Category: Uncategorized

To all my American friends and family, from your new fellow resident — Happy 4th!

Click the image to see the source.

This image was tweeted by Sarah Baker on June 30th, and it’s a succinct response to the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the “Hobby Lobby Case”. Health insurance is tied to the employer in the US, and Hobby Lobby, being a chain of stores run by evangelical Christians, objected on religious grounds (and whined in a “tragic letter” about how you can’t use Jesus to step on people anymore, calling it the “loss of religious freedom and liberty in America”) to having to pay for women’s contraception, and the “morning-after pill” in particular. Hobby Lobby’s insurance will still pay for vasectomies and Viagra, though, because men are actually people.

…was the one held by this guy, who was part of the Toronto Public Library group:

Marry as I legislate, not as I do. Ooh! I get to say “I do” and you don’t!

Sometimes when you move to a foreign place with a tropical climate, friendly people, and a low cost of living, all for the sake of a native girl, you pay the price by dealing with that place’s silly customs, backward ways, and primitive belief systems. Here in Florida, while a generally hospitable people hold many silly notions, such as the concept that two people of the same sex shouldn’t get married. The local chieftains banned same-sex marriages some eighty seasons ago, and when in a 2008 tribal council (called an “election”), they made an addendum to their sacred parchment of laws written by their ancestors (“The Constitution”).

(Okay, enough writing about Florida the way many news writers cover other countries.)

Pam Bondi is Florida’s Attorney General, and along with fellow Republican and State Governor Rick Scott, she was named in a lawsuit that states that Florida is discriminating against gay couples by not recognizing same-sex marriages that were performed in places where they are recognized.

Here’s the statement by Bondi’s office made in official court documents. Pay attention to the part’s I’ve put in bold text:

“Florida’s marriage laws, then, have a close, direct, and rational relationship to society’s legitimate interest in increasing the likelihood that children will be born to and raised by the mothers and fathers who produced them in stable and enduring family units.”

A quick visit to Pam Bondi’s Wikipedia page shows that she’s been married twice:

• The first time, from 1990 to 1992, in a marriage that lasted 22 months
• and in a second marriage that lasted almost 6 years, from 1997 to 2002.

She recently had a “non-binding ceremony” — a civil union of sorts — with her fiance. According to reports, it had all the trappings of a wedding, without actually being one, for reasons that have not yet been revealed. While her fiance, who is a widower, has children from his marriage, Bondi never performed her wifely duty of producing offspring despite having had not one, but two opportunities to fulfill her sacred mission and biological imperative.

I’m not the first person to notice this; John Stemberger of the Florida Family Policy Council (the group’s name should already be a warning) questioned Bondi’s “true conservative” credentials and lifestyle by noting that “personally, she has no children and lives with her 60 year old eye doctor boyfriend.”

I think it’s the heat that makes people here a little wacky.

The website I (Effing) Love Science featured this machine designed to extract sperm from donors yesterday, along with a video of it running “unmanned”. It’s both mesmerizing and disturbing:

The video appears to have been shot in a hospital hallway. I hope for the donors’ sake that it was put there only for display, and that this isn’t its usual location.

Since it’s a machine that has very close contact with rather sensitive body parts, it should undergo regular safety inspections. I can think of no one more qualified for the job than this guy:

“Sperm-extracting machine” reminds me of this old tune by The Cult. Since it’s Throwback Thursday, I’ll close with its video:

I dropped by Trader Joe’s this afternoon to pick up some cookie butter for friends and family back in Canada and discovered that they carry frozen poutine now. I’ll file a report once I’ve tasted it.

The large outdoor sculpture pictured above is located in Tübingen, Genmany (30 km south of Stuttgart) and named Chachan-Pi. The name means “making love”, and yes, the sculpture is a giant marble vagina.

I suspect that there are thousands of people, who upon encountering Chachan-Pi, have told a friend “Photograph me whilst I strike some comical pose beside this Brobdingnagian baby-cannon!”…or words to that effect. I also suspect that they’ve all ended with a photo and no other incident.

One American student travelling abroad wasn’t so lucky. Somehow, in positioning himself for a high-larious pose, he got stuck:

But hey, the guy wanted his friend to take a funny picture, so he did just that. And, as any good citizen with a funny picture is morally compelled to do, he posted it on the internet. “Hey bro, I need the Reddit points!”

This will likely just reinforce the stereotype of the dorky Asian guy. Thanks, dude. Thanks for nothing.

For reasons that have not yet been made clear, reports say that it took 22 firefighters to free the stuck student. It’s almost as if they were trying to create a brand new metaphor about how little we men understand women:

The rescue was a success, and being guys in rubber raincoats who just had a close encounter with a vagina, they had to brag a little. They claimed that they freed the student “by hand and without the application of tools”. I say this with all seriousness and only a little jest: a little lube might’ve helped.

And finally, as the cliche cherry on the stereotype sundae that is this story, the mayor of Tübingen came across as the sort of stoic Teutonic psychoanalyst you’d expect as part of an ensemble cast in a black comedy with his statement on the incident. He said that he couldn’t figure out how the student got stuck in the first place, “even when considering the most extreme adolescent fantasies. To reward such a masterly achievement with the use of 22 firefighters almost pains my soul.”

Sigmund Freud would’ve had a field day with this.