Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Monday, November 23, 2009

Sita Sings the Blues (Shorter: The Ramanaya)

Eli, who posted this on FB sez it's "Animated Hindu mythology with a Jazz Age soundtrack (Annette Hanshaw, to be specific)." It's purty kewl.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Most Unusual Beard in the World!

There's a competition! What can I say? Compared to this chap, my own hirsute accomplishments utterly pale?

Truly amazing! DOTOF™ Joanne Canata-Kelley of FB...

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Leonid Meteor Showers Begin Tonight

(Photo: Via Huffpost)

According to the sky-watchers, this year is gonna "great, with one of the biggest meteor shower events of our lifetime." A Linkee, provides the allegedly best locations from which to observe them, with promises for up-dates. I wrote the one for Albuquerque: Go east, out toward Edgewood, at the top of Sedillo Hill, where you look out onto the Estancia valley, and there's very little light; or north/south on old hiway 14, towards the Crest or Chililli. Another cool thing might be to drive up to the rest area at the top of La Bajada...

On Nov. 17, 2009, Earth will pass through the "1466 stream" again, but this time closer to the center. Based on the number of meteors observed in 2008, Vaubaillon can estimate the strength of the coming display: five hundred or more Leonids per hour. The times provided are optimal view hours for PST, but the Leonid Meteor shower may last up to two days so there may be other times for optimal viewing. That time begins at 11:00 pst.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Monday, November 9, 2009

"Do You have "Restless Vagina Syndrome?": Best Pick-up Line Ever...

I cannot IMAGINE how I missed this, on In These Times late last month:
By promoting the idea that ‘normal’ women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch ‘female sexual dysfunction’ (FSD).
It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the “43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function,” according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties—but only if the woman feels “personal distress” about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that “normal” women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works—and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills—containing (how-could-it-not-work) “horny goat weed extract” in order to “feel like a real woman today.” Its website promises, “You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal.”

But the big swinging dicks of global FSD marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer—whose stop-gap strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which, using the same logic, has put its money on testosterone.

Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. FSD is “a classic example of starting with some preconceived, and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women’s sexual dysfunctions, based on the male model,” said John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical Journal).

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone. Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer’s little blue pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. No wonder: Researchers don’t even know what constitutes a “normal” female testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., (www.orgasminc.org), testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.

A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more diseased than their American counterparts, with “69.6 percent experiencing some form of FSD,” according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. Journal editor and urologist Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. “Science is science,” he says. “It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data shows.” Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps the bottom line Dr. Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid consultant for drug companies, including P&G and Pfizer.

Goldstein established an FSD clinic with Dr. Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including Pfizer, had financial ties to 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ revealed.

“Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose of comprehensive sex education,” says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can’t find: your brain and your funny bone.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Truly Awful Vid of the Day: "Knights On/Of Fire"

Eli, who is known to be knowledgeable and whose discretion in such matters I trust, worried that the sub-titles might nor accurately translate the lyrics. I leave such matter to him, or to any suitably trained auditors/viewers... I merely repeat the aural/visual insult.

Truly awful, nest paw? And do not TELL me you didn't notice how incredibly tiny was the cod-piece--hardly room for a minnow, much less a full-grown cod...
DOTOF™, to Eli...

Gilda Radner --" Let's Talk Dirty To The Animals"

Simels regards this as one of the proofs of the existence of 'god."
"Just heard from the good folks at Warner Archive that the transplendent 1980 concert film Gilda Live -- starring the unutterably adorable Gilda Radner and directed by Mike Nichols -- is at long last making an appearance on DVD.

This is wonderful news on all sorts of levels, but one of them is it means that, finally, you can watch a high quality digitally remastered version of perhaps the greatest song and live musical performance of the 20th century."

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

For Teachers

DOTOF™ to Susan Barbour Gourd-Mills, on FB. I have a LOT Of friends and family who are or were teachers in the trenches...I admire them all.

Slam-poet Taylor Mali:

Slam Poetry explained here. It's a decidedly mixed bag...