Today's Top Stories

I'm not saying, I'm just reporting:

A German study suggests that watching porn may be linked to reduced activity in certain areas of the brain

 A new study finds that men who watch a lot of pornography tend to have less gray matter volume as well as less activity in the region of the brain linked to rewards. . . . However, it did not determine whether watching porn leads to the decreased volume and activity, or if people born with certain brain characteristics watch more porn.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the latter is the case.  Why did they only study men?  Do women watch pornography?  I have questions.  They haven't defined "porn" in the Time article (perhaps they did in the study), but I'm pretty certain I don't watch it.  If it reduces brain activity, though, I think that perhaps I should.  The activeness of my brain is a constant source of trouble for me.  If watching people screw and pulling my pud is going to reduce that. . . hell, it might be better than Xanax.  In truth, though, pornography bores me.  It is way too literal.  I'm more a figurative person.  I might, if they made it, prefer metaphorical porn.  You know, something like I do here, talking about one thing to say something about something else.  I'll tell you a secret. . . sometimes during sex, I talk.  I mean with other people, of course.  It would be crazy to talk while masturbating, no?  I'd actually never thought of doing that before, but. . . I'll report back.  What I meant to say, though, is that I have found out the not-so-secret desires of people by talking during sex.  I say "people" because saying "women" in today's climate just sounds gross.  Having sex with women is just wrong unless you are a woman, I think.  Having sex with a person is optimal.  Sorry I have to keep explaining things.  But sex is like a hypnotic, I find, and people will tell you secrets in a state of arousal that they later shocked that they said out loud.  For a long time, I wouldn't tell this to anyone for I was sure I was the only one ever to do it and it was my secret and I didn't want to give anyone else the advantage I had in making women fall madly in love with me.  Now. . . well, it seems a moot point.  

Not all sex stories are the same.  Here is one that is shocking from today's N.Y. Times: 

WITH a sensational story of surviving child sex slavery in Cambodia, Somaly Mam became a worldwide icon, the best-selling author of a memoir and the head of a foundation raising millions in the name of saving girls and women from the sex trade, victims she recounted rescuing in dramatic brothel raids. Last year, introducing the State Department’s annual “Trafficking in Persons” report, Secretary of State John Kerry called Ms. Mam “a hero every single day.”

But all this wasn’t true. A Newsweek cover story last week found inconsistencies and flat-out fraud in Ms. Mam’s story of being abducted and forced to work in a brothel as a child — instead, former neighbors said she came to their village with her parents and graduated from high school, later sitting for a teacher’s exam — and in the stories of women she said she had rescued by the thousands. Ms. Mam even said traffickers had kidnapped her teenage daughter — but the girl’s father said she ran away with her boyfriend.

As it turns out, she herself is exploiting woman and sex BIG TIME.  The article goes on to say that most human trafficking in the world has nothing to do with sex but is about labor, and that the reports of sex trafficking are wildly inflated as they tend to lump in all sex-for-pay into the figures.  Is there no end to the exploiters exploiting the exploited?  But I am a suspicious person when it comes to do-gooders, so I am not surprised at all.  I suspected Sister Theresa for a very long time.  I thought she was just doing what she felt she needed to do to get into heaven, but I was won over by her letters where she revealed the deepest doubt in the existence of God that a true acolyte could ever utter.  After that, I was her biggest fan.

But there is good news today.  Teleportation.  I should leave this to the blog's official Science Editor and Astrologist who will surely explain it better than I, but some crazy mo fo's in the Netherlands are out to prove Einstein wrong in his doubts about some quantum mechanics.

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.

Maybe Walter Cronkite was right about the 21st Century.  Beam me up, Scotty.  

For all of it, my life goes on much as it has before.  An uneventful weekend stretches out before me.  The Wrecking Crew will be here to clean the house in a little bit, so I must scurry around and put things where they won't get broken or misplaced.  For all the horror and grandeur, all the pleasures and unpleasantness, there is always work to be done.  I'm just not sure if I'm the man to do it.