gmail insanity again

Once again Gmail is planning some big changes to their email service. I use it, as do countless millions others. I'm not happy about this, and I'm not alone.

With these new changes, Gmail will sort incoming emails based on content. This sounds good in concept, but given Gmail's past ineptitude with upgrades, I'm very skeptical. Some time ago, they introduced a feature where users could mark certain emails as "important" and others with a star. Problem was, Gmail also decided their system would also determine what was "important" and that was a disaster. Spam was marked as "important" while actual important stuff wasn't.

I'm expecting Gmail's sorting of my email will be somewhat equally a mess. Hopefully it can be easily ignored. The service has some excellent features, including an exceptionally accurate search function (whereas Yahoo's stinks).

I'm always left wondering about these sorts of "upgrades" -- did anyone beside some tech geeks at Gmail even want these changes? Did users write in begging for "improvements"? I suspect the latter did not happen.

the age of consent

Last week, a story from Australia made headlines around the world -- a man had set up a video camera to record what he thought were ghosts and instead saw his girlfriend shagging his sixteen-year-old son. The woman was sentenced this week to six months in jail and ordered to attend a sex rehab.

While the legal age of consent in most of Australia is sixteen (with some specific exceptions), the incident occurred in Tasmania, where the age of consent is seventeen. Hence, the reason she was prosecuted.

The facts in this particularly situation make the story somewhat gross -- she had a child with her boyfriend, who is thus the half brother of the teenager she was humping.

But should this be criminal? Is an older woman doing a teenager who is nearly seventeen a criminal act?

Australia certainly isn't alone. Many states in the US set the age of consent at seventeen and even some at eighteen.

I have to think many boys who are sixteen but not yet seventeen have lost their virginity, and probably quite a few (most?) before they were sixteen. These days, it's not like a great majority of teenage males in this age bracket are innocent waifs. You could probably make a sizable wager that many males in this age bracket are the ones who initiate sex.

This is almost certainly even more likely for males between seventeen and eighteen. Yet if an older woman sleeps with a male in Oregon, Virginia, or California a few days before his eighteenth birthday, she can end up in jail.

At least in the US, age of consent statutes not old laws that need to be updated. Many of them are recent changes to earlier laws, which established a younger age of consent.

I think sixteen is reasonable. Anything more than that is just unrealistic.

my second husband

My father-in-law is an expert kidder. He can hoodwink people with a straight face and is totally believable. It's a skill inherited by my husband.

Yesterday, with son Joey in tow, I drove and accompanied my father-in-law to an outpatient medical procedure that ate up a good part of the day. I had to wait for him through his appointment, which itself was punctuated by trips back and forth between the treatment room and the waiting room.

One of the medical people brought him back to the waiting room early in the appointment and said "oh, here's your grandaughter," referring to me. Not missing a beat, my father-in-law said, "oh, that's not my granddaughter, that's my wife."

Without even being asked, I played along. The case was bolstered by the fact that my son strongly resembles my husband and thus his father and also me, but I don't look anything like my father-in-law.

Most of the other old guys waiting for their appointments seemed to believe my father-in-law and were suitably impressed by the much younger wife and new offspring. When one asked how we met, my father-in-law blithely said "we met online and then she came all the way from America to marry me."

At that point, most of the older men were woefully disappointed they had never used the Internet and had no idea how to go online. (My father-in-law doesn't know, either, but they don't know that.)

the best of tumblr porn

For those of my readers who are Americans and back at the office after a long holiday, here's something to do today if actual work would bother you. Salon has a new piece up with about a dozen "best of Tumblr" porn sites.

I think a more accurate title would be "interesting Tumblr porn sites," because they only asked one person for his or her opinion on each webpage. It can hardly be "the best" when no group has actually voted on it. Hollywood just ask Dustin Hoffman for his opinion of the best film of the year and then hand out an Oscar. Plus, if different people all have different answers, then how can any of them be "the best"?

But enough about that. Some of the chosen sites are very good. A few are gay while some others are "meh." I'm not offended that my Tumblr wasn't selected, because other pages have far more followers than the 14,000 who follow mine. (No shit, I actually have that many followers, and I've only ever posted one of my own nude photos there.)

With Yahoo now owning Tumblr, I hope they don't go all puritan on us and ban anything even R-rated on the site, as is the case on Facebook. I do imagine Yahoo will soon require "adult warning" screens for Tumblr, which could actually drive up traffic.

this made my panties damp

I saw this photo online and it certainly made me purr. My brain started churning out a few X-rated Harlequin Romance plots, and that made my crotch a bit damp. I think the combination of his strong hand and the starched cuff while teasing her snatch is what did it for me.

Is this the young duchess's handsome butler who tends to his mistress's needs while the impotent duke is gone on yet another of his tedious hunts? Or is it a studly viscount who can't keep his hands off the innocent young chambermaid in his private library while his frigid wife remains in the day parlor, engrossed as ever in her needlepoint?

The second season of Downton Abbey sort of went in the latter direction when Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, had a dalliance with one of the maids. I was sorry to see that subplot end rather quickly, although it was very well done.

jimmy's giant penis

Earlier this month I featured a piece about a building in China that unintentionally looks like a giant penis. Jimmy Kimmel has some fun with it in this short clip.

Before I was a mom, I probably would've found these kids annoying. Now they strike me as sweet and innocent. I hope my son is innocent for a good while. Innocence, like virginity, when lost can never be found again but the loss of innocence is arguably more profound for most of us.

I have actually never seen Jimmy Kimmel on television. When I lived in the states, I was always working when he was on TV. His show ran for a while here in Australia on cable but we don't have that. So I've only ever seen him on YouTube clips.

For whatever reason, he strikes me as sexually unadventurous even though he is very funny. He seems like the kind of guy who could only go for about four minutes before shooting his load and then falling asleep.

the freelance dominatrix

The Atlantic has an interesting but somewhat uneven new piece about dominatrices. The writer was still a college student when she reported the piece, so perhaps she can be forgiven for her uneven coverage. She should have interviewed a few more women in the biz and left out the one who really is more of a dominatrix pimp.

Several submissive men in the article are married yet their wives know nothing of their need to be whipped to the point of drawing blood. That suggests their marriages are not very intimate, because otherwise your wife would notice if your back was lacerated.

One has to wonder if such a man is inherently drawn to dominant women -- he's afraid to tell his somewhat domineering wife that he likes to be beaten, so he seeks a woman who is much more dominant to punish him.

Other than some spanking play with a few men, including my husband, I don't have a lot of personal experience as a dominatrix. I would not want to whip James. I like to spank and paddle him on occasion but would never want to draw blood or even leave welts. Just some tush reddening is fine for me.

I like to bind him and then tease him, telling him how naughty he is as he role-plays being submissive, but I don't know if that makes me a dominatrix. There's no physical pain or harm. And he regularly does something similar to me, tying me up and verbally tormenting me as he manipulates me to orgasm with his fingers and tongue and cock.

I can see myself being a professional dominatrix, as long as no sex was involved. The man could not experience sexual release. But I could get into binding a man and then giving him a good whipping with a riding crop while verbally taunting him. I wouldn't go as far as drawing blood but welts would be okay. My husband said he wouldn't care as long as nothing sexual was involved.

Maybe that should be my new career once Joey is a little older. Of course, it might raise a few eyebrows if I picked him up at daycare while wearing a skin-tight leather outfit with thigh-high stiletto boots.

defective maternal instinct

As is typical for babies his age, Joey has been waking up now once or twice during the night on occasion. He doesn't do it daily like many I've read about, so that certainly is a blessing.

Several times in the last two weeks, I've awakened thinking he's fussing when it turns out he's absolutely quiet. I will be in the middle of an unrelated dream -- like visiting a surreal city or traveling somewhere exotic -- and I'll wake up thinking I've heard him. The husband, who is not a sound sleeper, will assure me Joey made no noise. I'll listen and, of course, he'll be right.

So that means I must dream that Joey is fussing. But the "main attraction" dream has nothing to do with my son. So I apparently have two dream channels clashing with each other. On the main channel, I'm dreaming about a canoe trip down a jungle river. Then suddenly I hear Joey in his room and wake from the jungle river. But then Joey isn't really crying.

This is a bit like what happened in Inception but only funkier. In that movie, the dreams were in layers. In mine, they're fighting with each other.

I hope this doesn't mean I have to storm some snowbound fortress or I'll be trapped in my dreams forever. Then Joey really would fuss. (That will only make sense if you've seen Inception.)

fornication equals prison time

Indonesian politicians are keeping busy. Some of them are busy trying to relax banking laws to an "anything goes" standard.

Other politicians there are keeping busy trying to write absurd new laws regulating morality. Under a proposed new measure, premarital sex could lead to a five-year prison sentence if caught and convicted. Co-habitating with an unmarried person of the opposite sex will land you an additional year in prison.

So you launder countless billions in drug money -- no problem! Shag your girlfriend or boyfriend and it's hard time for you. We all know that unmarried people fucking will cause all sorts of societal harm, but of course an unregulated banking system that could collapse at any minute will not result in any problems whatsoever.

One can only shudder wondering how they'd investigate and enforce this.

alien abductions and esteemed academics

Vanity Fair has an interesting new article on their website exploring about how certain highly respected academics from prestigious institutions are UFO abduction believers. The primary focus of the piece is a man named John Edward Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist who wrote widely about people who claim they were abducted by aliens.

Stories of supposed alien abductions are interesting but the rationalist in me is eternally skeptical. Who's to say they weren't just really powerful dreams? With so many cellphone cameras now, why has no one been able to record his or her supposed abduction?

I'm not saying these people claiming to be abducted are wrong or lying or mentally ill. But I'm always a doubter. I just need to see more proof, and until that time comes, if ever, I can't help but be highly skeptical. It could be true and it could be fiction. I imagine many other people feel this same way, too -- show us the proof.

Why would aliens be so secretive, anyway? If they're advanced enough to have perfected interplanetary travel, I would think they had some kind of diplomatic skills, too. Why don't they make a more formal attempt at reaching out and contacting us?

Conspiracy theories thrive on secrecy, cover-ups, and alleged insider knowledge. That's arguably what makes abduction claims so attractive -- they're impossible to prove, which for a conspiracy buff therefore means they are true.

Academics and science, however, usually approach these things from the opposite angle -- without proof, it cannot be believed at this time and judgement must be reserved until later. Which makes some academics' embrace of UFO abduction theories seem inherently suspect; they're overlooking the lack of proof and too easily accepting them as true.

The academics, in a sense, have become conspiracy theorists themselves. They've become anti-academics and rejecting their typical methodical approach, a subject which the Vanity Fair writer never broaches.

one billion dollars

The big tech and business news this week is Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr for more than a billion dollars. I suspect my reaction was like a lot of people's -- huh?

Tumblr has always lost money. Last year, it had expenses of $25 million with revenue of only $13 million in one of the few years that it actually had revenue. It has also been funded by more than $125 million from investors before the Yahoo sale. One has to imagine those people will make a bundle and share part of the $1 billion-plus windfall.

Yahoo spent a lot of money to buy a company that's always lost money. They obviously expect future revenue will increase with advertising, but one has to wonder if that would kill what makes Tumblr attractive, now a relatively ad-free experience. If Tumblr is junked up with a lot of advertising, one has to imagine that will drive away bloggers and deflate any revenue.

It's no surprise that porn is a big part of Tumblr now -- many of the most popular pages are filled with hardcore material. Will mainstream advertisers want their content on analgangbang.tumblr.com? I don't think so.

Tech world's history is littered with expensive past deals that led nowhere. Previously, Yahoo spent billions on Flickr and Geocities. It lost billions on both. Google paid billions for Blogger and has lost billions on that acquisition. Is there any reason to believe Tumblr will magically be different.

I'm reminded of the wealthy person who buys something expensive, but soon tires of the new acquisition and then it's ignored and forgotten. The cycle is then repeated again and again. Yahoo seems to have been that way in the past with other deals -- it has more money than it has ideas what to do with what it buys. I wonder if the same will happen here.

By the way, in case you don't already happen to know, I have had a hardcore Tumblr page for years.

no best friends

I'm reading a very good novel now with part set at a traditional boy's public school in Britain in the early twentieth century. (A bit of context for those who don't know -- a "public school" in Britain is what Americans would call a "private school." Weird, I know.)

One of the rules the boys must honor is "no best friends." That struck me as immediately obnoxious, and while this is a novel, I imagined such a rule is based on fact. I Googled that and found, indeed, some schools in the UK ban best friends, as do some schools in the US. I found a bunch of examples.

I'm sorry, but that is just moronic. I refuse to be a helicopter parent and micromanage my child's friendships. Kids have been forming friends on their own for countless thousand of years. They don't need busybody adults dickering around and rearranging friendships. Yes, a teacher can encourage children to interact with many other peers, but that doesn't mean dictating friendships while outlawing others.

This whole thing smacks of arranged marriages. An arranged friendship is equally nonsensical. Any school that attempts to do this would not be a school my child attends, thank you very much.

(By the way, the novel referenced above is Old Filth, by Jane Gardam.)

the ethics of deep space exploration

I read an article this week in National Geographic about possibilities for mankind to visit nearby solar systems like Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti in search of earth-like planets where other intelligent life forms might be found. The article hypothesized about future spacecraft that could travel much faster than anything we have now, but slower than the speed of light.

The print version featured some large illustrations of hypothetical spacecraft for such a journey. One of them, shown below, featured a massive prototype multi-generational space ship that would transport an entire human colony of several thousand people on a journey lasting decades or even centuries. Those who left earth may not live long enough to reach their destination, but their progeny born and raised onboard the ship could.

That led me to wonder about the ethics of rearing children on such a long journey. Let's say such a craft now existed and the deep space probe team was signing up volunteers. My husband and I are selected to go. We've made that decision with our own free will, and it's our choice to spend the rest of our lives on a spacecraft.

But what about our children born in space? Is it ethical or fair or morally right to decide their entire lives before they're even conceived? They have no free will to decide about leaving earth and spending the rest of their lives on a possibly pointless road trip. What happens if they arrive in the Alpha Centauri system and find nothing more than moss and lichen on a boring Earth-like planet?

And what about if it's a really long journey, one that would take generations, maybe even several centuries. Not only would we condemn our children to spend their entire lives cooped up in a spacecraft, we'd be condemning our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on.

Parents now make choices for their children that they are largely powerless to reverse until they reach majority. Two examples that immediately come to mind are having children when you're very poor or forcing your children to embrace some weird religion. But at least when they grow up, the kids have the potential to escape that. No such luck for children born on deep space journeys.

Fortunately this is an ethical dilemma I will never have to face. I have zero interest in personally traveling to Alpha Centauri or even Mars, for that matter. But if you go, be sure to send pictures. I'll bet it'll look really cool.

mr. and mrs. hitman

I haven't heard from my religious troll in a very, very long time -- at least a year. So I hope I'm not opening myself up for a new troll infestation by posting a somewhat religious topic, but here goes.

There's something I don't buy in Christian theology. A little story will illustrate my point of contention.

Mr. and Mrs. Hitman are a happily married couple. He's always faithful and worships his wife. He pampers her and caters to her every wish. He's deeply in love with Mrs. Hitman. He attends church with her as often as he can.

Mrs. Hitman is a loving, traditional wife. She is 100 percent faithful to her husband and loves him deeply, too. She's also quite religious and a devout Christian. She has no idea what her husband does for a living -- she believes he's some kind of government consultant and can't talk about his job because of its sensitive nature.

Truth be told, Mr. Hitman is an expert contract killer, the best in the business. He's efficient, ruthless, and without remorse. His targets have begged for their lives but he nonetheless dispatches them without any doubt or guilt. And when the contract demands it, he will be outright sadistic, making sure the target is tortured ruthlessly before he or she dies, something he enjoys doing.

Notwithstanding that he attends church and prays with his wife, Mr. Hitman is an atheist. He has privately renounced Christianity but would never tell Mrs. Hitman out of concern for her feelings.

After Mr. Hitman treats Mrs. Hitman to a lovely evening out, both are killed in a freak auto accident on their way home. Mrs. Hitman, to no one's surprise, is sent straight to heaven. Mr. Hitman is sent elsewhere.

Now here's where I have a problem: Mrs. Hitman loves her husband unconditionally. She has been a model wife and a dutiful Christian. She would make a busload of saints proud of her upright life. She could even be a future saint.

So how can it be heaven/paradise/whatever-you-want-to-call-it if she'll spend the rest of eternity separated from the man she loves?

And there you have it.

(As a reminder to those reading this far, I'm neither an atheist nor an agnostic. My faith, however, is a little murky -- I attend church on occasion but am not sure what I would call myself as far as my religious affiliation.)

how much porn is on the internet?

Buzzfeed decided, for whatever reason, it was necessary to determine how much porn is on the internet so they wrote a story about it. The problem is they confused traffic with volume of content volume and ended up coming (hah!) to no particular conclusion at all.

They do reveal that, where statistics are available, the internet is saturated with porn. Popular porn pages receive hundreds of millions visits per day. That's a lot of people looking at a lot of porn and a lot of used tissues.

The most interesting takeaway in the piece, for me, was that some porn traffic comes from Vatican City. Of course, it might be a lowly layperson janitor surfing the smut. Then again, it might be some cardinals. Or?

One popular porn title was a German BDSM video. Hmmm -- wasn't the penultimate pope a German?

What's also funny is a glimpse of non-porn bootleg viewing that's attracting Vatican eyes via torrents. The scifi sitcom The Neighbors is popular, as is the supernatural TV series Touch. Is anyone seeing a pattern here? Also popular is the espionage drama The Americans. Is there a communist sleeper in the Vatican?

555 feet in the air

In a continuing effort to feature videos that might terrify my fellow acrophobes, I present a helmet-cam video made atop the Washington Monument, the world's tallest stone structure.

IMHO what's really impressive here are the men who climb all over the scaffolding as if they're six feet in the air. They clearly have no fear of heights. Yes, they are wearing harnesses, but if you're afraid of heights, you still wouldn't go up there no matter how many safety rigs. You could still fall and smack yourself into pulp on all that stone.

Today's big mystery question -- what's inside that little cabinet door at the very tippy top of the monument? The direct YouTube link for this video is here.

angelina jolie's courage

You may have heard actress Angelina Jolie disclosed yesterday that she had a double mastectomy. This was a preventative measure, because she carries a gene making it 87 percent likely she would develop breast cancer if she did not act proactively.

I don't often think of celebrities as courageous, but Angelina is the exception here. Going public about what she did is truly heroic. She's known as a "sex symbol" but that didn't stop her from telling everyone about her surgery, notwithstanding she may pay the price professionally, because it's a way to encourage other women to get tested and consider their options.

I usually don't agree with celebrities standing up on a soapbox and using their fame to push their personal agendas. But this is an important exception. Without question, she is using her notoriety the right way.

You go girl.

space oddity

This gave me goosebumps. If you haven't already seen it, this vid is definitely worth watching. I was never a big David Bowie fan, but this gives a whole new perspective on the song. Chris Hadfield released this yesterday, the day he returned from 166 days in space. (Here is the direct link on YouTube.)

naked girls on bicycles

I am intrigued to stumble at times on niche blogs and Tumblrs with a very narrow focus. One such example is the accurately titled Naked Girls on Bicycles.

How much time does it take to comb the internet for this very specialize fare? I'd have to think quite a lot, at least several hours a week to supply the volume of material appearing on the site. Finding nude female cyclists can't be that easy. The result is a sort of cyber coffee table book showing any possible variety of image with this unifying theme.

Nude cycling strikes me as something photographers thought up for nudist magazines and art photos but very few real men and women would be very interested. This wouldn't be so much out of prudishness but the sheer dislike of putting one's exposed naughty bits directly on the seat. A stone in the road has to be painful.

the mullet

Was there ever a time when a mullet was not laughable? They predate me. I asked my husband and he said it was not a style he saw much in Australia. I guess it was more of an American thing.

I don't mean the sort of "slight mullet" as is seen in old MacGyver reruns. I mean the full-bore, no-holds-barred mullet. They just seem so inherently ridiculous.

When I lived in Las Vegas and Los Angeles from 2003 to 2008, I would still see both men and women with 1980s-era mullets. Some were so extreme people would turn around and stare. Their owners seemed oblivious.

I could well be wrong, but I think a loooong time will pass before the mullet comes back into style. Everyone who ever saw a real one will have to be dead first. But then nothing is ever dead when you have YouTube and the internet to remind you.

how to fight revenge porn

The Atlantic has a somewhat long and interesting new article with many internal links about fighting revenge porn. The piece was written by a lawyer/law professor and very readable and understandable for those of us who are laypersons.

For those not in the know, revenge porn is the practice of an ex posting private nude and X-rated photos and videos online without the subject's consent. More regular readers of my blog will know this happened to me long ago; a former boyfriend posted some nude stills of me, including some masturbation shots, that are still floating around on the internet.

While the article's writer explores a variety of legal issues both theoretical and real world, including discussion of a woman who is suing her ex-lover for posting her private naked photos online, he doesn't touch on the whole psychological aspect of revenge porn, which I think is very important when considering these issues.

In my opinion, revenge porn is about the ex refusing to let go. Yes, you've had all the horrible fights and have broken up officially, but he or she can't end it. He/she can't shake you. It becomes an obsession. And revenge porn is part of that obsession. If he/she can't have you, then revenge of any sort, including revenge porn, is continuing to have a type of relationship with you.

So taking any kind of legal action or filing criminal complaints is once again engaging the ex. Like your ex, you are refusing to let it die. Yes, it can be embarrassing to have your naked photos floating around in cyberspace, but if you make a stink, you're only more likely to have those photos become public knowledge, as The Atlantic piece explores.

Potentially worse, you are establishing a type of relationship by attempting to take action. True, it's not an intimate relationship -- it's a contentious relationship -- but it's a relationship nonetheless. That may be exactly what the ex craves. It's the Fatal Attraction syndrome -- I can't have you as my lover but I can still have you in my life, thanks to my obsessive games.

That's why, when my ex started scattering my naked photos all over the internet, I took no action at the time. I already had a serious problem with him stalking me, so hiring a lawyer in an attempt to deal with naked photos would only encourage him. He'd see it as a signal I wanted him back.

All of this aside, in practical terms, once something is in cyberspace, unless you're a multinational corporation with lots of money and in-house counsel, removing naked photos from the electronic ether is probably close to impossible.

Of course, the moral to this story is never take X-rated photos. No one can spread something around if it doesn't exist. But for those of us with naughty photos circulating without our consent, this is little consolation now.

I'm a former exotic dancer who made her living getting naked. It's not as much an issue for me, I would imagine, as it is for a professional woman who suddenly finds her naughty stuff out there for everyone to see.

For those who have yet to take any naked photos, these incidents should always serve as cautionary tales. Be very, very certain you trust anyone who has access to your photos. Because if that relationship should ever sour -- particularly if he or she is of an obsessive nature -- then you may be sorry.

But suing? Not for me, thanks. Maybe others will find it worth their while, but I'd reserve judgment until seeing if they can actually put the toothpaste back in the tube.

granny and her boytoy live in sin

This news item is quite sweet, about a 106-year-old woman named Marjorie here in Australia living with her 73-year-old lover Gavin. Neither have ever been married and it sounds like the first big romance for both of them.

They enjoy shacking up and do not plan on marrying. "I'm too irresponsible," Marjorie says. "I quite like living in sin."

I've already told The Husband that if we grow old together but then he dies before me, I plan on finding myself a boytoy. They're not called the golden years for nothing.

how to eat an apple

My grandfather taught me to eat apples core and all when I was a child, just like the dude in this video. I distinctly remember walking with him through the small orchard on his gentleman's farm. He picked an apple for each of us and showed me how to eat all of it, core included.

His method was slightly different than what's seen below. He bit into the middle like most people do, then took bites all the way around the fruit's "equator." Then he started eating all of either the top or bottom. Once that was done, the remainder was consumed. Only the stem is tossed away, which you use for a handle while you eat.

Some people are squeamish about the seeds because they contain harmless, trace amounts of arsenic and cyanide. You'd have to eat many, many apple seeds before they had any harmful effect.

chairs like tribbles

I saw the pictures below on the web the day before yesterday. They're accompanying an interview with Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. The three pictures show an installation Salcedo created in Bogotá at the Palace of Justice where the Supreme Court of Colombia meets.

That night, I had a dream about these chairs. It wasn't a nightmare because I wasn't frightened. But the chairs were reproducing like weeds in my dream. They appeared all over the place on lawns and sidewalks, sporadically at first and then in greater density. As things got worse, they clogged streets and trapped people.

They just kept reproducing, however it is that furniture has sex. Like everyone else, we were eventually trapped in the house by the chairs until, suddenly, they all disappeared over the course of one evening. Strangely, no one celebrated their departure. People didn't seem to want to talk about the chairs, almost as if they were frightened but only after the chairs had vanished. I was shushed for wanting to talk about the mystery furniture.

This is the first time I ever recall having a dream inspired by something I saw on the Internet. It might also be worth noting that I don't think I've ever had a nightmare as an adult. I like interesting dreams like this chair invasion and am always glad when I have one.

no more birth control pill

I have decided I'm not going to go back on the pill again. I'm pretty sure I'll never use an oral contraceptive again. I think there are just too many risks down the line. I don't even like to eat any food that's not natural and organic, so why should I load up my body with chemicals in a drug form of birth control?

I first started taking the pill when I was still living at home with my parents. My father actually prescribed it for me. I guess he figured he couldn't talk me into abstinence but having a pregnant teenage daughter wasn't something he wanted, either. So the pill was his way of not having to deal with the problem any longer.

So while this was something of an informed decision at the time, I just wanted my father off my back about getting pregnant. I never really considered the possible long-term health consequences. Who thinks about that kind of stuff when you're fifteen. In my late teens and early twenties, I thought more about having sex than possible consequences thirty years down the road. I just avoided thinking about it.

But now my head is on much differently. I want to be as all-natural as possible (without getting ridiculous about it). I still love having sex but no longer fear getting knocked up. Yes, I don't want to get pregnant right now, not until Joey is at least two or three, but we'll stick to more "traditional" forms of birth control from here on out. The Husband is in total agreement.

Teenagers do a lot of stupid things that can have consequences later -- drugs, criminality, smoking, you name it. I guess being on the pill qualifies as somewhat less stupid than other things I could've done. Yes, it may have long-term consequences years later, but not on the scale of, say, committing an armed robbery or doing cocaine for ten years.

Is that rationalization? I don't know. I hope I don't have to revisit this issue when I'm sixty. Maybe they'll have a prescription then to deal with it.

hoverpuss

A neighbor's big mellow male cat often comes into our yard and sometimes right into the house. The dog could care less, but Joey seems entranced by the creature.

He watches it walk towards him and then will hold out his hand when it's close. The cat will come near to him but seems to know a baby is not always trustworthy so stays just out of reach. When I hold the cat and then stroke Joey's hand on its fur, he coos and smiles.

He's not really old enough yet to focus too much on the TV or a computer screen for longer than a few seconds, but the image below does entrance him -- I use it as a screen saver on one of the desktops. He stares at it, transfixed. I don't know if it's the cat or the 3D effect or maybe he thinks the cat is moving toward him. (Click it and you'll see a larger version.)

The husband says "at almost six months he's already mesmerized by pussy."

four women

Someone posted this series on Reddit of four sisters who had their picture taken in the same pose once a year for 36 years, starting in 1975. You can see the entire set here.

For whatever strange reason, I always like looking at photo sets of complete strangers through the years. I like to look at how they change.

In this sister set, some of them age noticeably from one year to the next, but then almost seem to skip a few years of aging. I also like how they start out looking rather different from each other, more like some of them are cousins, but by the last few photos, the sibling resemblance is so obvious.

china builds giant penis

The Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper People's Daily is building a new headquarters in Beijing that looks unmistakably like a massive hard cock. As you can see from the picture below, there's little room left for interpretation here. I would think even the cleanest mind couldn't help noticing the striking similarity.

The great irony here is that, when Chinese citizens go online and search for the new building, they're blocked by the official Chinese firewall. The censors apparently think pictures of the building are too sexual, and like all X-rated fare in China, viewing is prohibited. No glorious big dong building picture for you, comrade.

I can't imagine Lenin would approve of a communist building that looks like a giant dick. But if the party needs a new name for their headquarters, they might try Very Excited Building Happy to See You. Directions to the place will be a snap -- it won't be hard to find us; we're in the biggest dick in the neighborhood.

subtle nymphomaniac

Lars von Trier has long been a controversial filmmaker, and his new sexual epic titled Nymphomaniac is sure not to be an exception.

The two-movie series has been described as "the erotic history of a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac, who recounts the story of her sexual life to an older man after he saves her after a beating." The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman, Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, and more.

Some of my favorite movies of all time are by von Trier so it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I'm really looking forward to this one. I also see some parallels to my own life. While I was never beaten, I did have a very toxic relationship with a man and, afterwards, my husband saved me emotionally (although the two men in question have never met).

The new poster (seen below) for Nymphomaniac has just been released and I think it's a winner. It's subtle so it can't offend anyone but also extremely provocative for the more sophisticated audience. The movie will screen in Denmark later this month, but I have not been able to find out where it can be seen outside Europe.

my first public breastfeeding dustup

Like most mothers who breastfeed in public, I don't just whip out a tit and let the kid chow down. I drape a baby blanket over my shoulder and baby, then go into R-rated mode while fully covered. Joey dines and then I cover up before removing the blanket.

It is, however, obvious I'm feeding a baby because his body and arms are exposed. I do that because if I put all of him under the blankey, he can bat it away with his fists.

I've never had a problem doing this in the past. I have on occasion been on the receiving end of a few stares, mostly from younger boys, and I think I once heard "is that woman doing what I think she is?"

The other day, I was with my son in a large outdoor food court. I selected a table in the shade well away from other diners and went into breastfeeding mode. A few minutes into this, I heard a middle-aged woman with a very clear American/Canadian accent say to her dining mate, "I can't believe that woman is breastfeeding in public. It's disgusting."

She then proceeded to give a somewhat loud soliloquy about how women like me are dragging society into the gutter with our shocking behavior, yada yada yada. I pretended to ignore her.

After a while, Joey finished and promptly fell asleep, as he often does after a meal. So I packed everything up and rose from my seat. On the way out of the food court, I walked by her table and said in my best Australian accent, "Madam, in Australia it is against the law to harass a breastfeeding mother. You have been warned."

She just stared at me with an open mouth as I left. I suppose no such law exists, but I wanted to zing her in some way and hopefully she won't bother anyone else for a while.

thought for today

This image is a keeper. I am a monotheist but sometimes I wonder if "little gods" also exist who can nudge fate in one direction or the other on occasion. After all, the Old Testament does mention other gods, so I'm not completely pulling this out of my ear.