Don't want to marry your sister? There's an app for that!

Incest is a terrible thing.  But when you're one person among a population of 300 thousand, your odds of contributing to genetic bottleneck go substantially up.  That's the problem in Iceland, where just about everyone is related to everyone else and some downright... creepy... marital relations have inadvertently come about.

(I'm assuming those were inadvertent anyway...)

Enter App of Icelanders, a new app for Android-based devices.  Utilizing a database called Book of Icelanders that has data on 95% of the country's native population going back 300 years, smartphone users can find information about their family with the touch of a finger.  But the real gimmick is what the developers have named the "Incest Prevention Alarm": by merely touching your Android smartphone with another also loaded with App of Icelanders, the software automatically determines if you and the other person are cousins.  Or brothers.  Or sisters.  Or parent and child...

(Hey, it happened to Oedipus didn't it?!)

The developers have come up with a catchy ad slogan for their product: "Bump in the app before you bump in the bed".  If you have an Android phone and you're Icelandic, you can find it here.

Bump here for more about this app, which is no doubt being coded-up even as we speak for segments of the population in certain quarters of Appalachia...

Apple should jump on this for iOS gadgets.  It could be called iNcest!

(I'll just leave by the back door...)

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Wiiiiiii!!!

A lady named Amanda Flowers in Great Britain is, errr... blaming Nintendo's Wii Fit for causing her to have persistent orgasms.

From the article at the Daily Star...

A WOMAN has gone from Nintendo to nympho after a fall from her Wii Fit board turned her into a sex addict.

Randy Amanda Flowers needs 10 sex sessions a day after the slip-up.

And now the slightest of vibrations, from mobile phones to food processors, turns her on.

The catering worker said: "It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm."

A doctor diagnosed her with persistent sexual arousal syndrome due to a damaged nerve.

Probably a million-to-one thing that happened to Amanda Flowers and likely not easily replicated (no matter how many people will attempt it, no doubt). I found this interesting enough to post 'cuz I've some fascination with video gaming and human biology.

This just happens to be the first time that I've heard of a video game affecting one's sex life (apart from some examples that will readily come to mind :-P)

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To the person presently fixated on searching this blog

Behave yourself or everybody finds out who you are having an affair with.

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Pathetic!

I know of no other way to describe it when a person arrives at this blog via a Google search for, and I quote, "scarlett johansson seks".

(I hope the person found what they were looking for on this post that I made over three years ago.)

What kind of a world is this coming to when even "sex" is getting misspelled?!?

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Best man rigs newlywed friend's bed to Twitter during sex

Yeah it's a slow news day apparently.

Read the wonderfully lurid technical details about the prank here.

And if you are interested in this kind of... stuff... click here to follow the Twitter feed straight from the newlyweds' bed.

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Sex in space "inevitable" says experts

A Japanese firm is offering weddings in space beginning next year, and now officials with both state-sponsored space agencies and private corporations are beginning to openly concede that sexual intercourse beyond the confines of the Earth is going to happen... if it hasn't already (NASA is tight-lipped about whether it's taken place on the International Space Station or a shuttle flight).

Of especially great concern is what will happen on a long-term mission, like the ones now in the planning stages for a manned flight to Mars, or even an extended stay on something as relatively close by as the Moon. Space experts agree that humans are, by nature, beings who require sexual activity and expression in order to remain both emotionally and physically healthy. In more than forty years of forays into space, we've learned how to deal with just about every other human physiological need... and now we're going to have to confront the final frontier if we are to consider going any further.

It all sounds funny. But it's not.

Think about it: if we are bent on being an extra-planetary species, then what's going to happen to children who are conceived, and then grow up, in either a micro-gravity environment, or on a world with two-thirds or less of Earth's gravity? The movie WALL-E had some fun with that idea. But in reality, someone who matured in such an environment might very well die if he or she came to Earth, from failure of the body to acclimate to the higher gravity.

(And on a geeky note, the failed ABC pilot movie Plymouth back in 1991 took a very serious and engaging approach to this notion. It was yet another idea for a television series that was way ahead of its time...)

Of course, it would be remiss if one did not note that at least this would bring a whole new meaning to the term "panspermia"...

Okay, I'm stopping now.

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Pregnant man story: "Meh..."

"Hey Chris, did you hear about the pregnant..."

"Yes I have!"

So it's gone for the past several days, ever since the story came out about Thomas Beatie, the Oregon man who is now pregnant and showed his ultrasound images on Oprah Winfrey's show to prove that it's no hoax.

Yeah well, I don't see what the big deal about this is.

The thing is, Beatie may be pregnant but I'm not convinced that he's a "man" in any sense at all. Born Tracy Lagondino, "Thomas Beatie" had trans-gender surgery and hormonal treatment beginning in her twenties to gain more masculine traits. And legally, Beatie is classified as a male.

But none of that changes the fact that at the basic cellular level, Thomas Beatie is still a woman. That her own body recognizes her feminine qualities enough to carry a child should be ample evidence of this.

Yeah, I'll acknowledge that Beatie now allegedly possesses male anatomy. But if it only takes a surgical procedure to fundamentally alter naturally-endowed biology, then sew on a trunk and ears and call me an elephant!

To me at least, there's nothing sensational about this story. In fact it only demonstrates that there are still things beyond man's ability to alter, and that gender is one of them.

The only thing I'm really concerned about with this story is whether what Beatie has done to her body might have some detrimental affect on the child she is carrying. Hormones are a very tricky thing: even a small excess could trigger severe developmental changes in her baby.

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The state of things ...

Or to quote Scatman Crothers's character in The Shining: "Just between you and me, we got a very serious problem with the people taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes."

To wit:

- Oil today hit $111 per barrel.

- $200 per barrel is possible, says Goldman Sachs.

- The value of the dollar is plummeting.

- We are now in a recession, according to most economists.

- Some are now saying that there is a "perfect storm" brewing for another full-blown depression.

- Next week will be the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, with no end in sight. We have now been engaged in military operations in one small Mid-East country for far longer, with no clearly defined end-goal or even rationale for our presence there, than the United States fought in World War II in both the European and Pacific theatres.

- George W. Bush desperately wants to be remembered as the President who legalized torture and government spying on Americans. If you are so foolish as to support Bush on this, remember that eleven months from now Hillary might have this power too.

- Considering that it cost one guy $80,000 and a job as governor, that must have been the greatest sex ever.

- If members of law enforcement are trying to shut down a website called RateMyCop.com because it exposes abuses they commit, does that mean that America now has "secret police"?

And finally: A woman in Kansas sat on her toilet for two years. Her flesh became meshed to the ceramic. Her boyfriend is now being charged with... something or 'nother. The sheriff in the case is named Bryan Whipple.

Only in America...

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Muslim women becoming "virgins" again via surgery

Here's an interesting story via Fox News Channel...

Muslim Brides Undergoing Painful Vaginal Surgery to 'Re-virginize' for Wedding Nights

Monday, December 17, 2007

On her wedding night, Aisha Salim will hand her blooded sheets to her in-laws as proof of her virginity, according to a story in The Daily Telegraph of Australia.

But there’s one problem. Being a modern English university graduate, she is far from the traditional untouched Muslim bride.

Like most woman her age, Salim has smoked, drank, had sex and even lived with one of her past boyfriends.

However, if the devout Muslim family of her soon-to-be husband – or even her own family – knew this, she could be murdered.

Aisha has opted to have her virginity surgically restored in a delicate but painful surgery called hymenoplasties -- where the hymen is re-created from the already torn tissue, or a new membrane is inserted.

"If my husband cannot prove to his family that I am a virgin, I would be hounded, ostracised and sent home in disgrace,” Salim told England’s Daily Mail.

“My father, who is a devout Muslim, would regard it as the ultimate shame. The entire family could be cast out from the friends and society they hold dear, and I honestly believe that one of my fanatically religious cousins or uncles might kill me in revenge, to purge them of my sins. Incredible as it may seem, honour killings are still accepted within our religion.

"Ever since my family arranged this marriage for me, I've been terrified that, on my wedding night, my secret would come out. It has only been since my surgery last week that I've actually been able to sleep properly. Now, I can look forward to my marriage."

There's more of the story at the link above, including how this "surgically-reconstructed virginity" is gaining in popularity among Muslim women.

So much that could be said about this...

Fer starters, there is something very, very wrong with the expectation that a new bride "hand her blooded sheets to her in-laws as proof of her virginity" on her wedding night. Just plain ewwwww, man.

But what if the woman in question is indeed a virgin but already has a torn hymen? There are several cases of women who have no more hymen because they were lost during activities like gymnastics and horseback riding. Some women have even been found to have been born with little or no hymen at all, meaning that there isn't much to reconstruct from.

But most of all, I have to wonder how much sincere love there is for this woman from her family: from her own as well as the one she's marrying into. Love is supposed to be many things, and forgiving is among the most important. Even forgiving things like "loss of virtue".

That a religion would deem it acceptable to kill a person like Aisha (I'm pretty sure that's not her real name) cries volumes about what this supposed "faith" holds sacred. The whole point of most religion at all - and I'm not gonna try to use this to get into a "my faith is better than your faith" thing, 'cuz that's not the point of it - is to reconcile one's soul with something that's higher than man, because we have to realize that whatever perfection there is, we do fall short of it. Way short. And there's nothing on Earth that we can do on our own to make ourselves justified to that perfection.

A "faith" that does not acknowledge this and appreciates the need for grace, is not a real faith at all.

It is also sad that Aisha does not seem able to break away from this religion. She only adheres to it because she's expected to. She believes she has no choice.

But there is always a choice and each of us can make it, if we want to.

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Catholic sex abuse case demands that priests be allowed to marry

This post may get a whole lotta folks mad at me, but I don't care. It needs to be said...

You've probably heard by now that the Los Angeles diocese of the Roman Catholic Church is paying $660 million to keep from going to court over long-standing allegations of sexual abuse of children by its priests.

This could have been avoided if the Catholic Church had long ago put an end to its insane policy that forbids its clergy to marry.

The Catholic Church believes that priests and nuns should be "married" to the church. That if the hearts and minds of its clergy are fully devoted to serving the Church, that this will provide an adequate substitute for the natural sex drive that almost all of us have. The implication is that if its priests and nuns are "tempted by the flesh" enough to desire sexual stimulation, then they "obviously" are not seeking purity and holiness enough.

The result is Lord only knows how many generations of men who are emotionally arrested as adolescents and remain that way for the rest of their lives, with no understanding of how to manage their natural instincts. So it is that many of them are compelled by their vows - from consequence if not from policy - to satisfy their sexual drive however they can.

That's not an excuse for these priests' behavior. But something sure as the world precipitated it.

All of this from the horrible and very mistaken belief that sex - and everything associated with it - is sinful by nature.

There is nothing sinful about sex, when it is expressed as God intended it. Within the confines of marriage between husband and wife, sex is not just a means of pleasure and relieving of natural drives: sex becomes an act of worship. Between husband and wife who are united in the eyes of God, sex is a holy and beautiful means of expressing not only love for each other, but love for the One who created them.

The apostle Paul spoke quite a bit about this in 1st Corinthians. To those who feel this need, then "they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion", Paul wrote. Ideally, marriage is supposed to be about much more than "the sex". In marriage as God designed it, sex is just one way of expressing love, rather than what defines love. But in the circles of this world, sex is what physically unites man and woman into something greater than the sum of the parts. So it is that marriage of man and woman is an illustration on this earth of the union, the "marriage", between Chris and His bride, the church (the church as in all who belong to Him).

The Catholic policy of forbidding priests and nuns the right to marry not only denies them the satisfying of physical nature, but of the spiritual nature also. The Catholic Church is forcing them to cut themselves off from what is, in the proper context, a magnificent intimate knowledge of God through the beautiful mystery of marriage.

It's like this: just about all of us, at some point in our lives, want to get laid. It's a design feature of God's engineering to keep the human race going. Being compelled to ignore it, for whatever reason, just doesn't work. It leads to very bad things happening, like priests molesting little kids.

On this point it would be a better thing to concede to human nature per God's instructions, and not the screwy thinking of mere men. Let the priests and nuns marry so that they can enjoy all the deep, passionate, hot-blooded sex that they want, just as God meant it to be part of marriage.

And for whatever it's worth, the priests who squirmed their way out of meeting real justice in this case should be strung up from the nearest telephone pole by their circular reproductive units. With piano wire.

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