EstroBlaster!

Apparently, I’m a 50-something gun-toting impotent Republican.

At least, that’s sure what it seems like judging by the junk mail I get. For some reason, I’ve ended up on some hilariously odd mailing lists. I get occasional mailings from the AARP welcoming me to my retirement years, the NRA asking if I want to join or contribute money to one thing or another, and so on. Today brought the best mailing yet, though.

Prairie picked up the mail and started flipping through the envelopes. Handing one to me with a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What mailing list are you on?” The envelope she handed me had a somewhat softcore porn-ish shot of a man and woman in bed, with the text “THE FIRST TRUE REVOLUTION IN MALE SEXUAL POWER IS HERE…NOW!” emblazoned across it.

“I’m really not sure,” I said and popped it open. Pulling the folded newsletter style paper out of the envelope, my eyebrows shot up, and I started to laugh at the headline that greeted me: “THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE – The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don’t Even Know It.”

Feminized? Oh, no — what’s happening? Am I losing my manhood? Is my manliness being sucked away, turning me into some swishy girly-man? This can’t be true!

EstroBlaster Detail

Reading on, I chose bits and pieces to read to Prairie aloud, until both of us had stitches in our sides and tears in our eyes. The advertised product, EstroBlaster, is yet another in a long line of herbal supplements aimed at men who have (or are being convinced that they have) a little less fuel in their rocket than they did in earlier times. I haven’t seen too many of these ads, so I don’t really have a basis for comparison, but this one’s marketed using an absolutely hilarious mix of misogyny, homophobia, and scare tactics.

A few choice quotes…

…more and more research is coming out. There is a terrible secret that you should know about.

The Secret Problem of Estrogen Dominance

You are being deluged with female hormones. That, on top of naturally falling male hormone levels, can cause a condition called estrogen dominance.

You are being turned into a woman, and you don’t even know it.

What’s happening is that large amounts of female hormones are slipping through the water treatment plants of most major cities. Even in the country the water is filled with them.

Estrogen is passing right through women and into the water supply — where it can’t be removed.

In fact, there is enough estrogen in the water right now to change male fish into females.

Recent statistics even show that more young men are getting plastic surgery to remove their “male boobs” than there are young women getting breast augmentation.

EstroBlaster Detail

Not only that, but the rate of young boys turning into girls is frightening. One group that monitors this problem said:

No one compiles official statistics on transgender youths, but everyone agrees that their numbers are rising quickly.

…it took months to narrow down a powerful formula at a good price. We named it Estro-Blaster — after what it’s designed to do…blast the estrogen out of your system.

**Get Back the Sexual Drive and Ability You Had as a Teenager… Wanting Sex Every Day – The Ability to Get Hard Every Time – And Even Spontaneous Erections! (The Kind You Used to Have to Hid in School When You Got Up to Change Classes…You’d Have to Carry Your Books Down in Front of Your Pants)

After years of falling sexual ability, I was amazed one day, when out and about, that I was getting a “spontaneous” erection.

I didn’t even have to touch my penis. It just began swelling to an erect state.

You can imagine my surprise — and pleasure. This hadn’t happened to me since I was in my twenties. Many years ago.

I felt like a man again — a real man.

EstroBlaster Detail

As if all this wasn’t funny enough, there were two sources listed in the flyer. At first I was surprised that there were any sources listed — this didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be worrying about sourcing its information. Then I noticed that one of the sources was a forum post on Free Republic, one of the most notorious far-right rabid conservative spaces on the ‘net today, and far from being anything that I’d even remotely consider a ‘trusted source.’ The second was a small excerpt from an article titled “Treatment of Young MTF Transsexuals” on a site called “Second Type Woman,” which (at least on first glance) doesn’t exactly strike me as the kind of source most people should be basing their pharmaceutical decisions on.

All in all, it made for a very entertaining evening.

And, apparently, I’m a fifty-something gun-toting impotent Republican.

Good to know!

True Enough

My coworker Rachel watched as our poster printer produced three posters, all wintertime shots taken in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. “Y’know,” she said, “all the people in those shots are probably dead. That’s kind of depressing.”

I looked over from the lab. “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’d be a lot more depressing if they were alive today. Trapped in those little boxes, clawing at the top, screaming to get out….”

She paused for a moment, then shook her head. “You’re just so weird.”


Just a moment ago, I was looking over the Phi Theta Kappa website after getting an invitation to join. As I perused the eligibility requirements, one line caught my eye. “Ooh — I must ‘adhere to the moral standards of the society.’ I wonder what those are?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” called Prairie from the other room. “I’m pretty sure you don’t.”

The Nerd Handbook

While as with any broad overview of a particular genus or species, there is plenty of room for small or even large variations at the individual level (I myself lean a bit more towards the social side of the scale than what’s described here, though that is in large part the product of many years of practice), this field guide to understanding the common nerd should be required reading for many, many people, especially those involved with, living with, dating, or parenting nerds (also most varieties of dork or geek).

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Parenthetically…

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with by the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).

— Lewis Thomas, Notes on Punctuation

Soylent Cheese

Last week sometime, Prairie and I were flopped in bed, watching some silly sitcom before we faded out for the night. During one of the commercial breaks, we heard the following:

Of course milk comes from cows, but we know that cheese comes from people…

Prairie and I looked at each other with identical horrified and amused expressions, and then spent the next few minutes laughing until our sides ached and our eyes were tearing up. Cheese comes from people? We just couldn’t get past it, and every time we started to calm down, one or the other of us would say, “cheese comes from people!” and we’d start laughing all over again.

The worst part was, we were laughing so hard that we had no idea what the rest of the commercial was about, or who it was for, so since then, we’ve just been hoping to run across the “cheese comes from people” commercial again so that we’d have some idea what they were talking about. Prairie found it last night, and apparently it’s an ad for Kraft cheese…unfortunately, a horribly written ad. This one just slipped right past the editors before it went on the air!

Thankfully, we’re not the only ones amused by this.

Dance Off 2007

About a week and a half ago, six teams of people with dance in their souls — if not their soles — gathered together for a battle royale at Dance Off 2007.

If you were there, you know the pure awesomeness of the spectacle. If you weren’t there (foolish mortal), then at least I can offer this photographic record of the event.

Dance Off 2007: The Trophy

Truly, such fleetfooted feats (feets?) shall never grace a stage again.

Until next year, of course. ;)

Young men, you don’t have to feel down…

Best YMCA... ever!

Best YMCA… ever!, originally uploaded by dyanna.

I’m going to hell for posting this.

In my defense: they’re going to hell for doing this in the first place.

And you’re going to hell for laughing at it.