that she's pregnant. If she's lucky, her public appearances will be limited and brief. Otherwise, I can only imagine that public life will compound the frequent discomfort brought on by pregnancy.

My husband's anti-royalist family has rubbed off on me, and I think the whole lot of the royals should be sent packing and made to get real jobs. But I like Kate, maybe because she started out as a non-royal. I hope the best for her.

who the hell is joanna?

Several times a day I receive spam where the sender is shown to be "Joanna Stevenson." They're for a variety of come-ons, everything from credit repair services to dating websites to overseas prescription sales.

To the best of my knowledge, no one famous is named Joanna Stevenson. So unlike spam from "Emma" or "Paris" or "Eva" who wants to chat with me online, or spam using real celebrity names, I can think of no logical reason to keep sending spam under the same obviously fake name.

I know instantly that anything from Joanna is spam. It's usually in the spam trapper anyway, but occasionally not.

That still leaves me wondering why someone would design spam in such an inept way. They must send countless trillions of these and many people are probably like me -- they know Joanna is garbage.

It must make life a bit difficult for anyone really named Joanna Stevenson.

glorifying the stupid

I always find things like this a tiny bit disturbing. Some of the mishaps are harmless indeed, but others are not. Is there something wrong with laughing at someone's very painful misfortune? I often wonder if the victim in clips like these knows her stupidity is being broadcast world wide.

smiley face

I know that babies can't really smile until they're several months old. Anything before then is a result of poor muscle control. Or so I've been told.

But that said, Joey smiles a lot. Like all the time. I feed him, put him down to sleep, and he cracks a smile. I change his diaper, and there comes a smile. He's a week old and he seems perpetually happy.

So maybe he's smiling because he's a genius. Or simple-minded. Or a sinister evil villain in training.

Whatever it is, he sure as hell seems happy about something even though it's not supposed to be real.

I should keep quiet and consider myself lucky. In a week I could be complaining about a wall-to-wall colicky baby.