'The woman who can't stop orgasming': Boing Boing has first-person testimony from a woman suffering from Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder.

Someone at Fox really doesn't get Dollhouse.

Sunday night links.

* The flag at right (via MeFi) is the marriage equality flag, which only includes those states which allow gays and lesbians to marry.

* Return of a meme I haven't seen since the 1990s: the end of science.

* Krugman spills the beans on Al Franken's secret wonkitude. A reader of his books and an infrequent listener to his radio show, I can confirm this is true: he has a much sharper and more wide-ranging intellect than the press gives him credit for.

* The Nation gets excited about the rediscovery of Secular America.

Obama agreed and remained true to his word. And then came the moment approximately 50 million Americans-- who identify themselves with terms like agnostic, atheist, materialist, humanist, nontheist, skeptic, bright, freethinker, agnostic, naturalist, or non-believer -- will never forget. In his inauguration speech, Obama said, "…Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers."

Like 50 million other Americans I tell my nonexistent children about the Great Inclusion every night. And then, together as one all across the nation, we weep from joy.

* Lev Milman, a Duke undergrad, has been named a chess grandmaster.

* Grant Morrison is apparently working on a comic that will highlight the undisguised bondage imagery that makes up to the Wonder Woman mythos. (More here and here.)

“Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll tell you his subconscious desires... Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.”
—Dr. William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman

And why not another?

But Marston was intent on more than merely fulfilling the fantasies of his male readers. In a letter to comics historian Coulton Waugh, he wrote, "Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." Marston believed that submission to "loving authority" was the key to overcoming mankind's violent urges, and that strong, self-realized women were the hope for a better future. Wonder Woman was very consciously Marston's means of spreading these notions to impressionable young minds. As he said to Olive Richard, "I tell you, my inquiring friend, there's great hope for this world. Women will win!" He then goes on, "When women rule, there won't be any more [war] because the girls won't want to waste time killing men...I regard that as the greatest - no, even more - as the only hope for permanent peace.”

* Also on the "comics and sex" beat: X-Men Rictor and Shatterstar are out and proud, prompting a promise from Shatterstar creator Rob Liefeld to "someday undo this."

Links for Wednesday.

* First-gen Sierra adventure games in your browser. Your childhood says come back home, all is forgiven.

* The setup for this Flash Forward show seems pretty good, but man do I wish Brannon Braga weren't involved.

* McSweeney's has the syllabus for "ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era."

* Long-time Republican strategist declares defeat in NY-20, while Norm Coleman presses on in the courts with his unique metaphysical argument that he is the only logically possible winner in the Minnesota Senate race.

* David Simon on Bill Moyers.

* Roberto Bolaño, 2666, and the Ciudad Juárez murders.

* What happens when you "run government like a business."

* I don't agree with everything Amanda Marcotte has to say about prostitution here, but she's certainly right about Eliot Spitzer; it's completely insane to me that some people actually seem willing to give the guy another chance.

* The best article about the "sexting" crisis you're likely to read.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

If your laws allow people to be charged with distributing child pornography for sending other people naked pictures of themselves, you need some new laws.

* Nate Silver thinks the libertarians are taking over the Republican Party. That would certainly be a huge improvement, as long as we're not just talking about glibertarians.

* The headline reads, "Obama keeps prosecutions on the table."

I know I said I was going to cut back on link dumps, but in my defense I have been busy. I'm likely remain fairly busy (and therefore link dumping) until I get back from the inauguration, at which time I'll be able to devote more time and energy to blogging. In theory, anyway.

Anyway, the link dump.

* Bastard Tetris: the version of Tetris that does openly what all the others just do secretly. (Thanks Jacob!)

* Things to say during sex.

* Another call for a Bush administration truth and reconciliation commission. Via Yglesias, who has more on the subject, as does Steve Benen.

* Big ups to Will Wheaton, who Twittered yesterday: Best thing I've heard all day: "We're in the final 100 hours of the Bush administration."

* Douglas Wolk has Watchmen for dummies.

* The stimulus package needs more trains. More from Yglesias.

* What's in the stimulus for higher education? I could use a second yacht.

* Republicans continue to have trouble with the fact that 24 is not based on a true story.

* Name your child "Adolf Hitler" and you're labeled a prat, and that's the game.

* How many AAAAAs in KHAAAAAAAN? In honor of the late great Ricardo Montelban, Boing Boing reports. Via Bill.

* Is the world a giant hologram?

* And they're going to make a movie out of Jericho. (Failed-)TV-show-to-movie is officially the latest trend—things used to run the other way.

Salon's Broadsheet has full coverage of the sexing up of Tina Fey, while Jezebel counters with photos of the provocatively unsexed-up younger Fey. My personal favorite Fey is "Weekend Update" Fey, c. 2003, who I'm certain is still in there somewhere, finding this sort of nonsense completely ridiculous.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Some articles for this lazy Sunday.

* "A Boy's Life": Biology, politics, and transgender children in America.

Brandon raced by, arm in arm with his new friend, giggling. Tina and Bill didn’t know this yet, but Brandon had already started telling the other kids that his name was Bridget, after the pet mouse he’d recently buried (“My beloved Bridget. Rest With the Lord,” the memorial in his room read). The comment of an older transsexual from Brooklyn who’d sat behind Tina in a session earlier that day echoed in my head. He’d had his sex-change operation when he was in his 50s, and in his wild, wispy wig, he looked like a biblical prophet, with breasts. “You think you have troubles now,” he’d yelled out to Tina. “Wait until next week. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, she’s not going back in!”

* "Rock, Paper, Scissors": A history of the polls.

Voting in America, it’s fair to say, used to be different. “Are you not a man in the full vigor of manhood and strength?” a member of the House Committee on Elections asked another Harrison supporter who, like Kyle, went to the polls but turned back without voting (and who happened to stand six feet and weigh more than two hundred pounds). The hearings established a precedent. “To vacate an election,” an election-law textbook subsequently advised, “it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness.”

* "Red Sex, Blue Sex."

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

* "The Things He Carried": Jeffrey Goldberg exposes the joke that is airport security.

During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.

* "Verbage": The Republican war on words.

Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.

* "Thumbspeak": A brief history of texting.

Texting is international. It may have come late to the United States because personal computers became a routine part of life much earlier here than in other countries, and so people could e-mail and Instant Message (which shares a lot of texting lingo). Crystal provides lists of text abbreviations in eleven languages besides English. And it is clear from the lists that different cultures have had to solve the problem of squeezing commonly delivered messages onto the cell-phone screen according to their own particular national needs. In the Czech Republic, for example, “hosipa” is used for “Hovno si pamatuju”: “I can’t remember anything.” One can imagine a wide range of contexts in which Czech texters might have recourse to that sentiment. French texters have devised “ght2v1,” which means “J’ai acheté du vin.” In Germany, “nok” is an efficient solution to the problem of how to explain “Nicht ohne Kondom”—“not without condom.” If you receive a text reading “aun” from the fine Finnish lady you met in the airport lounge, she is telling you “Älä unta nää”—in English, “Dream on.”

Nighttime links.

* Weekly retro illustrations of Mad Men episodes. At right: "Joan and the Xerox."

* Ten things you didn't know about the Earth.

* Noise Artists for Obama. (via PClem)

* Obama's on Letterman tonight. He'll talk about lipstick and pigs.

"Keep in mind, that technically had I meant it this way she would be the lipstick," Obama said. "The policies of John McCain would be the pig."

* John McCain isn't such a good campaigner without Sarah Palin to hold his hand.

* And the Department of the Interior scandal is the perfect story. It's got everything: oil, sex, drugs, corruption. Drill, baby, drill.

Nuke Pop, a large archive of pop-culture images about nuclear war, is only one of many resources at Paul Brians's large collection of Science Fiction-Related Materials. Cool site. (Via Rob Latham)

A few more while I'm feeling fiery.

* Speaking of our entrenched class of professional morons, there's been a lot of good commentary today on the strikingly poor job Brokaw did interviewing Gore last Sunday. Just for starters, here's Grist and OpenLeft.

* For some reason, The Nation now has a sex column. The subject of this and presumably every edition: How hot does Barack Obama make you?

Pretty hot, I guess.

* Inside Homeland Security Hell: Nine-Months-Pregnant Edition. More at Daily Kos.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

When they told me Democrats were Satan worshippers, I guess I really should have listened.

A Durham County [North Carolina] Democratic Party official was charged Wednesday as an accessory in a sexual assault case that includes allegations that a couple held a man captive in a dog cage.

A prosecutor has said that the case may have involved Satan worship, but a defense attorney for one of the three people charged said it seemed to be consensual sadomasochism gone awry.

“Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”

Using the Eliot Spitzer story as his hook, Philip Weiss takes on love, marriage, cheating, and divorce in New York Magazine, against wise counsel: You can go against it in life, but don’t speak against it. The article has a lot of anecdotes masquerading as data, but I was struck by details such as this one:

Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by.

Of course it rather quickly descends into an if only... if only... dream of free-love sextopia, but these things always do.

Via MeFi.

* Cracked has 7 insane conspiracies that actually happened.

* MetaFilter has a fun post on irrationalities in the stock market like the January effect, the weekend effect, and the Halloween indicator.

* Via Boing Boing, Scientific American tackles the science of orgasm.

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are watching this research with great interest, as our G Spotter™ and CliMax 3000™ products have not yet caught on in the way we might have hoped.

* I forgot to link to Waxy's great compilation of obsessive fanboy supercuts, including such gems as every "What?" ever uttered on Lost, every "Dude" and F-bomb in The Big Lebowski, and every murder from the Sopranos. Below: Sen. Clay Davis.

Science!

* 'Runner's high' confirmed by brain scan.

* Seven to thirteen minutes. That's all it takes. I'm a little tempted to throw up the "Business Time" video again, but I'll restrain myself for now.

* A classic study from 196 shows the placebo effect working even when the patient knows it's a placebo. Another study from 2002 shows the efficacy of placebo anti-depressants increasing over time (!), presumably as the idea of an anti-depressant gained more cultural capital. And a study released this week shows that more expensive placebos are more effective than cheap or free placebos.

A new days ago, I brought you news of the G Spotter™, which makes it possible "to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has got a G spot or not." We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are following that incredible device up with the CliMax 3000™, which can determine using a brain scan whether or not a woman has really had an orgasm or is just faking. I'll let the device's inventor speak for himself:

Professor Holstege said: "Women can imitate orgasm quite well."

I'll say. But, using science, at last this subterfuge can be exposed.

At left, a genuine orgasm. At right, the "tell-tale brain activity in a fake orgasm."



Remember, if it's not a CliMax™, it's just fake.

Holstege has some additional Science to share with would-be lovemakers:

"When you want to make love to a woman, you must give her the feeling of being protected."

This is precisely why the importance of hooking a woman up to brain-scanning equipment during the physical act of love cannot be overstated.

Also, lest it be said I never did anything for the good of humanity, allow me share another part of the study's results:

One thing that they found was putting the couples off the task was literally cold feet.

When they gave the couples socks to wear, about 80% of the couples were able to achieve orgasm compared with 50% previously in this staged environment.

This backs up earlier findings:

Dr Jannini said: "For the first time, it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has got a G spot or not."

The language in this BBC News story on the possibility of detecting the G spot using ultrasound is a fascinating document on the continued medicalization and pathologization of female sexuality in the 21st century.

And take note, would-be sex millionaires: my patent on the G Spotter™ is already pending.

Are robots the sex partners of the future? Obviously.

Okay, this one may not be safe for work either, but I feel obliged to link to the Terminator Kama Sutra nonetheless. Via Gravity Lens.

I very rarely link to things that are not safe for work, but I was struck by the long-exposure and mean-averaging images that Kottke links to in this post and wanted to pass them along. My guess is they'd all actually be okay for work—but I've never had anyone websurfing over my shoulder and I know those guys can be trigger-happy.