Sex in the news

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The fastest shooter in the West

It was a long weekend due to commemorations of lost battles past on April 25 and holidays owing due to Easter, so what with all the crappy rainy weather a beeline was made to some snuggling in on the couch and watch some movies. It turned out to be a Heath Ledger weekend, when Ewen went to see Brokeback Mountain with some mates - I really can't be bothered with it - and Rialto Channel screened two other films he's in:

Two Hands (1999): a hilarious Australian gangster movie set in really sultry Sydney. I bet tourists never envisage Sydney and Bondi to look like it did in this film: all sweaty bodies, oppressive nighttime and gangsters in nylon shorts and jandals. Heath plays an amateur boxer with an eye on becoming part of the local King's Cross boss's gang. He looked rather magnificent in his green wife beater and blue patterned budgie smuggler. A sweaty tattoed bod does become him. I always had him down as a "Home & Away" boy, and he has been in that soap, which is a little sweatier than the Weetbix-insipid "Neighbours".
The film is really worth watching for its combination of sardonic humour and nasty violence - the drowning scene is expected to give me nightmares soon.
Totty awards: Country girl love interest city brother and tattooed streetkid (left in this group picture)

Monster's Ball (2001): Forget about Halle Berry's "notorious" sex scene for which she got the Oscar: if sex scenes were the measure to win Oscars my shelves would be groaning. No, our Heath steals the show here too, because when he disappears halfway through the film, you could safely switch off (which would spare you Ms Berry's writhings) and still savour the film's subject matters of racism, the death penalty and oppression within the family unit.
But what really made us guffaw on our couch was Heath Ledger's opening scene where he meets a prostitute in a sleazy motel room for their regular tryst. It surely must rank as one of the movie history's shortest sex scenes: from arousal to deflation in less than two minutes, including a drink beforehand and a wash afterwards. I mean, speak of rising to the occasion, it sure wasn't obvious in his demeanour - or swelling in his camo pants - that he was glad to see her. Humping her doggy style over the table must have been hotter than his efforts on Jake's arse as it only took nanoseconds before he hauled up his white underpants again over his fetching backside - they hadn't even been fully pulled down for the full delectation we old perverts are accustomed to. And how did his dick go down so fast to be able to stuff it back into his pants without any risk it'd get caught in the zipper? He truly is the fastest shooter in the West. I hope Jake got more satisfaction out of him in the tent on that mountain.

An axis of evil hanging over your head

According to Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2005, 94 percent of all (2,148) executions were carried out by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The good news is that the number of states who have abolished this cruel and unusual punishment is growing too. Mexico and Liberia, welcome to civilisation.

But is self-love OK?

The Bush administration has issued strict new guidelines on issues such as "abstinence" (they are for use by organisations applying for funding grants for abstinence-only education programmes):

Abstinence curricula must have a clear definition of sexual abstinence which must be consistent with the following: “Abstinence means voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage. Sexual activity refers to any type of genital contact or sexual stimulation between two persons including, but not limited to, sexual intercourse.”

It basically means that you should never be taught or informed about any form of sexual contact, ever, and you have to abstain as an adult if you are unmarried, regardless of age or sexual orientation.
That last point is pregnant with possibilities for satire as Condi Rice can't have sex, ever, until she marries the President; and, naturellement, Jeff Gannon's gay whoring within the White House and the armed services is out too.
And let's not forget the two White House ambassadrixes of chastity and clean living, Jenna and Not-Jenna. Surely daddy's edicts won't cramp their lifestyle?

Sex in the news

News item:

Police searched the dorm rooms of two Duke University lacrosse players after the two were arrested on charges of raping and kidnapping an exotic dancer during an off-campus team party. [...] Neither Seligmann and Finnerty was among the team members arrested in recent years for such offenses as underage drinking and public urination.
Finnerty, however, was charged in Washington, D.C., with assault after a man told police in November that Finnerty and two friends punched him and called him "gay and other derogatory names." Finnerty agreed to community service.

Don't these guys have girlfriends who put out so they don't have to go find release with unwilling partners?
White middle-class student virgins saving themselves for their marriage, or what?
And what on earth is Lacrosse, which warrants team parties with booze and strippers?
Also imagine the outrage, even lynch mob calls, had a white woman been raped by a group of boozed up black students. No $400,000 bonds would have sufficed, surely, even if they could have raised such an amount of dough.

But what really shocks me is that, as usual, this kind of sordid story is being reported on the sports pages of some (student) magazines. Sex and sport should be played consensually, fairly and with grace.
I trust the cops found lots of embarrassing material in their dorm room, such as dirty underpants, sticky girly mags and lots of DNA on their bed sheets.

Easter weekend

The last large Summer event of the year has just passed, the (usually) annual Waiheke Jazz Festival, which is a multi-day event over Easter weekend. It's not something I attend as it is largely aimed at visitors and I also work one day of the weekend.
The venue was mercifully close to the ferry terminal so there was no need for large hordes of drunk jazz fans to roam the island in search of their favourite sounds and drinks. The event took place in a large circus tent next to the ferry car parking (pictured left).
Maybe they should keep the tent for circus events like the new Matiatia design competition, Council-trained monkeys and all.

Ewen had an invite to visit Rakino Island for a small jazz session there.
It's the smallest inhabited Gulf island (pictured right), about 20 minutes by (occasionally running) ferry from Waiheke. It has about 35 permanent residents on an area of about 165 hectares. Our friend Paul has a section there on which he has plonked a caravan, with a nice view back to the northern part of Auckland. Ewen hitched a ride back on a yacht, which by all accounts was very civilised and exhilarating. I did eff-all over the weekend instead.

My inner celebrity

The good folks over at My Heritage have developed face recognition software that allows you to upload your own face picture and searches for any celebrity face matches to your own.
My number one match was Matthew Fox (pictured left), a outcome, I think, most flattering but I'm unsure whether he would think the same thing. I have never heard of him since I do not watch the "Lost" TV series. The only things we have in common, according to his biography, are having a pretty face and a liking for punk rock.

Mind you, it could have been worse, Rod Stewart was #5 in the face-off list. I count myself lucky.

The only "celebrity" I have been compared to, and this was a long, long time ago, was Howard Devoto (pictured right).

If I was Iraqi

I would definitely argue against the withdrawal of US troops. (WARNING: not worksafe, thank Yadoge for the inspiring imagery)

When you're gay

Success at age 8 is: playing a fairy and knowing you are one
success at age 18 is: having sex and being able to get paid for it
success at age 28 is: popping a pill to keep going all weekend
success at age 38 is: having a boyfriend who loves you for your body
success at age 48 is: having a boyfriend who loves you for your mind
success at age 58 is: popping a pill to keep going all weekend
success at age 68 is: having sex and being able to pay for it
success at age 78 is: playing a fairy and knowing you have always been one

Show me the way to the next whisky bar

Every day lots of tourist and day tripper visitors come to Waiheke to spend an agreeable (or dirty) weekend or an expensive slap up meal, usually paid for by a corporate entity or wedding, at one of the vineyard restaurants. And usually this is a well-organised, if somewhat overwhelming experience for ferry passengers and islanders (unless it involves TV stars, alcohol and testosterone bravado).
Last weekend, when waiting at the city ferry terminal - as first impressions of Waiheke go before you have even arrived, it is a truly atrocious dysfunctional structure doing a huge expensive disservice to us islanders - I was approached by a swarthy looking young man, who asked whether "there was anything fun to do on the island or any good bar to go to". He was about my height and stood really, really close, much closer than we're used to regards personal space, so I was a little taken aback and surprised. In normal circumstances when good looking men ask me where the fun is I usually tell them to wait till I'm down on my knees but this response would have been somewhat inappropriate for the venue we were at, so I could only mumble something about which bars and cafes on the island would be good to check out, it being Saturday night and all. I noticed he had these really pale brown eyes, almost the same hue as his skin colour. He was dressed in all the latest, if somewhat upmarket, international youthful fashions and he continued telling me he came from Saudi Arabia and was travelling around New Zealand and had escaped from Christchurch because it was really boring.
The Saudi remark threw me because I can't remember ever meeting anyone from that country before and I was a bit intrigued since I would never have guessed - he and his travel companion weren't wearing any traditional gear or anything. Getting out of Saudi Arabia for your overseas experience must be like walking into a worldwide sexual candy shop or bar hop, I'd imagine, especially if you are a fit male, and they had obviously no problems integrating into New Zealand culture. This in contrast with what you hear about immigrants and their offspring not obviously wanting to fit in and wanting to keep their traditional culture at all cost.
I have known a Pakistani man here in NZ who had a very liberal attitude towards his culture and religion, even to the point of enjoying a beer or glass of wine like the rest of us. This in contrast to some local (European) Muslim converts who are in some sort of competition to be the purest Muslim in the village. Aren't born-again people just the most insufferable?
Anyway, I'm sure the Saudi boys had a swell time, and I was quite happy to board a ferry (and later a bus) with them.

Auckland in 5th place as best place to live in the world

The annual Mercer World-wide Quality of Living Survey is out. It covers more than 350 cities to help governments and multinational companies place employees on international assignments.
Auckland is rated 5th in the world after Zurich, Geneva, Vancouver and Vienna, and up from 8th last year. This is an incredible result, considering it has the worst public transportation system and the worst sprawl of any developed world city. It certainly doesn't feel as a world class city to live in (that's why I live on an island 25km away) due to its rather mediocre facilities and cultural treasures. But then that may be of no importance to multinational expat employees the survey is aiming at.
Personally, if money, time or job restrictions were of no import I'd rather live in Madrid, Copenhagen, Paris, Edinburgh or Luxembourg. But given those choices are not really available to me, I'm quite happy on my little rock in the South Pacific. I hope you are happy too wherever you live and if not, well, get out.

Gerard Reve (1923-2006)

One of the great writers in the Dutch literary canon died over the weekend. His Wikipedia entry (in English) is here, a Dutch obituary is here.
Gerard Reve was a rather controversial figure, and you know you have to try really hard to be controversial in that liberal bastion of 1960s and 70s Netherlands. He kicked against the petit-bourgeois ultra-conservative sensibility with his lurid descriptions of his (literary) love life, involving imagery such as God disguised as a donkey he wanted to have sex with (he was acquitted for blasphemy on that one). But he was not averse to irk liberals either: he was blacklisted by the Amsterdam City Council for visiting South Africa under apartheid and writing about it in a pro-apartheid magazine.
He had a rather inimitable writing style, all baroque sentences with dozens of sub-clauses, which makes him not very easy to read but once you get into it, it's all rather stylishly marvellous.
Content-wise he is very hard going: combining obsessions such as Roman-Catholicism, death, extreme violence and boy arse.
I'm re-reading "De Taal Der Liefde" and "Lieve Jongens" and despite all that rather Freudian carry-on it is really good fun in a perverse way. He writes marvellously about Love for his men/boys expressed in the most unusual ways.
His biography mentions he broke off co-operation with a newspaper because a translator stated he was almost impossible to translate, so I'm not sure whether there are any good English translations available. You may have heard of, or even seen, films based on his work such as Paul Verhoeven's "The Fourth Man".

And amen to that

If you suddenly feel the irrational urge to appeal to a "higher being" to assist you in whatever pickle you have gotten yourself into, take a useful bit of time to read the Atheist Manifesto, and you'll soon feel much better.
Extract:

It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith dialogue. The endgame for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. While all parties to liberal religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their worldviews would otherwise collide, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.
When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t--indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

Possibly America's most stunning man alive today.

If you can stand teen comedies, check out Channing Tatum in this one.

Fat heteros

Marriage and co-habiting cause obesity, if you are a woman, but makes you healthier if you are a man.

Men found themselves eating lighter, healthier meals and more fruit and vegetables, while women moved towards the creamier, heavier dishes like curries and rich pasta meals favoured by their partners.

Men, of course, need more calories than women, so eating the same thing together is causing more weight gain in women. But marriage also discourages exercise by making less time available for it.
Stereotypically, gay guys go to the gym together and lesbians organise healthy vegan gluten-free pot luck dinners for social occasions, which leads us to conclude that old-fashioned monogamy is bad for your health. Not that there aren't any obese gay men or lesbians, I wouldn't want to take the stereotypes too far!

Intriguing questions

Some things are guaranteed to exercise my mind because I don't know the answers, mainly because I'm too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia.
For instance, take the sun, imagine being a photon that is about to be blasted out into space by the sun. My physics tutor (and first boyfriend) told me nothng goes faster than 300,000km/second, the speed of light. Now imagine a photon on the other side of the sun which is about to be blasted out by the sun at the same time as the previously mentioned photon. When they both shoot into space at 300k km/s, relative to each other do they travel at 600k km/s away from each other? If so, they would never see each other again or be able to make contact again?
If we transpose this to the Big Bang, does this mean that the original material that was blasted out is travelling in all directions at the speed of light away from each other and so will never be able to observe each other? Not just red-shift Doppler effect but perfect invisibility? So much light and material out there in space is practically impossible to observe because it is invisible due to the speeds involved? Is basically 99% of space out there then simply unexplorable for us? Will in the distant future, due to the increase in space expansion (at an increasing rate), all galaxies be so far away from each other that they would not be visible anymore? Our radio waves would become too slow to ever reach them, let alone get any messages back from them?
Another issue, imagine your car's petrol tank. When you first bought your car and filled up, are there any petrol molecules in your tank now that have been there all that time?
Don't ask why this interests me. I'm just an Aspie.

Tommeke wins again

Belgium is going ga-ga again for Tom Boonen after he won another classic road cycle race "De Ronde van Vlaanderen".
Afterwards, the TV coverage showed he was rather more enthusiastic meeting his team manager by jumping on him rather than on his own girlfriend.
His hometown of Balen always celebrates through the night and one of his fans wore an award winning t-shirt with the logo "Will eat Boonen on first date", based on Tom Boonen's own "will fuck on first date".
So will I.
More Boonen pictures here.

Don't let your farmers' sons camp on Brokeback Mountain

Entries for the 4th Fieldays Rural Bachelor of the Year competition have now opened and organisers are encouraging friends and family to ‘dob in’ single rural blokes.
“Typically, quality rural blokes are humble guys who like to get on with their work and sometimes they need a bit of encouragement to put themselves out there” said competition coordinator Elysia Shirtliff.
“This is an awesome opportunity to bring these guys from out of the shadows and for the guys to experience an unforgettable week and win their share of $30,000 worth of prizes, not to mention loads of female attention” she said.
The 2006 competition introduces semi-final rounds which will select the crème of the crop from each region to compete for the national title and the prestigious ‘Golden Gumboot’. The competition seeks to find New Zealand’s most eligible rural bachelor through a series of heats at the final at the NZ National Agricultural Fieldays in June.
Heats are designed to test the entrants’ rural skills and bachelor eligibility. They will cover all aspects of the typical rural Kiwi bloke’s lifestyle including fencing, cooking, farm fashion, digger driving, chainsawing, dog trialing, making music, dating and classic Kiwi sport.
Last year’s winner, Tony Buckingham from Southern Southland (pictured getting the trophy from the 2004 winner Justin Nelson), says the competition is well worth entering,
“It was an amazing experience, an all-expenses-paid week with some great guys. We were treated like celebrities and were lavished with great prizes from the sponsors.”
Mr Buckingham will return as a judge this year and will give this year’s finalists some tips while he stays with them in the secret bachelor pad.
Eligible contestants will be over 18, work in the rural industry, ooze Kiwi bloke charm and most importantly, be single.

Now why would any fit farmer's son want to leave that bachelor pad?
You can enter here. And what's more, you don't have to be straight!