Recently I was e-mailed, via Match.com, by an attractive woman (to the extent that profile pictures can be trusted, anyway) named Kathleen. I love that name, and her profile made her sound like someone I’d be interested in talking to a bit more, so I replied. We exchanged a couple of e-mails and I was thinking that maybe I’d like to meet her in person.

Then she asked me if I liked skiing. I answered honestly. I love skiing, although I’m not great at it and I haven’t been on the hill since I annihilated my knees a few years back. I’d love to get back into it, though, but haven’t so far because I hate doing things alone.

I knew as I hit the send button that I’d never hear from her again. Full story »

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid. Full story »

Our question for today is: How is Otherwise not like Newt Gingrich?

Is it that Newt is a fat, slimy old scoundrel with creepy teeth and Otherwise is not?

No.

So Otherwise is a fat, slimy old scoundrel with creepy teeth?

Stop it. Otherwise is not a slimy old scoundrel with creepy teeth. You know what I mean. I mean that is not the difference Otherwise is talking about. The difference is that Otherwise is accountable.

A-cow-and-a-bull? How do you spell that? What does it mean?

Ahhhh, I see you are a Republican. No matter, perhaps this post can help your understanding. Full story »

We now have two scandals in college involving coaches using their positions to prey on young boys. They are different in degree—Sandusky apparently set up an elaborate system to deliver young victims to him while the allegations against Fine (he is uncharged and unconvicted) make him appear to have been more opportunistic. And they are different because at this point it appears that Penn State deliberately covered for Sandusky, allowing his predation machine to grind on while the university administrators counted the gate receipts, while Syracuse was far more responsible in its handling of the situation. But they are similar in that both these predators used the razzle dazzle of college sports as bait to attract young boys, the same way priests used the church and Boy Scout leaders used campfires.

The question, of course, is not why Sandusky and Fine did what they are alleged to have done. We know why they did it. Full story »

Penn State, like many of the big schools, is focused on sports and football as the big ticket event. Sports is so big at Penn State that it is home to the John Curley Center for Sport Journalism and the Knight chair in Sports Journalism and Society. Sports is endemic. It’s part of Penn State’s  DNA as Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Baer reports.

Though, as awful as the situation is, Penn State is not alone in revering athletics. At a lot of schools, in the Big Ten, the Big 12, the PAC 12 and so on, athletics is number one to its students, its alums and its board. The likelihood of blind eyes being turned for other matters (hopefully never sexual abuse) would not surprise me. It’s what happens when the questionable decision of elevating athletics over academics occurs. Full story »

by Chip Ainsworth

The cold air chased me south from New York into Pennsylvania and on through Virginia into North Carolina. “We had snow here last week,” exclaimed Sarah Edwards. “We haven’t had snow in 15 years.”

Edwards was speaking from behind her desk at the Ava Gardner Museum in downtown Smithfield, a Tar Heel town of about 13,000 that’s located a few miles west of I-95. I’d pulled in once before but the museum was closed. Now I was back to get a glimpse into the life of the woman who became the flame who “taught Frank Sinatra how to sing a torch song,” as his band arranger, Nelson Riddle, once described her.

The museum attracts about 12,000 visitors a year — mostly seniors but also “a lot of younger people interested in Old Hollywood,” said Edwards. Admission is $6 and patrons can buy a variety of souvenirs from Ava Gardner post cards to five-ounce jars of regional delicacies like sweet potato butter and moonshine jelly. Full story »

I spent yesterday in Houston on business. Excuse me, I meant “bidniss.” I had to do some interviews with physicians around town, so I spent a good bit of time in the rent-a-car driving from airport to center, center to next center, center back to airport, etc. And sitting in traffic on the freeway. And turning around and trying to find the exit I missed because accurate road signs aren’t the city’s top priority. Or a medium priority. Or even a low priority.

Anyhow, before this trip, I don’t believe I had ever heard a radio advertisement for anything testosterone related. Ever. But by golly, yesterday I heard dozens. Literally, dozens. I found a sports talk station as I was rolling out of the Hertz lot and I just left it on (because I like sports and also, it’s far less brain-damaging than music radio is these days) and honest to sweet baby Jesus, there were at least two testosterone spots in every commercial break. Full story »

So much of popular music is about sex and nothing else, and we have seen more sexcess than we probably know how to process. Perhaps so much that we occasionally grow numb to it.

I can think of dozens of really sexy women in music, but since it seems like sexy is a prerequisite to even get in the door, it really takes a bit extra to rise above the noise.

Enter Alison Goldfrapp. Full story »

In a way, this is kind of a trick question. If you’re doing it right, a song doesn’t last nearly long enough. So when I was creating 30-Day Song Challenge, the Sequel, maybe I should have designated day 13 for your favorite make-out album.

In any case, this may be the single easiest day of either the original challenge or the sequel, because there is one CD that stands alone at the top of Make-Out Mountain: Avalon, by Roxy Music. Full story »

The great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer created timeless characters in his Canterbury Tales; archetypal personalities such as the Wife of Bath and the Miller endure to this day. Through them Chaucer could readily celebrate, criticize and satirize different aspects of the society of his time. Additionally, Chaucer, as a public servant and man of the people, preserved a vernacular that may otherwise have been lost.

The late Richard Pryor, often hailed as the greatest comic to ever take the stage, is the American Chaucer. A master storyteller in the grand tradition of West African griots, fired by passion and pain, possessed of keen insight, he was also a brilliant impersonator with amazing range, an intuitive actor who never got his due, a social critic, a writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, and, most importantly, one funny motherfucker… Full story »

Children of the City of Certainties, part 2.

“Everything we have said about Des Moines has been found to be exactly true.”— “Des Moines the City of Certainties has Made Good.” In: The World’s Work, vol. 23, 1911.

Image to the right: “Krug’s Woe is a Tabloid Wow.” Life, August 4, 1947, pp. 26-28. Caption: “THE WHAM GIRL, Judy Cook, was employed at Lockheed Factory as a riveter during the war but also helped entertain Hughes’ guests. Company newspaper said she made ‘wham by day and trouble for the Japs by night.’

My Uncle Spike told me a joke from his college days when I was 13 years old.

There was a newlywed couple who went on an ocean cruise for their honeymoon, and the virginal bride was taking quite a conjugal pounding as they crossed the ocean. Full story »

I put out two or three Moments of Clarity per week. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe at www.youtube.com/LeeCamp2

Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska governor and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, will address Washington University students on abstinence during next month’s Sex Week activities. The younger Palin, you’ll recall, became pregnant at age 18, creating a certain measure of campaign discomfort for her mother and GOP presidential hopeful John McCain.

Only in America can a girl who knows nothing about abstinence or going to college be paid thousands of dollars to go to a prominent college and talk about abstinence. Full story »

by Lisa Barnard

I worry about how I’ll manage if I have kids—you know, where’s the best place to raise them, how to choose their schools, how the hell to keep such tiny people alive when I can’t even water a bamboo plant twice a week. The usual. Also, how to answer the tough life questions kids throw at you. The birds and the bees is a topic I particularly dread—I can’t exactly envision a reasonable, informative, non-awkward way to explain sex to your kid. I just can’t.

But over the holidays, an anecdote shared by my Uncle Paul gave me inspiration. He thought I should know how my grandpa explained it all to him back in the day so that I’d at least have that approach as an option. I thought I’d pass it along to you, too, in case you want to keep our tradition alive. Full story »

The Texas GOP platform for 2010 has been out for a while now. From my casual skimming of reviews and analyses, the general sense and direction of the party line didn’t seem to have changed much; and so, in a shameful victory of sloth over principle, I absolved myself of reading the actual document and went to the pool. Or the river, or the grocery store, or the dentist – anywhere, in fact, rather than a quiet place in which I could closely read for myself the principles of the majority political party of the state in which I was born, raised and once again live.

But if my conscience sleeps soundly, my curiosity has a terminal case of insomnia, and last week I holed up at La Taza, fortified my flagging resolution with a large latte and two palmiers and began to read.  And read. And at last I understand, both intellectually and at a gut level, the hopes, fears and way of life of the Texas Republican. The platform is more than a statement of beliefs. It’s a signpost, a guide to the kind of life an honorable, principled Republican aspires to lead and the vices he struggles to avoid – because of course, no decent human being would hypocritically urge his beliefs upon society without striving to live them himself. The following is a small sampling of what I learned about the private lives of my neighbors of the GOP persuasion.

1. No blowjobs. Full story »

If you’re a woman in a Western or Westernized culture in the twenty-first century, chances are good that you have, do or will own, wear, struggle to get into and on occasion hasten to get out of a garment called a brassiere. A bra. A couple of  fabric cups and some elastic which contain, shape and redistribute the weight of two masses of mammary tissue… while also bearing the burden of more than a hundred years of cultural, medical and political debate and opinion. Just off the top of my head here, a bra:

• is an essential device to support, train and protect fragile breast tissue while slowing or preventing their eventual droop earthward;
• is a cancer-causing, lymph-node-squishing, shoulder-aching contraption which has no effect on the actual shape or condition of the breast; Full story »

Christina Hendricks: that’s what real looks like, boys.

Today, women around the interwebs participate in Boobquake. The brainchild of self-described “liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted atheist feminist” blogger Jen McCreight, this Commemoration of Cleavage, Festival of Funbags, Jubilee of Jugs is in actuality a double-mam slap in the face to this jackass, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, whose charmingly magical thinking runs something like this:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Wow. I knew adultery, rape, disease, societal meltdown, bastard children and plagues of locusts were the fault of my dirty pillows, but earthquakes? Damn. Full story »

The arrival of The Beatles in February of 1964 and the subsequent cultural changes they fostered (whether consciously or not) paralleled momentous changes in the American social and political landscape. From 1964-70 Boomers found themselves awash in powerful cultural currents coming from, it seemed, every direction:

• The civil rights movement, which had reached its zenith with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial after the March on Washington in 1963 had seen some fruition in the passage of landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. But that movement had begun to move in a more radicalized direction, partly as a result of police brutality. Even as a “loyal opponent” such as Malcolm X was assassinated by members of his own religion, younger, Boomer-aged black leaders emerged such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton calling for a new approach to race relations that reflected more the beliefs of Malcolm X rather than Dr. King – an approach based on a concept they called “black power.” Full story »

Some months back, I attended a convention on behalf of my employer. One of the honored guest speakers was former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson. Wilson, whose story was Hollywoodized in Charlie Wilson’s War, died today at the age of 76.

Wilson was primarily famous for two things: fucking anything he could catch, and funneling arms to the Afghani mujahedeen during the country’s war against the Soviet Union. Those of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in the room during Wilson’s speech were regaled by tales of how he ignored the law, bullied, end-ran, lied and cheated to get what he wanted, and I mean all this literally. Wilson was as proud of flaunting the law as he was of his lifelong pursuit of women with obvious esteem issues. Full story »

by Shelley Jack

Mamasita! Mamasita! Psst! Psst! Psst!

Taunting, yet playful faces of men passed me by on uneven sidewalks, working diligently to make eye contact. I was lost, again, on a street in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica, walking quickly, head down. Only a few months in to my year-long stay as a business English teacher in the country, the unpredictability of the road and transportation systems continued to challenge even my most adventurous side. When I finally arrived at my destination, three hours into what should have been a 30-minute walk, I sat down and cried one of those long, cleansing cries. I felt dirty from a steady stream of what we North Americans might refer to as aggressive cat-calling or ogling. I was drenched in sweat and tears, and I was painfully conscious of my light skin, blue eyes. Worst of all, I was immersed in a kind of fear that most of my countrywomen never have to face here on the streets of America. Full story »