The pieces of malware used to compromise websites tend to become some sort of online highlander as they remain available longer than anytime before, security company ScanSafe revealed in a study published today. According to the findings, in the second half of the last year, the malware implemented into online websites remained available for approximately 29 days which represents a 62 percent increase. The first half of the year brought an availability period of only 18 days, which underlines th…
With the Euro 2008 championship quickly approaching, people around the world search the web for sites that could help them buy a ticket for one of their national team's matches. However, searching the web for such a page may have a different result, other than what you would expect: a nice-looking and apparently clean website that attempts to drop some sort of malware on every vulnerable computer. The website was actually clean but due to some hackers, it got compromised and it now attempts…
Google Maps Street View is a famous service which provides high-resolution photos straight from the street, allowing users to enjoy amazing panoramas from several locations in the world. Although there are only a few similar services on the market, there's one which may represent a real alternative for Google's service. Codenamed MapJack, the street imagery service only provides photos of San Francisco, Sausalito (United States) and Chiang Mai (Thailand), but the quality of the picture…
Clinton has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda. However, Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.
Traffic statistics are very important for the maintenance and improvement of a certain level of website popularity. The usual visitors tracking and website traffic statistics tools are useful, but the majority of them do not offer live reports.
Woopra is a visitors tracking and web traffic statistics analysis application (service), suitable for any type of website having tens or hundreds of thousands requests (views) for their pages. This application is recommended mainly for blogs monitorin…
I don’t think we disagree so very much. Yes, there may be some sex workers who are happy — relatively speaking.
However, I have a theory about these things based upon having known some people like this and having done some research. A large number of these women have been victims in childhood of sexual abuse. In general statistics on the sexual abuse of child run to about 1 in 3 girls and 1-4 boys, depending upon how the study is structured. That’s lots of people. Obviously, not all of them become sex workers. However, of women sex workers whom I have actually known sexual abuse by a male parent figure (father or stepfather) is extremely common. Statistics that I have read bear this out, especially if you figure in uncles and much older brothers. From working with women and knowing women who have had this happen to them, I can confidently say that this is the ultimate abuse of trust and the ultimate loss of control over one’s body.
My theory: These women often begin their profession to re-enact this trauma in their lives. Any counselor or social worker can tell you that people have a compulsion to process trauma over and over. Many times, in their choices, they actually seek out the devil they know. (Anyone who has ever faced the startling fact that a spouse or SO actually reminds them of the parent they have the most uncomfortable relationship with can testify to this.) People talk about the control Johns have but what they don’t understand is the control that sex workers have. They do indeed make a choice (poverty not withstanding) and in that choice they can actually relive a sexual situation in which they have some sexual control rather than being powerless. For one thing, they demand payment. For another, they get to set some boundaries about what is done to them and what they will or won’t do. They have the power to negotiate. I have spoken to a sex worker who admitted that she enjoyed the power — the sexual power — that she had over men.
Now, I know someone is going to chime in and say that if sexual trauma is such an awful thing why on earth would anyone wish to repeat it? The answer lies in the fact that even abused children often love their parents and that sexual attention may have been the primary attention that these people received. In other words, love is what you get because love is what you want. People can turn shit into gold if it is all they have. Children are ever hopeful and ever trusting and they believe their parents must love them — or at least they earnestly want to believe this. Also, sexual abuse can result in sexual feelings in the abused. This can be confusing and guilt-inducing. Most abusers try to make their victims complicit in the activities and often blame the victim for the abuse: “You made me do this.”
When I lived on a ranch, I would sometimes come across wild animals caught in traps. The trappers were supposed to check their traps every 24 hours, but they didn’t. I recall a beautiful bobcat caught in a trap for what must have obviously been at least a couple of days. Her eyes were glazed, pained, and wild. Horrible fear. We could not free her because her would have attacked us. We shot her.
I never wear fur. I don’t want pain on my back.
People who frequent prostitutes will sooner or later be complicit in pain.
March 11, 2008 | As a kid, I probably learned as much about sex from “Love American Style” as from anywhere else. Although the hodgepodge comedy show originally aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974 — for a time alongside family-friendly fare like “The Partridge Family,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple” — that’s not where I discovered it. It was a syndicated daytime staple for years thereafter, and I can distinctly remember faking sick (sorry, Mom!) to stay home periodically from school to watch it along with the soap operas a friend’s baby sitter had turned me on to.
Tuning in to it — upstairs, in my parents’ bedroom, on our one color TV — always felt vaguely titillating, a bit naughty, and OK, maybe a little shameful, as if I were peeping into a forbidden window. Was I in elementary school? Junior high? I really can’t recall, but I do remember that zazz of excitement as the opening credits rolled: the fireworks, the groovy male and female voices commingling in song, the famous faces framed in hearts. Seventies sex was so darn cute!
Or was it? The recent release of the original series on DVD (”Season 1, Vol. 1″ came out last November; “Season 1, Vol. 2″ hits stores Tuesday) reveals a show that is at once more innocent and more pointed than memory conjures. Beneath the corny vignettes and the meandering, sitcom-y sketches that make up each hourlong episode lurk a few sharp observations about a culture and time in which gender stereotypes, institutions (like marriage), generational relationships and pretty much everything else were shifting dramatically. But even while all that was changing, the show seemed to say, love is a constant. Even as it winked at swingers and sex toys, “Love American Style” was as earnestly romantic as candlelight and Chianti.
Take, for instance, Season 1’s “Love and the Legal Agreement,” in which Bill Bixby and Connie Stevens play a couple whose marriage appears to be on the rocks: He’s suiting up and going off to his law firm each day, drinking too much at night, neglecting her, flirting with other women; she’s spending her days hanging around the house in bright-patterned muumuus, feeling unfulfilled, flirting with other men. They’re always fighting and so, naturally, decide to separate. Since neither wants to leave their lovely home, they agree to share it. But when push comes to shove — when each of them contemplates dating someone else, and worse, seeing their spouse date someone else — well, wouldn’t you know, they realize they’re really in love with each other after all. See? Even in this crazy age of divorce, love offers a heart-shaped lifesaver.
Or how about “Love and the Unlikely Couple,” in which a perfectly average-looking young man, Wally (Wes Stern), brings his bombshell fiancée, Bunny (Barbara Rhoades), home to meet his folks. His mother (Alice Ghostley), who before meeting the fiancée had been nervous about making a good impression, suddenly suspects that the young woman is after her son’s (nonexistent) money. All his googly-eyed father (Lou Jacobi) can mutter is, “The lucky bum.” But it turns out that, no, the lovely lady is loaded, too. So, asks the mother, what does this beauty see in her humble son? And for that matter, why is her son marrying this woman?
Wally: Why? Because I love her, that’s why. Mama, you always said that when I met the right girl, something would twang inside me. Well, didn’t you say that?
Mama: Yes.
Wally: Well, the minute I saw Bunny, I started twanging and I haven’t stopped yet.
Papa: Attaboy, ya lucky bum!
Bunny: And I’ve been pinging. All time I’m with Wally, I’m pinging away!
Mama: They’re in love! Can you believe it?
See? Even in these shallow, looks- and money-obsessed times, love turns out to be not only blind but independently wealthy and pinging away.
And then there’s “Love and the Pill,” in which Jane Wyatt and Bob Cummings play middle-aged parents who try to get their teenage daughter’s boyfriend to slip birth control pills into her drink each day, telling him they’re vitamins for a rare blood condition. Unfortunately for them, he’s seen birth control pills before — because his mother takes them — and is aghast. He and the couple’s daughter aren’t having sex, he tells them, indignantly. “Why not?” they ask, confused. “It’s just the way we happen to feel about it,” he says, quietly, yet resolutely, “that’s all.” See? Even in these free-lovin’ times, some young people still value love over sex — no matter what the oldsters think.
To be sure, the show is anything but subtle, and all these variations on pretty much the same theme may grate on anyone who isn’t willing to cut “Love American Style” a lot of slack for nostalgia’s sake. Also, there are some serious clunkers to be found among the assortment of mildly flawed gems: “Love and the Doorknob,” for instance, in which a man gets his mouth stuck on a doorknob on his wedding night (it’s not what you think, but it’s also not funny), and “Love and the Militant,” in which a guy tries to impress his crush by threatening to blow up her boss’s office, to name just two.
But the silly inter-sketch mini-vignettes, sending up the changing mores of the day, are still fun, even if they seem far cornier, more obvious and less edgy than they must have in their original incarnation. And the show’s rotating cast of actors — Flip Wilson! Larry Storch! Arte Johnson! Sid Caesar! Ozzie Nelson! Phyllis Diller! — are a pip, as is the parade of groovy period décor, minidresses, leisure suits and teased hairdos.
So while anyone who tunes in expecting to be titillated may be as disappointed as those sex-preoccupied parents in “Love and the Pill,” they may also find themselves just as pleasantly surprised. Because “Love American Style” evokes a time when sex seemed full of possibilities, gender roles seemed ripe for redefining, and making love seemed like a perfectly viable alternative to making war. And who couldn’t use a little dose of that?
The New York Times’ coverage of a new survey of the inner workings of teenage boys is a must read — just skip past the sensationalist guard-your-girls headline, “Peeking Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter.” The piece starts by sketching out the stereotype of the singularly focused teenage boy and asks: “Are boys that age really defined primarily by their sexual urges? Or does the stereotype fall short, telling us less about teenage males and more about a culture that seems to have consistently low expectations of its boys?” Turns out it’s the latter.
A study published this month in the Journal of Adolescence surveyed 105 10th-grade boys and found that the vast majority don’t pursue romantic relationships for sex but because they “really like the person.” The person — not because she’s the lusted-after lead cheerleader or has her name scrawled all over the boys’ bathroom. Sexually active boys responded that they pursued sex for love equally as for physical satisfaction. Also, forget the male mission to have sex before graduation; that Hollywood meme doesn’t hold up with these real-life boys. Only 14 percent said they pursued sex to lose their virginity. The study’s sample size is admittedly small, but this news might help us strip ourselves of those previously mentioned low expectations, no?
Well, no, apparently. When the Times first blogged about the study, readers rushed in with snickering skepticism. Take this comment: “Based on my past experience as a teenage boy, this study just reinforces my view that teenage boys are horny liars.” Or this: “Yeah right! 16-year-old boys are concerned about relationships?” Even this: “I can just about pinpoint the exact moment in my prepubescent life when the ‘lies I told the ladies’ turned into the ‘truths’ I told myself … These punks have got one thing on their minds, and it ain’t relationships.” Holy protective posturing, Batman!
Thankfully, the Times took these responses to the study’s authors and an expert in adolescent psychology and asked them what was up with all the snark. They suggest it reveals more about adult men than teenage boys. Psychologist Michael G. Thompson, author of “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,” said: “Grown men often deny how dependent they are on women. The idea that you could pine for a girl, and be devastated by a girl, makes an adult man uncomfortable. It reminds them of how profoundly attached they get to women.” Andrew Smiler, an assistant professor of psychology at SUNY-Oswego and a study author, worries about the effect this adult attitude has on boys. “The stereotype reduces boys to one-dimensional beings who just want sex and nothing else,” he says.
Can we be surprised, then, if they ultimately fulfill that stereotype?
Mom kicked off plane for breast feeding her baby.
Are you kidding me with this? What is the issue that people have about breast-feeding? Let’s break it down very simply, shall we?
We are mammals. Mammals, by definition–(Thank you, National Geographic): Any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class Mammalia, including humans, characterized by a covering of hair on the skin and, in the female, milk-producing mammary glands for nourishing the young.
Oh, my god, what are these bunnies doing????
And this orangatan??
And the worst of all, this shameless mother panda. Good lord, is that a breast???
I know, we shouldn’t stoop to this animalistic behavior. After all, who would support the 3 million dollar a year salary of Nestle, maker of baby formula? Do you think the CEO wants you to use free healthy, natural breast milk for your baby? Barbaric. No, we are more civilized than this. We humans want it known that breasts are SEX OBJECTS and should be treated solely as such. Yep, we know the real reason for breasts: For adolescent fun and mockery, of course.
Feeding babies? Ridiculous and repulsive.
Someone rescue me.
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More of the same hypocritical thinking that strikes out at bare breasts, can’t get enough cleavage in magazines and advertisement to sell “God-knows-what-all”!
Yet the fact that every 5th person in our country has been subjected to molestation, Clergy rape and what happens routinely in prison (rape) is not accorded the same outrage nor attention! It might just shatter the illusion that all is safe as long as we clamp down on public display of breast-feeding.
Remember, the Christian Right and Moral Majority are neither!!
March 30, 2008 | Considering how much TV I watch, you’d think that eventually my senses would become numbed to the insanity of the small screen. What other defense could my brain launch in response to so much lowbrow entertainment, than to dampen the clumsy blows of pop culture’s bluntest weapons? Surely, after years at this job, my sensitivity to the idiocy and outrageousness of television would decrease, rendering me less and less surprised or disturbed by the madness I encounter.
Sadly, though, the more exposure I have to the volatile, absurd, depraved kaleidoscope of televised entertainments, the more my senses have become heightened to the boob tube’s confusing stimuli. Little details that other viewers have long since accepted as part of the mundane TV landscape — David Caruso’s growl, Tyra Banks’ elevation to giganto-tranny/high priestess of the universe, Julie Chen’s wardrobe choices — these things confound my overtaxed senses much like a scrap of shiny paper confuses the ecstasy-addled teenager.
“The Hills” aren’t alive with anything
Take Lauren Conrad, the star of reality soap “The Hills” (10 p.m. EDT Mondays on MTV). When the series returned last Monday, it struck me once again, this time with even more force, how utterly devoid of charm and personality and a discernible pulse Lauren is. What is this limp rag of a woman doing on TV? Why is the camera trained on her empty face, which reflects the apparent paucity of thoughts floating through her head? Why do we see, time and again, that pouting, downturned mouth, which forms words so infrequently?
Clearly, the point of “The Hills” is to see Lauren tortured at every turn. How else could Audrina call, right after Lauren and Whitney arrived in Paris, to tell Lauren that she saw Brody Jenner, her sort-of sweetheart, in L.A. the night before with a girl he introduced as his girlfriend? Even Whitney, who’s supposed to be Lauren’s friend, has trouble stifling laughter at the swiftness of Brody’s betrayal. “Really? That took, uh, two days!” she says with a smirk, then struggles mightily to wipe the smile away as she supportively brushes a stray hair off Lauren’s face.
And what does Lauren say? Nothing.
Whitney: We can find boyfriends in two days!
Lauren: Silence.
Whitney: If he can do it, so can we!
Lauren: Silence.
Whitney: I’m sure that Paris is full of guys who are cooler than Brody.
Lauren: Silence.
Next, Lauren and Whitney decide to go out to a club with some guys from a French rock ‘n’ roll band called Rock ‘n’ Roll. Maybe these concrete thinkers will be slow enough to find Lauren interesting, or maybe the language barrier will render her mute frowning mysterious and seductive.
One of the guys leers at Lauren from across the table, and she lights up immediately. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I think that greasy guy with the half-assed mustache is leering at me!” her delighted face seems to say, but her mouth, as always, says nothing. At least she’s throwing us a bone by offering us a rare glimpse of how her face looks when she’s not in a semi-comatose state.
The Leering Rocker (whose name is Mathias) follows her out to say goodbye, and she dodges his advances, which in Lauren’s twisted universe is a crystal-clear come-hither sign. Happy to be encouraged by Lauren (Or the show’s producers? It’s so hard to tell!) Leering Rocker shows up after the Teen Vogue event she and Whitney are in Paris to help with. He rides up on a Vespa (His Vespa?) with two matching, shiny silver helmets (OK, obviously a producer rented this moped package for him). Lauren hikes up her ball gown and the two zip off into the rainy night for what is an undoubtedly unpleasant but nonetheless rather photogenic adventure through the streets of Paris.
The next day, Whitney and Lauren discuss their regrets over having to leave Paris so soon after arriving.
Whitney: I bet Mathias really liked you. I bet he wishes you were staying longer.
Lauren: Me too.
Whitney: What about Brody?
Lauren: Silence.
Whitney: It’s so weird, just to come here and then come home with like a whole new perspective on things, you know?
Lauren: Well, Lisa did say that Paris changes you.
Whitney: What about you? Are you excited to go back home?
Lauren: I don’t know. I guess so.
Wouldn’t it save MTV untold piles of cash if they replaced Lauren Conrad with, say, a duffel bag? They could ship the duffel bag to Paris, shoot it lounging in the luxury hotel room as Whitney guesses at its innermost thoughts and desires. They could even prop it up on the back of the moped behind Leering Rocker and show it the sights of Paris at night. The duffel bag could appear on the cover of US Weekly next to the words “How I Got Stabbed in the Back” or maybe, “How I Got Thrown Around Carelessly.”
And you can bet that a duffel bag wouldn’t become outraged over its press, pathetically confusing itself with a real-life human being. A duffel bag would happily accept its role as a fictional character on an entirely imaginary “reality” show.
Anyway, we’ve got much more to discuss so we’ll get to Lauren’s ex-friend Ice Princess Barbie Heidi and her repetitive ‘toon boyfriend Spencer later.
And if you want to sing that title to the Backstreet Boys song, feel free. Yes, I admit it - I love the Backstreet Boys and even have their latest cd which is fab. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today - actually, it’s more like a complaint. You see, there’s something else I really love - shopping - and clothes designers are not making things easy.
So since my big life changing event, I have lost some weight - like 2-3 pants sizes in weight depending on the designer. Good news, right? Yeah, until you try to find something to wear. Now, since I’m one of those people that keep all my smaller clothes because I figured one day I’d get back in them, I DO have a decent wardrobe in four different sizes - of course I’m already past two of them but hey - progress. So I don’t need all new stuff but I need a couple of simple tops to compliment the capris I already have.
So for the past two weekends, I have made passes by stores in search of some simple, inexpensive tops. The new trend this year (and quite frankly most of last) is the baby doll tops like the one pictured above. Cute, huh? Yeah, I thought so too, but there’s one big problem I’ve found with these tops. First off, they come in two types of material - a light breezy cotton or a cotton/spandex blend that makes me sweat just thinking about it. So the light breezy cotton is definitely the top for me. But the light breezy cotton doesn’t “give” so an exact fit is required. And that’s where the problem comes in.
Can someone please tell me why in this age of vanity and affordable breast implants, all tops are made to house ten-year olds in the bust??????? Sorry, folks, but I’m built like a woman - boobs, hips, you know the drill. And even if I lost more weight, the girls still wouldn’t fit in one of those tops because I’d just have to go down another size and I’m figuring the boob area doesn’t get bigger as the top gets smaller. So in order to fit my boobs in one of these tops, I’d have to buy it bigger than I need. Sometimes this is a doable thing, but take a good look at that top again. See how it’s fitted under the boobs then blouses out over the tummy (which is a great idea for hiding a little too much tummy), well the bigger the top, the bigger the tummy area - so by the time I’m in one that fits my boobs, I look like I’m pregnant with an elephant that’s been gestating for four years.
By the way - I have the same boob problem with bathing suits, but since the whole topic of bathing suits is subject to moaning and crying (mostly by me) we’re going to skip that for today.
Second complaint - length of pants. I’m 5′8″ - not an Amazon, but not the average height for women either. And damned if I can find pants long enough. Ever once and a while I can locate a Tall but for the most part they all skim the tops of my ankles, giving me the whole “high-waters” look that I think was popular before I was born. And let’s just go ahead and say a small prayer of thanks that I HAVE lost some weight and left women’s sizes behind. Because apparently, if you are fat, you MUST be 4 foot 2.
Summer is much easier for me to manage - capris are still “in” (thank God) and I don’t have to search the ends of the earth looking for 32 length pants.
So after two weekends of searching for my prey, I am still topless. Well, you know what I mean.
Oh, my god, what are these bunnies doing????
And this orangatan??
For adolescent fun and mockery, of course.
More of the same hypocritical thinking that strikes out at bare breasts, can’t get enough cleavage in magazines and advertisement to sell “God-knows-what-all”!
Yet the fact that every 5th person in our country has been subjected to molestation, Clergy rape and what happens routinely in prison (rape) is not accorded the same outrage nor attention! It might just shatter the illusion that all is safe as long as we clamp down on public display of breast-feeding.
Remember, the Christian Right and Moral Majority are neither!!