Get Cynical

Walt Disney’s The Story Of Menstruation (1946)

I learned about menstruation by getting my prepubescent hands on a copy of Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” that a classmate had somehow managed to smuggle into school. Sure it was a girl’s book but we thought that it would solve every question we had about girls. It didn’t. In fact, I think we came away even more confused. (They bleed every month? Ewwwww.) And that every girl had a copy of that book and not only seemed to love it, but understood it made us realize that we had a long road ahead.

The good folks at disenchanted.com on brewing the perfect cup of coffee.

This is slightly NSFW although there aren’t any graphic pics.

Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film they shot was used in court as evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in the state penitentiary. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention. Tearoom is a radical example of film presented “as found” for the purpose of circulating historical images that have otherwise been suppressed.

(via Clusterflock)

Now this is chutzpah:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

He then ripped off his papal robes and revealed that he was wearing a Richard Dawkins t-shirt underneath.

(Thanks Emily!)

It’s really bad outside. The snow is coming down hard and traffic is backed up. And I just made it home to find out that my apt. building’s management decided today to replace the boilers. We don’t have heat or hot water at the moment. But who needs heat during a snow storm? I think I’ll bake something.

The report is here (pdf) but if you want a quick list of the names mentioned then go here:

Below, a complete list of players mentioned in the Mitchell Report.

All the players listed in the section VIII. B.: “Information Regarding Purchases or Use of Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball” (section 3 is “Radomski¹s Distribution of Performance Enhancing Substances to Major League Baseball Players”)

On Flickr.

(via Found on the Web)

The highest type of the orthodox Christian does not forget; neither does he learn. He neither advances nor recedes. He is a living fossil embedded in that rock called faith. He makes no effort to better his condition, because all his strength is exhausted in keeping other people from improving theirs. The supreme desire of his heart is to force all others to adopt his creed, and in order to accomplish this object he denounces free thinking as a crime, and this crime he calls heresy. When he had power, heresy was the most terrible and formidable of words. It meant confiscation, exile, imprisonment, torture, and death.

Robert Green Ingersoll – “Heretics and Hericies”(1874)