a word about toilets

Now in my final weeks of pregnancy, as is typical, I have to make water a lot. Like the last time I was pregnant, I know exactly where I'm going before I leave the house and where public toilets are located along whatever route I'll travel.

Getting on and off the commode at home with a distended abdomen is not easy, thanks in part to the odd design of Australian toilets. In America and most of the world, the toilet is in the bathroom with sink, tub, shower, etc.

But not Down Under. In most homes here, toilets are in small closet-sized rooms all by themselves. And those little closet rooms are not with the rest of the bathroom nor necessarily even anywhere near it.

So when you're eight and half months pregnant and need to get on or off the commode, you have no nearby counter or windowsill or anything to hold on to help yourself up and down. At home, I have to clamp myself with partially distended arms on the two side walls and hoist myself up and down.

One of my husband's brothers has a house with American-style bathrooms. Why that is no one knows, but is a true joy to use the toilets there because I can lever myself up and down on the adjacent vanity counter with so much more ease.

Whoever invented the Australian toilet closet was clearly not a pregnant woman.

severed feet mystery

Recently The Washington Post ran a fascinating article about the mystery of severed human feet wearing running shoes and found washed up on beaches in the Pacific Northwest.

While this phenomenon might seem like the plot of an old X-Files episode, the article outlines some plausible and logical explanations for this very creepy situation that keeps happening.

Still, some aspects of this strange occurrence can't be explained, like why the severed feet are always wearing athletic shoes and never dress shoes.

This true event could be turned into a really creepy movie or TV series by the right filmmakers. I hope Hollywood has been paying attention.

trashing trump

I did not watch the GOP debate the other night, but I did see highlights and also read about it online. The big news is that some candidates, finally, really lit into Trump and his many hypocrisies.

Much of the beating was dished out by Marco Rubio, whom the media seems to have crowned winner of the debate. The Florida senator clearly came prepared and used every weapon in his arsenal.

I read an article several days ago, for which I cannot now find a link, that revealed how none of the major Republican candidates invested anything in opposition research against Trump up until very recently. That was obviously a gigantic mistake.

Opposition research is critically important in politics these days. It's usually done by a team of experienced political researchers who comb an opposing candidate's record for any and all negatives.

Candidate hypocrisies can often be a goldmine for opposing campaigns. Trump has talked out of both sides of his mouth for so long, he is an opposition researcher's dream come true.

While it was good that Rubio finally aired some of Trump's many weaknesses, some pundits were left wondering if it was too little, too late, a sentiment I share. Nearly a quarter of the states will vote this coming Tuesday, March 1, and Rubio's salvos may not work.

Opposition research seems to function best when the scandals have had a chance to sink in for a while. Media outlets then pick up the story and run with it, but that could take several weeks as more shoes drop.

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more like Trump will be the Republican nominee. I'd be willing to bet the Democrats already have a massive opposition research collection on him and keep building on it every day.

So this fall could finally see a public evisceration of the Donald. It was a long time coming. And I can't wait.

another author recommendation

I have another author recommendation for you readers out there. In the last few months I have discovered novelist Linwood Barclay, an American-born Canadian author whose books are set in the United States.

He writes very clever thrillers where very ordinary people are suddenly thrust into extraordinary thrillers involving some particularly nasty and relentless villains. The stories are complex, the writing is strong, and the characters are fully dimensional.

While they're traditionally thrillers in plot and pace with nicely escalating jeopardy throughout, Barclay nonetheless sprinkles some believable humor and jaded wit into the mix all along to keep you both guessing and entertained.

I've read three of his sixteen published novels so far and am very much looking forward to more. If you like tight page-turners, you might want to check him out.

stoned for five years

I've never used drugs and am not in favor of drug legalization, although I'm okay with legalizing pot. I think marijuana can be as much a crutch as liquor, but I don't think one should be legal and the other not.

The Washington Post recently ran an article with the self-evident title "What happens when you get stoned every single day for five years." It was reporting on a medical study about the health effects of long-term pot use.

The results are not encouraging for regular tokers. "If you smoke a lot of weed — like a lot of it — it can potentially do permanent damage to your short-term memory," the article said.

People should have the right to smoke them selves stupid if they want. But just because it's legal to do something doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I dated a few potheads in my single days. They were mellow and funny but occasionally impotent, which can also be caused by regular cannabis use.

I remember more than one of them had trouble completing a sentence sometimes even when they weren't stoned. After reading this article, now I understand why.

playing with corpses

I had a strange dream the other night where one of the characters, if you can call them that, was a woman who used to babysit me as a child. I probably haven't thought about her at all for more than ten years, so who knows why she reappeared in dreamland.

When I thought about the dream later that day, I remembered she had both an unusual first and last name. Curiosity got the better of me, so I Googled her name and discovered she was an MD and pathologist in a city about ten states away from where I was raised.

I found her profile online and, sure enough, that's her in the picture, albeit twenty or so years later. She had also slimmed down quite a bit from the size-plus that she once was.

She seems very accomplished as a pathologist, but I wonder what in the world ever possessed her to pursue that as a career. Pathology is important work and somebody has to do it, so she obviously found a calling for some reason.

I remember she had an outgoing personality so it's not like she would have a difficult time dealing with patients. My brother once told me that the people he knew in medical school who pursued pathology did not tend to handle human interaction particularly well.

I'm tempted to send her a "remember me?" email but then she might think that was weird. I'm too curious for my own good, but I'd love to know why she likes to spend her day with dead people.

defeating anti-adblock websites

Last year I wrote here on my blog about using AdBlock to zap popups and annoying ads. I've been using it ever since and couldn't be happier with the freeware.

Recently, however, I've noticed that some websites will block their content unless a user disables any adblocking while visiting the site.

Of course, that opens you up to annoying popups, spyware, malware and more, so it's not a wise idea.

To circumvent this prohibition, I simply use a free web proxy to end-run the barrier. It has worked every time I encountered this anti-adblock obstacle.

My favorite proxy is AnonyMouse, which is free and super easy to use. You simply cut and paste the web address you want to visit into the URL block where it says "Enter Website Address." The proxy will take you there, around the anti-adblock barrier.

I've found that AnonyMouse always succeeds as a workaround. For whatever reason, no popups and ads appear on either the proxy or the web browser, but the surfed website apparently thinks they're unblocked.

There's probably a technical term for using one website to defeat another website, but I don't know what it is.

primary versus caucus

Like many expats I know here, I've been following the races closely for both Republicans and Democrats. As of this writing, three states have voted for both parties in primaries and caucuses, knocking a good many candidates out of the running.

IMHO, the caucus process is awful. It's not truly democratic because it's not a head count. In its own way, it has the same flaws as the Electoral College in the general election.

In a primary, it's a straight up and down vote. Whoever has the most votes is in the winner.

In some jurisdictions, if no one has a clear majority, then the top two winners face off in a final. I like this process best, but it's not used for presidential candidates. It should be.

With the caucuses, just like with the Electoral College, a candidate can win the total votes but lose the race because the votes are concentrated in certain areas.

With a straight primary, all citizens vote based on their schedules. If anyone can't make it to the balloting in person, then absentee voting is possible.

But this isn't possible with the caucuses. Participants must carve out several hours and attend what is really a mini-convention.

Primary politics have become more democratic with time. For the most part, candidates are no longer selected in smoke-filled backrooms.

In reality, caucuses are a weird throwback to those smoke-filled, closed rooms. The only difference is that anyone can go into that room to participate, but only if you have the time and resources to do so.

It would be nice to see the caucus process eliminated before the next presidential election.

advise & consent

I have been reading various news articles about the escalating battle between Republicans and Democrats in Washington over the recent Supreme Court vacancy.

The brouhaha made me think of the great film Advise & Consent, released in the early 1960s, which deals with various machinations surrounding a Presidential nomination and Congress's response.

The political shenanigans in Advise & Consent were criticized as unbelievable by some 1960s critics. Today, however, the tactics and behavior seen in the movie seem mild by comparison to our Congress.

I've never read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel upon which the movie was based, and the current imbroglio makes me want to. Hopefully I will be able to find a copy here in Sydney. The book was on the bestseller list for two years and won the Pulitzer Prize, so that helps my chances.

I found some original artwork for the movie online, which is displayed below (enlargement). The tagline may have seemed a bit histrionic in the early 1960s but certainly not now: Are the men and women in Washington really like this?

Perhaps some members of today's Congress saw this movie when they were young and thought it was an instruction video.

skype silence

I have written here before about the arctic relations I have with my parents. They almost never reach out to me.

I email them regularly and usually attach pictures, particularly of their grandson. Soon they will have another.

Maybe one out of ten times I'll receive a one-line response from my father that sounds like it came out of a random generator of generic replies. Thanks for sharing or it was nice to hear from you or something equally nondescript.

His emails are never signed "Dad" or "Love Dad" or anything. They're just one sentence of email and that's it.

I Skype often with my brother, with my uncle (my dad's brother), and my cousins (my dad's nephews). My son usually will tune in with me during the first minute or two to wave to people but then wanders off to do his own thing.

I would love to Skype with my father so he could see his grandson, perhaps wave back and just say something. I regularly mention "maybe we could Skype sometime soon" or "hopefully we could set up a Skype."

That is met with stone, cold silence.

Okay, I get the hint. I'm about as welcome as body lice or mildew. But it would be nice if my son could see and hear what his other grandfather looks like.

Nobody lives forever, Dad.

bernie madoff's game

Over the last several days, I watched the American miniseries Madoff, made for the ABC network. It was not broadcast here in Australia and who knows if they'll release it on DVD.

So I had to watch a pirated copy I downloaded. Yes, I know that's naughty, but if you don't make something available to me here, then I'm left with little choice.

I was pleasantly surprised at the program. American miniseries are often hampered by clumsy acting, flabby writing, and mediocre production values, but this was an exception.

Richard Dreyfuss plays Bernie Madoff, and Blythe Danner plans Ruth Madoff. Both are exceptionally good, particularly Danner. I thought she might be too WASPy for the role before I watched it, but she really transformed herself with this role.

Dreyfuss was physically not right for the part, but you see past that thanks to his strong performance. He plays the notorious conman without resorting to the clumsy devices and on-the-nose gimmicks that hampers many television actors.

The story itself is structured primarily before Madoff's big fall, but it's made abundantly clear from the get-go that he was a fraud from the earliest days. His first swindle benefits his clients, but after that, he becomes a merciless predator.

I would have liked to see more about his family after his great fall. Here, I think the series missed some real potential. The filmmakers clearly took the family's side and showed both Ruth and the two sons as being clueless to Bernie's crimes.

HBO will air The Wizard of Lies sometime this year, written and directed by the great Barry Levinson, a Madoff production of their own, starring Robert De Niro as the swindler and Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife (see the production still below). I'm looking forward to seeing that.

I read a piece about Madoff a few years ago where he imagined one day he would be caught and was surprised it took so long. That makes me think his was really a sociopath, because otherwise, how could he keep going on so long with his scam?

generic pornstars

These four porn actresses appeared recently on a porn news webpage (enlargement). Not to sound cruel, but my first reaction upon seeing them was how utterly generic and interchangeable they are.

The one dyed her hair blonde, not particularly well, but that doesn't make her really distinct. They all have rather round faces -- is that just a coincidence or does porn world like that?

I guess a girl's face doesn't matter as much in porn as what she can do with her body. If she can do double-anal with two largely endowed males, then nobody's really looking at her face anyway.

Except when she gets basted during the money shot.

florence henderson still gets laid

The online magazine Salon has a new profile piece about Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson and how, at 82 years old, she still has an active sex life.

After reading the article, it's pretty clear Florence Henderson is a lot different than Carol Brady. Mrs. Brady always seemed rather sexless to me, as did Mr. Brady.

They have all those kids, but I have a hard time imagining them getting it on. They seem sexless and without genitals, sort of like Barbie and Ken.

But I'm glad Florence is still getting laid. Hopefully as yuppies and Generation X and millennials age, they won't buy into the old saw that sex is only for younger people.

I certainly hope I'm still getting some action when I'm Florence's age, if I'm still around. My husband and I have talked about this at times.

What happens, as we age, if one of us still has a very active sex drive but the other one does not?

I think the best way to deal with that, for now, is to wait and see if and when that ever happens. Why worry about some possible problem decades down the road that may never come to pass?

And now, Florence Henderson when she was a young Broadway star...

false labor again

I'm now a month from my due date, and I experienced my first bout of false labor yesterday -- they're technically known as Braxton Hicks contractions. This happened in the final month of my first pregnancy, too.

I had two very noticeable contractions about fifteen minutes apart. I forced myself to remain calm, but there's no way to stop my heartbeat from racing.

After the two contractions, nothing more. He's been moving around regularly as he always does since then, so this was just a typical false alarm.

Although I'm just as uncomfortable now as I was during my final trimester the first time, not to mention the weather was hotter during this one, this pregnancy seems to have gone so much faster. I've heard pretty much the same thing from every women I know who has had multiple children -- the first is the worst.

I still wonder how women in past generations could put up with being pregnant so many times. My paternal grandfather was one of nine children and his wife, my grandmother, was one of eleven.

This beluga whale is pregnant. I know how she feels.

yuppies gone berserk

Earlier this month, a California jury awarded $5.7 million to a volunteer tennis coach who was framed for drug possession by a pair of husband and wife lawyers who pursued a vendetta against her after she once remarked that the couple's son was tardy because he was "slow to line up."

The ultra-competitive parents, both elite law school grads, took that as an insult to their child's intelligence and began plotting a complex retaliatory scheme that included planting drugs in the coach's car and then alerting police, who then found the contraband and took the coach into custody.

Fortunately for the victim, she was able to convince the police that the drugs were planted and they began investigating the couple, who were later arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. The wife has since been disbarred, and the husband's disbarment is pending.

The bottom line is they ruined their lives after trying to ruin someone else's life, all because of a comment that wasn't even a slight.

The most interesting twist to all this is how the couple turned on each other during their prosecutions, with the result they're now divorced. They were so perfectly matched, as evidenced by how they dreamed up and executed this scheme because of a petty spat.

I would love to know what becomes of both husband and wife in forthcoming years. One or both might find a way to redeem themselves somehow, but I suspect both will come to a bad end.

If this story had been used as a fictional plot in a novel or a movie, critics might accuse the writer of spinning an unbelievable yarn. It all goes to show you that truth sometimes is stranger than fiction.

I pity their child -- and hopefully there's only one. Imagine what life would be like with parents like that.

robot lipstick

Simone Giertz adapts technology into all sorts of personal uses and then demonstrates the results on YouTube. Here you can see how she programmed a robotic arm to apply her lipstick.

She has a wide variety of techy and mechanical adaptations on her YouTube channel, including another favorite where she demonstrates the robotic arm she programmed to fix her breakfast and then feed it to her.

streetwalker chic

I saw some photos from Kanye West's latest travesty of a fashion show at Madison Square Garden (where the stands had many empty seats) and, as can be expected, the clothes were mostly ridiculous.

To make the whole farce even more ludicrous, the models looked like they had all taken a mood-erasing drug and were close to catatonic, something West had specifically demanded that they do.

America's most persistent attention whores, also known as the Kardashian/Jenner family, were jumping around and dancing in the stands like coked-up toads, apparently concerned that not everyone in attendance had seen them.

They were dressed in some of West's ludicrous clothes and looked more like down-at-the-heels 1970s streetwalkers, what with their cheap-looking big fake furs and deliberately distressed knits with assorted rips and unravelling, which looked more like ripped men's underwear than anything else.

I thought Bruce aka Caitlyn Jenner looked distinctly self-conscious in his/her silly dress, as if he/she had suddenly awakened in the middle of this absurd spectacle and realized how much of a fool he/she had made of him/herself in this insatiable quest for attention.

childbirth confusion

One of my husband's nephews was over the other night. He's in his late teens and idolized by our son Joey, who is his three-year-old first cousin.

Shortly after nephew arrived, Joey announced with excitement the impending arrival of his little brother, obviously not realizing his older cousin had seen the obvious signs of this for months.

At some point when the two were playing with Joey's toys on the floor, Joey started describing the delivery process for new babies. It went something like this: "The mum wees in the dunny (toilet) and then the babe comes out."

I think the source of his confusion may have originated when I told him last week that I will know when the baby is coming because I will break my water first. I made the mistake of saying, "I'll wet my pants and then they baby will come."

He did ask me several times after that, when I went to use the loo, whether the baby had come out when I was in there.

In the course of the conversation I overheard with my son and his cousin, I also realized that my son thinks the baby comes out of me like I'm an oven. You just pop open the door and pull out the kiddie. If only life was that easy.

Provided I go into labor at a reasonable hour and it doesn't last too long, we tentatively plan to have Joey attend the birthing of his baby brother. We're still not entirely convinced that's the way to go, because at three, he might find the whole process somewhat overwhelming.

gymnastic porn

I have seen this trio before in a number of erotica sets much like the one below (enlargement). The two women are billed as twins and they do a variety of gymnastic and ballet poses with a man while stark naked.

Sometimes they appear without the man and also alone, but always the same types of naked but chaste poses. I don't ever remember seeing any kind of sexual activity or even a slight erection on the man.

I'm left wondering who the market is for this kind of product. Slightly prudish people who can't look at porn but want to see naked bodies?

the new hampshire curse

As I write this in the middle of the afternoon here in Australia, the major news outlets are calling the New Hampshire election for Donald Trump with about half the precincts reporting.

Against that background, here's a bit of New Hampshire trivia I picked up while reading around on the Internet yesterday: not since George H.W. Bush won the Granite State in 1988 has a non-incumbent won the New Hampshire primary from either party and then gone on to occupy the White House.

Here are the eight non-incumbent New Hampshire winners since 1988 and before 2016: Tsongas, Buchanan, Gore, McCain (2000), Kerry, Hillary Clinton (2008), McCain (2008), and Romney. Not a single one of them went on to measure the drapes in the Oval Office.

Think about that, Donny boy.

stepping stones to heaven

I posted this quote on my Tumblr the other day, and it keeps bouncing around in my head: "Every charitable act is a stepping stone toward heaven."

I think this idea embraces the way we should live our lives. Don't get so wrapped up in following some do-and-don't list preached by some cleric. Don't spend all your time in self-serving prayer, hoping you'll go to heaven. Don't make it about you you you -- make it about those around you.

In short, make your religion selfless instead of selfish.

Just go out and try to be a really good person. Try to be kind to everyone. Try to dispense good deeds. Try to greet everyone with a smile and friendly word. Try to make other people's days a little happier and brighter.

The speaker of the line quoted above was Henry Ward Beecher, a renowned nineteenth century abolitionist and clergyman. He also was a notorious ladies man who carried on simultaneous affairs with numerous women.

So maybe Henry's charitable acts included making sure no female friend would ever be denied erotic pleasures.

a robot runs for president

I only saw excerpts from the GOP debate the other night in New Hampshire, but I did see that Marco Rubio confused a lot of people about whether he was actually human or possibly an android running for President.

Now I'm not for him, so I have no skin in his game, but I have to say I feel a little sorry for the guy. He doesn't seem to function well in live television situations. I remember his water gulping crisis a few years back when he responded to the President's State of the Union address.

I have the sense he's really driven to succeed more than he really wants what that success would bring. He really wanted to be a Senator because that was an extremely impressive achievement for the son of poor immigrants, but he's not all that interested in actually being in the Senate.

The same could be said about his run for the Presidency. He's driven to run, because to succeed would be the ultimate achievement for someone who grew up in very modest circumstances. But he doesn't actually want to go through all the crap he must face while running, including live television appearances.

I remember a wealthy kid in middle school whose father was a very successful lawyer who had grown up dirt poor. The boy ran for student council president because his father really pushed him to do so, but the kid's heart really wasn't in his campaign.

In that situation, the boy was twelve or thirteen, so he had not yet learned to escape the yoke his father had put around his neck. Most kids ultimately do.

Poor Mario Rubio, it seems to me, is still burdened by the yoke around his.

deliberate disfiguration

I continue to be appalled by the extreme body modifications shown on the British television show Bodyshockers.

The latest horror is the woman seen below, who has extensive skull implants, tattoos on 80 percent of her body, tattooed eyeballs, and a surgically split tongue.

She completes her look with a massive unkempt mane of rainbow-colored dreadlocks and numerous body piercings.

Short of her throwing acid in her own face, I can't think of anything more hideous a woman could do to herself. She must terrify small children when she walks down the street.

I wonder how much money she has wasted in making herself into a monstrosity.

beware of the flying penis

A prominent New Zealand politician was hit in the face with a flying plastic penis yesterday during a press appearance.

The incident, dubbed Dildogate by the media, was the result of a one-person protest against the Trans Pacific Partnership.

The protester, who doesn't look like a stereotypical radical activist (see video), was arrested after tossing her projectile.

This is funny in a way but also stupid. What does a flying penis have to do with a trade agreement?

Rather than doing something silly like this, she should've shouted embarrassing questions at him during his press op. That would've given the media something more substantive to report when he had to come up with an answer on the spot.

Of course, he could've ducked the question or had her hustled away out of sight, but that could've reflected badly on him.

driverless cars

I was reading an article about driverless cars, one of several I've digested recently. It's a Jetson Age development that promises to be right around the corner.

Advocates of driverless cars, technically called autonomous cars, stress they are super safe because advanced digital technology can gauge, predict, and react to any road danger with computer efficiency and without those pesky human errors or lapses in judgment.

Perhaps in theory, yes, but in reality? Few of us have not experienced a baffling and previously unknown software or hardware glitch that causes computers and tablets and smart phones to fail at doing what they're supposed to. Who's to say that won't happen to a driverless car?

The various shots I've seen of driverless cars in action are always on test tracks with carefully controlled conditions and very little traffic of super careful drivers who know it's a test. The driverless cars react well.

But I've also driven on enough heavily congested limited-access highways in Sydney and Los Angeles and New York to know that three, four, five or more drivers can all concurrently make split-second decisions to change directions or lanes without any notice or "tell" until it happens. Could a smart car predict that many permutations and combinations and react, or would it freeze up?

And what about when human driving patterns begin to change specifically because roadways are partially filled with driverless cars. I can see more daring drivers darting immediately in front of the drone cars with only a foot or inches to spare, simply to get a good spot on the road.

How will the driverless car react and what will then be the effect on other drivers? Will humans end up in accidents trying to best or avoid the driverless cars?

On heavily crowded but free-flowing roadways, people don't drive the speed limit. They go faster. So will the driverless car with the saintly computer that doesn't allow speeding cause massive traffic jams as they put-put along slower than anyone around them?

Driverless cars on a road with driverless cars would probably be the best way to go. But mixing the two -- driverless cars with computers at the controls and traditional cars with maniac humans at the wheel -- seems like a recipe for disaster.

waffle house of blues

If you were planning on stopping at Ozark Waffles in Forrest City, Arkansas, you might want to think again.

Customers were disgusted to find wads of hair in their food when they tried to eat it.

They noticed employees in the kitchen rinsing their hair in large pots and then drying off with towels over the food prep area while other employees were making customer orders.

It was unclear if the two employees were shampooing or dying their hair -- or possibly both.

This brings a whole new meaning to curly fries.

Meanwhile, a few days later at a Waffle House in Atlanta, a woman entered and stripped off all her clothes, then randomly selected a customer and punched her in the face, breaking her nose. She followed this up by heaving plates at the windows and platters of food at other customers.

Maybe she was upset she couldn't order blueberry waffles with a rinse and comb on the side.

I have never actually eaten at a waffle restaurant. After reading about these two incidents, I'm feeling lucky somehow.

the mellow whale

I can't say that I'm enjoying my second pregnancy, but I can honestly say I'm not stressing in the least like I was with my first child.

All the side effects this time are as bad if not worse -- morning sickness that went on forever, rashes, sore tits, swollen feet and ankles, constantly having to pee, indigestion, intense flatulence, leg cramps, etc. etc. etc.

But if I'm having a particularly crampy or farty or rashy day, I find myself just shrugging it off -- this, too, shall pass.

The first time I was pregnant I would freak out about some new side effect, wondering how much worse something would get or what new horrible torture my body would force me to endure. Now I'm just like "meh, bring it on."

I was reading through some of my journal entries made during my first pregnancy the other night and was thinking what an anxious wreck I made myself.

Baby Two definitely seems mellower than his older brother. Joey liked to kick and hard, like he had to put a field goal directly through my spine.

But this little guy just seems to be lightly dancing around in their all the time, tippy tap, tippy tap. He's a lot more active than Joey was but not anywhere near as violent.

I am now in the second half of my final trimester -- the home stretch, yes! -- and am huge. I swear this baby will be larger than the first.

a tapestry of hate

An artist named Conor Collins has used all of Donald Trump's hateful, racist, sexist, and bigoted words into a portrait of the follicly challenged media whore turned presidential candidate.

As you can see by looking at the enlargement of photo below, the artist printed out all of the statement into shapes forming Trump's face.

This was a very clever project, but I feel sorry for the guy, having to look at Donald's ugly face while carefully copying the spewings from his ugly pie hole.

As I'm writing this, I see on the live CNN feed that Trump has lost the Iowa caucuses. I'm not thrilled about the candidate who won, but seeing the arrogant Donny taken down a peg is nonetheless worth the schadenfreude.

al qaeda swimsuit models

A website called The Daily Rash, a competitor to The Onion, has a new article about al Qaeda's propaganda magazine running its first-ever swimsuit edition.

Some of the models from the shoot are pictured below. According to the article, the swimsuit issue created such a buzz with jihadists around the globe that the magazine's website crashed several times after it was overwhelmed by visitors.

An al Qaeda spokesman is quoted as saying: "Men in caves with Internet access are going crazy looking at our swimsuit models. In just a few days we've already received enough donations to purchase ad space on the Huffington Post."

So this is funny in a way, but in a way it's not at all funny. We live in a surreal century where women in western nations are empowered and running countries and corporations, while other countries exist where women can't even show their lips or ankles.

The great hypocrisy with al Qaeda and ISIS and the Saudi elite and their whole reactionary mindset is that they have no problem exploiting women outside of their own country or territory.

Operatives for al Qaeda have no problem visiting prostitutes, while ISIS has no problem prostituting female slaves. And wealthy men from Saudi Arabia have no problem exploiting women sexually when travelling abroad.

Women have come so far in the last hundred years. But some still have so very far to go.