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Month: December 2004
like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree
LONDON (Reuters) – American author and journalist Tom Wolfe has won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades — the British prize for bad sex in fiction.
The prize is awarded each year “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel”.
Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest novel “I am Charlotte Simmons”, a tale of campus life at an exclusive U.S. university. “Slither slither slither slither went the tongue,” one of his winning sentences begins.
“But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now!”
Judges described Wolfe's prose as “ghastly and boring”.
The former Washington Post correspondent, whose debut novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” was a defining text of the 1980s, fought off stiff competition from 10 other authors including South African Andre Brink, whose novel “Before I Forget” contains the following description of a woman's vulva:
“(It was) like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end.”
Another writer who only narrowly escaped the prize was Britain's Nadeem Aslam for his novel “Maps for Lost Lovers” a tale of life in a Muslim community in an English town.
“His mouth looked for the oiled berry,” one of his raunchiest passages starts.
“The smell of his armpits was on her shoulders — a flower depositing pollen on a hummingbird's forehead,” another reads. The winner of the award, organised by the London-based Literary Review, is given an Oscar-style statuette and a bottle of champagne — but only if he or she comes to the awards ceremony in person.
Organisers said Wolfe, who is based in New York, was the first writer in the 12-year history of the competition to decline his invitation.
Original link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=857&e=1&u=/nm/oukoe_odd_literature_sex
Motherfucker
I just threw somebody out of my office. It felt good to do.
I was making a playlist, ordering Pink Floyd tracks according to their original albums. Fascinating, i know, but bear with me. Thing is, I was concentrating on it. Now anybody who knows me knows that I kinda turn autistic when I concentrate, i.e. I block out the world around me and focus on a single thing.
So when an idiot silently walks into my office and yells “JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!” behind me, bad things happen. Like me almost falling out of my swivel chair and having a heart attack.
I am rarely pissed off. Rarely angry. But this time, I just looked at him and calmly said “get out of my office before I punch your face in”. Funny thing, I meant it. Funnier thing, he left.
May all your xmas pies be mine
Weebl & Bob outtakes
http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/chat.htm
As more proof that the US is going mad….
There are still good people out there
Over the weekend, I ordered flowers to be delivered to Katy this morning, before she left for Manchester to wish her luck on her interview and as a little pick-me-up cause she's going to have a busy week. A half-dozen long stemmed white roses. So, this morning, as I'm talking to her on the phone (I wanted to make sure she got them – or knew of them – before she left), the delivery man arrives and gives them to her. She loved them, which made my day.
I ask her to describe them to me, cause I knew what I'd ordered, but not exactly how they'd be presented. First thing she says is that they're a lovely deep red.
Red.
Gaaaaaah!
They screwed up the order. I sent them an email this morning (and won't worry sweetie, I remained polite) thanking them for their prompt delivery, but it would have been better if the correct flowers had been sent.
As I got in to work, I had this waiting for me in my mailbox:
Firstly apologies for our mistake. I have just spoken to our florist who cannot apologies enough for the error. We will however as a goodwill gesture, send another six white roses tomorrow with our apologies. I hope you find this satisfactory.
Again sorry.
Happy Christmas
Kind Regards
Jill O'Brien
Customer Services
Flowers Direct
So, no harm no foul, and she's going to have another half-dozen flowers waiting for her when she gets back :) Even with the boo-boo, I'm going to buy my flowers from them in the future, just because of this email.
Finally saw it!
So I finally saw Better than chocolate tonight. After 6 months of having Stephane's DVD on my desk. It's a nice light movie, but honestly, i have to say, the couch scene ain't as hot as I was led to believe :)
withholding sex until marriage makes you cool in god's eyes!
The 1938 government antimarijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness is still watched today for its campy excesses. Dr. Carroll, the moralizing high school principal, warns parents that marijuana is more dangerous than opium and heroin. Those who smoke the drug are depicted as instantly addicted and crazed.
We laugh at these scare tactics today. But the government has not ended its efforts to modify behavior by using campaigns of exaggerations and lies. A new congressional report has found that the nation's most popular government-funded abstinence-only sex education programs are peppered with inaccuracies that misinform young people about the risks of sex, contraceptives and abortion. It's Reefer Madness all over again. Or, as one research group called it, “Scared Chaste.”
One aspect of President Bush's continuing efforts to direct our tax money to religiously affiliated groups is the push for a massive expansion of federal funding for abstinence-only sex education. During the 2005 fiscal year, the federal government will spend $170-million to support programs that preach that sex is to be reserved for marriage only, and a number of the recipients of those dollars will be faith-based. That's more than double what was spent in 2001.
But unlike Bush's energetic concern over educational accountability and standards reflected in No Child Left Behind, the curricula for abstinence-only sex education programs are not vetted for accuracy. (There was an attempt by Democratic lawmakers in 2002 to require medical accuracy as a condition of receiving money for these programs, but that effort was voted down by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.)
So rather than getting the tools they need to make sensible choices about their health and bodies, young people are being told outrageous lies, such as how 5 to 10 percent of women who have abortions will become sterile (when there's no correlation between elective abortions and sterility) or how condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31 percent of the time (when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that consistent condom use resulted in a zero transmission rate.)
The congressional study, conducted by the Special Investigations Division of the Committee on Government Reform at the behest of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., found “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health” in more than 80 percent of the most popular abstinence-only curricula.
The result is not that young people are scared off sex until marriage. (Even most of those who take virginity pledges engage in premarital sex.) It's that they don't bother taking precautions against sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. They are led to believe that condoms are ineffective.
“We hear from kids all the time about the myths they've been fed,” said Marilyn Anderson, director of education at Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida. “The whole idea is to scare kids and make them think they'll get HIV by having sex. But what's walking into our clinic says that kids are having sex, just without condoms.”
Although the federal government has determinedly refused to study whether any correlation exists between teaching abstinence and actual abstinence, the social science that does exist demonstrates very little positive impact. The handful of states that have studied it found no long-term success in delaying sexual initiation. Instead, some state program evaluators said the programs' lack of information on pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases was leading to dangerous attitudes and behaviors.
Bush's push for abstinence-only education is a way to pander to his base. According to Adrienne Verrilli, director of communications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the purveyors of these programs are often connected to the antiabortion movement.
It's no surprise, then, that the curricula have also been found to mix religion and science in ways to promote an antiabortion agenda. One course described a blastocyst as a “tiny baby” that “snuggles” into the uterus. Another called a 43-day-old fetus a “thinking person.”
In Louisiana, a state-sponsored Web site tells young people that withholding sex until marriage makes one “really, truly, “cool' in God's eyes.” And in Florida, the Pinellas Pregnancy Center received more than $300,000 in 2003 and about $200,000 in 2004 in taxpayer money to spread an abstinence-only message in public school health classrooms. They reach between 5,000 and 6,000 students a year this way, according to program coordinator Linda Daniels. The center describes itself as “a faith-based organization that offers a Christian response to the issue of abortion.”
Insanity has been described as doing the same thing under the same conditions and expecting differing results. The government is once again squandering its money on falsehoods, wild exaggerations and scare tactics that have young people either snickering or ignoring the message. Now that's madness.
Original link: http://sptimes.com/2004/12/12/Columns/Fact_free_teaching_on.shtml
Bold emphasis mine.
Just so you know
My cat really REALLY doesn't like the vacuum cleaner.